yarnevk

Conan Exiles certainly is better for various RP styles of building but is also has good lore ground to cover. But is Snail willing to make the multiyear commitment Funcom did considering this is a stopgap low investment quick cash game for them until Ark2? Especially as they are burning more time/money than the expected to do all the ARK DLC - which for the first time each DLC is going to get a paid skin (SE gets a cowboy outfit). I greatly prefer skins be part of the free events though, they profit by events keeping up game retention and a healthy game population brings in more new people. So instead I think they are going to leave it to paid mods to do.

They seem to be using their ATLAS seemless transitions, that lets you sail from one island to another - unloading and loading a new island at lat/long crossing. It was essentially an advanced version of ARKs obelisk server clusters. The same seamless level crossing is being made available in the updated dev kit that will allow you to make your own games. Now if you ever played ATLAS you know 'seamless' usually meant a massive fps hitch, to the point they would have been better off with loading screens. The cave transition has the exact same hitch. But caves being bad performance are more to do with lots of terrain geometry, lots of glowing flora, lots of concentrated fauna. You would get the same low frames if you spawned a bunch of drops and dinos around you up on the island.

This certainly seems to be the case given how many regressed bugs there are .... the question would be why. It is not the case that they decided to start ASA five years ago and they did not want to use the moving DLC/TLC code branches. They did not even decide to do it until last year only after trying to write ARK 2 in UE5 and decided to move to something more familiar to learn UE5, so there is no reason they would use old code giving they own all the code that they certainly could have started with last years version of ASE.

there is a unassigned keybind for landing flyers and takes them off follow. I put mine on L

I think that is their goal in reality, the more they can push off to unofficial servers where people can adjust things to fit their server - the happier nitrado is because they sell another server with no competition other than DIY, the happier wc is because they do not need customer service for trolls blocking resources, and the happier the player is because they do not have an alpha demanding $$ to play.

I think snail is going to go hard on the paid mods and paid skins now (fortnight model), since they committed (but broken promises before) on all past DLC being free for next two years of dev. Or they say screw it and port the other DLC as is and just do a bad texture rescale and move onto ark2 which will sell for a premium - but the instant I heard it had action video game combat I was not interested.

I tried running asa on the laptop ...1 fps reported but it was actually more like seconds per frame. It was horrific.

Not for official servers - too much changes being made to the world. Maybe small tribes limited populations they tend to raise these nerfed limits when they can. But bottom line is that concentrated server maintenance times is always worse peak performance despite having the same average performance of a distributed maintenance server. So it comes down to is your server load so minimal and your server so powerful and your playerbase so small that you can make the concentrated server maintenance peaks not noticeable, and can you sustain that across all the peaks at all times. Much more economical to make the peak load closer to the average load with distributed maintenance. It is much like system building a 4090 and 1kW powersupply vs. 4070 and 500W power supply vs. a laptop 4070M running a 100W power adaptor giving 35W. Big difference in peak capability. This is why DLSS is so good, they synthesize frames and rez with an AI that is more efficient all the time removing the need for the CPU/GPU trying to hit the peak load. VR has been doing that for a while now.

and its not even win win for WC and Nitrado. WC itself is getting screwed just as bad as we are. Instead of being able to tell Nitrado to fix their damn servers, Nitrado has the power to say nerf your server code so it is less load. And they have to do it because they have millions in unpaid server bills since Nitrado wants to get paid, but they are not going to rely on WC paying them - instead they forced their way into the storefront cut of the game sale on top of Steam/xbox/epic/ps storefronts cut so even if a server is not being used - Nitrado still takes a cut of your game. It is so badly screwed. Its early access for them to be cleaning up the UE5 graphics and the new QOL features and porting the DLC and adding a few new dinos and events, but instead every daily patch is nerfed servers...nerfed servers. They cannot just use the ASE server code as it was - that would require Nitrado to go buy real game servers. But what other game gives you that dino fix for thousands of hours - and they both know it. I am trying to play PixArk on my laptop because my desktop rebuild is DOA. It is painful as it was a $500 'gaminig' laptop scam from 5 years ago (AMD R5 with integrated radeon 12GB shared menory 0.5gb gfx memory). I get 12fps with using all the min startup and low settings possible and not running google at same time, good thing it is chunky 1m blocks so I can sorta hit things.... I would be happy to go back to the ASA SP preventhibernation lag after this, which should delag in theory as I am upgrading desktop from 9th to 12th gen to get into min requirement range.

You can answer that question easily, this is a direct result of Nitrado took over the contract for all commerical ark servers. They need not worry about ARK server commercial competition at all. When there was competition you could compete on price value and quality , choosing realtime MMO gaming proper servers that could handle the transactional load. Even the official server contract you still had to worry about losing that contract. Now? They are probably using the cheapest excel spreadsheet storage small biz servers they could find and trying to run a real time massive database on it. Same reason they force early access release on a date - they want to cash in no matter how much pain it cost WC and their customers. They have WC over a barrel badly because they are stuck with Nitrado forever. From the point of view of the server there should be absolutely no difference between ASA and ASE so why is it that the ASA server performance is far worse than ASE? Why is the structure and harvest and tame limits so much more restrictive now - when it is the same island it has always been - only slight differences in structures, harvest and tames databases. The answer is Nitrado junked the ASE servers and replaced them with crap servers for ASA. Sure the AI is smarter but the server could care less what path the dino takes now avoiding your traps - all they do is record the resultant dino movement and shove it down it to the clients, which itself they had to nerf the smooth movement because the crap servers could not even keep up like they did before. Now the other workaround to -preventhibernation, start a dedicated client on the same PC (not non-dedicated as that has same issues as SP). It sounds that would be worse load, but others have said it is for more efficient at multi-core usage than SP and runs better. This is what Conan does in SP mode, automates running a local server. Not sure how you go about serving on an XBOX though, I use PC.

resources like trees are not static - they grow like crops and babies do (or they used to but maybe they optimized that out for server load and just make random small ones now - I need to carefully watch). The last thing you would want in the game is to be walking thru player tall palm trees hunting in god view and bam your view is covered by palm leaves because a days worth matured because it was daily spawn. And while flora has less numbers to track than dinos there are many magnitudes more flora than dinos - so the flora vs. fauna server load balances out they both are server hits. Many survival games do not even do realistcally dense forests like ARK where you can clear cut the entire thing, they do much sparse grasslands with fewer spawns for the very reason of server optimization - because there will always be people cutting down every tree harvesting every rock. If you have ever played any MMO that was stupid enough to have scheduled daily server online maintenance rather than time distributed maintenance, you know that you just as well log off and play later - the lag hit is very bad. They just as well do it as offline reboot maintenance because everyone will logoff anyways. The difference is not neglible no matter what the number is - the simple math of your idea is if you compress an ark day of respawns into an ark hour that it is fundamentally means 24x the peak server load. That is an order of magnitude it is absolutely not neglible. And since you are still despawning resources when players are clear cutting you are actually not concentrating database updates anyways, as you would not want to despawn the tree at the magic hour - you want it to despawn when the player chops it down. And player despawning things is a real issue (despite your claim it is just easy tree goes to zero in the database) - they just recently did a patch that limits how many resources you can get - because people was breeding max mammoth mutants that was clearing the server faster than it could keep up.

Ask yourself why the server performance is so bad, it is just numbers stored in a database not rendering anything according to you. Ask yourself why the needed to nerf the simulation time tics to improve performance, if it is just numbers. If you cannot answer those questions, then you should probably leave the real time database handling to them....the reason this game has far worse performance than any other RTX open world game - is the fact that it is very simulation database heavy and has a heavy CPU load. Single player has to run both the server number crunching and feed the GPU rendering at the same time, unlike when you play online. We know that the number crunching is not neglible for the very reason that they added hibernation to get it to do less number crunching so that SP is not burdened with server tasks. They made -preventhibernation an option because it WAS impacting performance, but since PC is variable performance those with beefy machines can use it for its benefit of working like a server does. XBOX is fixed performance so either they overlooked that option, or intentional that they know it cannot handle the performance. It has aleady been posted in bugs for them to look at that option for XBOX.

PixARK has one like that.

The Grinch that stole Christmas - such a classic tale.

They did fix it though with -preventhibernation over six years ago.....which makes it work just like a server rather than being different. And even if you took that all ark day respawning and concentrated it into one ark hour of respawning you have worsened the performance problem of concentrated lag to that ark hour - meaning you are better off going AFK. By spreading it out over all time or removing it entirely you actually improve performance - because server code is worried about max transaction rate. Some simple math lets assume there is 10k spawns on the map and 2.4k respawns per ark day are needed. That means there is 100 respawns an ark hour with -preventhibernation rather than your time compressed version which is 2400 respawns in an ark hour. Regardless of what the actual numbers are the simple fact is that your ark hour respawning requires a 24x higher server transaction load than the ark continual respawning does - an order of magnitude higher lag problems during that ark hour. timeshifting spawns removes current gameplay of killing spawns to reroll new spawns trying to get a higher level, because you have to wait until later in the ark day or week - which for you might as well mean you are done playing IRL Only to realize that when you saved you are right where you left off - waiting for the spawn oclock to kick in to find your high level tame..