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Will ASA solve the massive disk space requirement that ASE has?


Castle117
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One of the biggest setbacks to get more of my group to load Ark is the 200-500GB SSD disk space requirement. With most graphic heavy games in the range of 90GB, recruiting becomes an issue when I tell someone they will start at 200GB for just the starter island is a game stopper...

I can't see how UE5 will be less with the boost in quality, but i could be wrong. 

justifying $60 for a version of ark that looks better, runs better and takes up only 90GB of SSD space would be worth it in the savings of hardware and time. anything else would be a fail.

 

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38 minutes ago, Castle117 said:

I can't see how UE5 will be less with the boost in quality, but i could be wrong.

Short answer: No.

It's vaguely possible that maybe, possibly, hypothetically, there could be a small reduction in disk space, maybe 5%-10%, but don't believe it until you see it. And as for the idea of a 90GB install, definitely not.

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49 minutes ago, Castle117 said:

One of the biggest setbacks to get more of my group to load Ark is the 200-500GB SSD disk space requirement. With most graphic heavy games in the range of 90GB, recruiting becomes an issue when I tell someone they will start at 200GB for just the starter island is a game stopper...

I can't see how UE5 will be less with the boost in quality, but i could be wrong. 

justifying $60 for a version of ark that looks better, runs better and takes up only 90GB of SSD space would be worth it in the savings of hardware and time. anything else would be a fail.

No, it will actually make the problem worse. Instead of one game requiring 500 GB, you will now have two games that require 500 gb.......hope you have a terabyte of storage that is empty.

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Ark as it is shipped now has two entire copies of the assets in the game. One inside of the "Content" directory, and one inside of "SeekFreeContent". I don't know why this is so.  My feeling was that SeekFreeContent was to enable console games. Other peeps on this forum have said that it is to support lower DirectX 10 rendering.

But whatever the case - it is certainly within Wildcards power to do away with that double install footprint .... So whilst the new engine of itself cannot make the game smaller, the fact that the game is being reworked a bit might allow for a (roughly) 1/2 size install footprint - if Wildcard see fit to address it.

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11 hours ago, DirkInSA said:

Ark as it is shipped now has two entire copies of the assets in the game. One inside of the "Content" directory, and one inside of "SeekFreeContent". I don't know why this is so.  My feeling was that SeekFreeContent was to enable console games. Other peeps on this forum have said that it is to support lower DirectX 10 rendering.

But whatever the case - it is certainly within Wildcards power to do away with that double install footprint .... So whilst the new engine of itself cannot make the game smaller, the fact that the game is being reworked a bit might allow for a (roughly) 1/2 size install footprint - if Wildcard see fit to address it.

I think the problem is the coding has criss cross paths to files within one another....so while pc may not need console assets, due to some of them being in the console files, you have to have both. However wildcard never got around to trying to optimize the game. Hence why we all stuck with 500gb while switch only is about a single gig.

However Im fairly certain consoles are suffering from the same issue.....No other game in my library, even with my 3000 hours of fallout 4 and the probably 100,000 saves, I have anywhere near 100bg of data. Except for ark.

Thank god I did the external SSD trick back when fallout 4 was new, that thing has saved me a ton of headache and problems I never expected. o.o

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you can compress easily the game with compactgui ( recommend using the last beta version, xpress4k or xpress8k for very strong CPUs, skip poorly compressed files). It will take more or less half space. Please note that this kind of compression doesn't work on old version windows (requires updated windows 10 or later version). Also note that each ARK client update (not server update!) will write new data and so invalidate part of the compression but don't panic: simply re-run compactgui on ARK and already compressed files will be skipped automatically (I recommend to use always the same settings!). with the lightest compression methods (xpress4k) you can cut the game data by 48% and doesn't slow down or lower performance at all (the decompression time needed is a lot compensate by shorter and multithreading loading time). Please note usually mods data don't gain a lot of free space in this way. Do not use Xpress16K and especially LZX: while they offer a far higher compression rate, they are really slow (LZX in particular) and will slow down the game.

There is also NTFS compression that is a live compression and will always automatically recompress modified/new files in the game folders, however it slower (both on compression and file opening) and frees less space on drive (usually between 20-30%, while weakest xpress4k compression between 45% and 50%)

Edited by darkradeon
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