darkradeon

In Crystal Isles would fit well a new amphibious or another water dino. That map is full of water and possibilities to expand this.

that utc converter website doesn't work for me :V anyway, I have anything on my main server now 😛

you don't get this: nanite is CLIENT side shader/software tessellation programmable pipeline (traditional tesselation pipeline has a fixed step between the 2 tesselation shader stages and less capabilities on triangle geenrations). Vertices and meshes are still there.

with UE5 the polygons (better, triangles) are still there. Nanite it's a fancy expensive software (aka totally running in shader stage) programmable tessellation (similar techniques already have been tested and used in the past) which best feature is an easier to control tessellation factor and patches at runtime (ei: controlling to not choke the gpu on vertex which actually is easy to happen with traditional tessellation pipeline) and total removal of the need of multiple LOD levels (still can be loaded and used for "weak" gpus). A more fine grain control will be needed at runtime for such models to not get too many triangles, removing most of the job from "artists". Yes, if nanite is ALWAYS used, some vertex data can be spared on assets, that's probably a minor optimisation. It would be nice instead if artists understand that a HUGE model cannot have the same texture resolution of a super tiny model, but this is a problem affecting 99% of videogames.

sadly, the game put the save files directly inside the installation directory, which means your old save is gone.

Unfortunately official saves takes a lot of memory usually, and those private servers/clusters have to deal to strict memory usage if running on private servers or with restricted slots amount if running on gaming services. On private servers (VPS, root servers or bare metal dedicated servers) RAM amount is usually the first cost (despite the needing to use server or at least workstation CPUs if going above 128GB usually, so even more expensive CPU), while on gaming services it's all proportional on slots amount (that must be shared for each map for a minimum amount fixed by provider!). You should ask your main official server community if there are any plans for a private server/cluster (many official communities are doing this). The alternative is importing such save for solo / local host / non-dedicated or your won unofficial server. Beware this will require a good amount of memory, and despite what could many people think, running a client + dedicated server on same machine may require less resources (although a far more complex setup for non-expert players). For solo /non-dedicated you will face with a graphics card memory usage problem that can be solved only wiping all chars from map (beware such commands will wipe also your char and leave no bags on ground!).. otherwise you will face probably like 1 FPS and intensive frame buffer, as process working set, intensive page file swapping... unless you have a very powerful machine and some extreme graphics card such as the workstation card RTX-a6000 that comes with 48GB RAM.. but it may not enough anyway in the biggest server saves!

I didn't try that. I was looking for an easy char import from other official saves, I tried a couple of times but it didn't work. While doing it with default settings (no -usestore, no newsaveformat) worked just doing paste&copy. But this is a minor issue, with admin power is "easy" enough to assign a new char the tribe ownership, only the imprint bonus will be missed on riding imprinted dinos.

so, when is the final snapshot?

Another thing I noted, probably due the -usestore option, I was able to "import" chars from a server to another just copy and paste the char profile files, but with those officials seems not working.

for Epic player there is some sort of conversion from epic-id (that is alpha-numeric) to something equivalent to steam id

here is a list of 25th august save sizes: https://gist.github.com/ark-automated/2dd592eb7295c36f36c209f839f4765b

try to parse a big official server save :V I tried that with a relatively "small-medium" size legacy and it was a very slow process and the file produced was pretty big. It's a nice debug feature for mods developers for sure.

-parseservertojson can generates huge files for saves that aren't tiny.

The server doesn't care about textures, nor about triangles vertices beside clipping/bounding meshes. What we know for sure is that UE5 uses double precision floating points (64-bits) for coordinates system vs single precision (32-bits) so I expect memory usage to getting worse if they don't do radical changes on compressing other info into bitmasks and removing other useless info (who the hell cares about the server name where a dino was born?).

Vaults / storage box content can also impact on memory usage. They always told us cryopods have lower memory impact than structures, vaults contents and of course tames out of pods. And I noticed it a bit doing some tests cleanups: save file size isn't really proportional to memory usage at runtime. Also Offline Raid Protections helps a lot. Deleting a tribe with a "small base" but tons of cryofridges may worth at save size, but deleting a tribe with gazillion of structures and a relative "small" amount of pods worth far more at runtime. BTW, Mirage utility is really helping us on take right steps to decide what to delete and what not, also in preparation of final save.