• Triple_B@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Ark Survival Evolved over in the corner hoping nobody notices its 700GB+ if you download every map.

    • Maestro@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Ark is total madness. Every map has a copy of every dinosaur. Not just the dinos for that map, but all dinos in the game. That’s because you can transfer dinos, so somebody may transfer a dino to your map from a mao that you don’t have the DLC for. And you still need to be able to see and interact with that dino.

      I wonder if the new Ark Ascended fixed that.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        I’m no game dev, but did they not consider saving the dinos once and loading them in to each map as required?

        • seth@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That would be object oriented programming. They took the subject occidented antigramming approach to development.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            subject occidented antigramming

            I knew there was a cool technical term for what I’ve been doing all these years.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              I’ve never heard of that phrase, but I like abject oriented programming. In this case, they’re using the concept of inheritance, but with assets:

              Inheritance is a way to retain features of old code in newer code. The programmer derives from an existing function or block of code by making a copy of the code, then making changes to the copy. The derived code is often specialized by adding features not implemented in the original. In this way the old code is retained but the new code inherits from it.

        • Maestro@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          They probably tried and failed. IIRC the original Ark was build on a pre-release version of Unreal engine 4. There were probably loads of things missing or broken in that engine. When they couldn’t make UE load assets from a shared storage location, it was probably just easier to ship all dinos with every map.

          • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I seriously doubt that. Assets handling is one of the most important things in a game engine, and not having to duplicate every asset for every map, including for entitlements reasons (e.g DLC ownership) is an extremely basic feature.

            It sounds more like they seriously misused blueprints and/or DataAssets. To be fair, epic games did say a bunch of sightly misleading things about them when they released the engine to the public, but anyone using the engine noticed that blueprints could dramatically bloat your install size and/or memory usage in some situations, and found some workarounds.

            Also they really should have been following the engine’s updates. Now I wonder if they’re the reason why Epic insists that we should really avoid being too far behind the “current” engine version for games that are actively maintained…

            Source : been working with UE4 (and 5) professionally since UE4.12

      • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        The new ark fixed nothing. Except semi playable frame rates. It’s great if you want to run a game at 12fps on a 4090.

      • TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 months ago

        That’s just hysterical. I’m out here learning and strictly following rules of OOP and these motherfuckers just do whatever

    • TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Need a fucking server farm to have that one installed because no one on that development team knows what they’re doing. Isn’t there some duplicate remover a fan made that slims it down by a significant margin?

      • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I don’t play ark, but if what I read in this thread is to be believed, I’m pretty sure you’d have to repackage the game which is a big copyright nono. Also you would have to redo it with pretty much every content patch. So, probably not.