▶
A Message from the Founders
Hey everybody! Im WC_jellyknee, the lead Live Ops Engineer on the ARK team. I wanted to tell you about our efforts to prevent cheating in ARK in general, and our continuing efforts to defeat undermeshing specifically. We're excited to get this post out in order to address the issue of meshing with the community and, also, to share news on how we will be countering meshing more aggressively moving forward via technical solutions. I'm going to start off by quoting from a previous developer diary:
Now that this system has been proven to be effective, we've now built another layer on top of it to take advantage of this data. I don't want to give specific numbers here because it can only help bad actors try to find new exploits, but I'll explain how this system works: 1) If we detect a player undermeshing for a certain amount of time, it will teleport them to a valid position that they were previously at. It will then monitor that player for an amount of time. 2) If the system finds that player undermeshing again within that time, or if it's not able to teleport the player to a previous position, then the player's character will die. Any items being carried will remain at that location. 3) The system is aware of what the character is doing, and will take certain actions into account to help prevent player frustration. The system, whilst in a state were confident will have an impact on limiting meshing, is in a state of ongoing development. We will continually make improvements and updates, along with rolling out more definitive undermeshing-resolving changes in the next week. While we continue to introduce new content and experiences to fans of ARK we will remain focused on ensuring that everyone has a fair playing experience on the Official Network.
[ 2020-01-23 01:27:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
Hello Survivors,
Jesse and Jeremy here! We know things have been a bit quiet on Genesis news for the past few weeks, even though there is much more to show you, weve been deeply immersed in the pre-release development process. That being said, were writing today to tell you that the final release date for Genesis Part 1 is now February 25th, 2020 simultaneously on all platforms.
This additional delay will no doubt come as a disappointment to everyone who is eagerly awaiting Genesis. Were extremely sorry to push it back an extra month, but as we have been heads-down with the rest of the team polishing, balancing and putting the final pieces together, we really felt that the extra wait will be worth it both for the quality of the base game and the ambitious new expansion.
The live ops team is taking advantage of the scheduling change by making sure we have a really fun Valentines event in store for you (something we originally planned to skip because it followed so closely behind the launch of the new expansion). Plus, weve just deployed an initial anti-meshing patch, and next week we will be rolling out a definitive anti-meshing logic overhaul that should fundamentally address those long-standing issues. As we look forward to a successful cross-platform launch of Genesis, all of this will make ARK substantially better for everyone who plays PvP and PvE.
On behalf of the broader Wildcard team, we thank you so much for your passion, creativity, feedback, and support. We are extremely thrilled to bring ARKs next chapter to you, and are looking forward to a hugely exciting 2020! Meanwhile, here are some tasty new screenshots from ARK: Genesis Part 1!
Jesse and Jeremy
Studio Wildcard
Anti-Meshing Efforts
Hey everybody! Im WC_jellyknee, the lead Live Ops Engineer on the ARK team. I wanted to tell you about our efforts to prevent cheating in ARK in general, and our continuing efforts to defeat undermeshing specifically. We're excited to get this post out in order to address the issue of meshing with the community and, also, to share news on how we will be countering meshing more aggressively moving forward via technical solutions. I'm going to start off by quoting from a previous developer diary:
Undermeshing refers to the ability to get to where you aren't supposed to by moving outside of the playable space. Almost every game is susceptible to undermeshing in some form. Most speed runs rely on undermeshing, for example. It's effectively impossible to solve completely, at least automatically. The approaches taken to prevent it are usually a tradeoff between how much freedom you want the player to have, how complex your world is, and how much processing time you can afford to spend on physics. Generally, when there's an instance of meshing, it's caused by bad collision setup, improper level geometry (holes), or a problem with the algorithm used to move the character through the world. In some instances, you place kill volumes in locations that you want to guarantee that the player doesn't end up, but that isnt a global solution.
When we lay out our levels - we construct them in the way that is interesting and optimize them for efficiency so that we can maximize quality and quantity. What that means is generally the world outside of the space you're meant to play in is empty - we spend our resources on the spaces where players are at. In addition - we reuse assets many, many times - rotating a rock different ways to make it look different before shoving it into the terrain at various depths to mask the reuse and keep it visually pleasing. Technically, the physics for these objects overlaps, and if you get past the surface of one, you'll stand on the next one down. While that sounds like it would help, its actually the meat of the problem. Adding more meshes doesnt help, because once you can get past one, you can get past the next one. That said, there have been many instances where weve flagged the collision on an object incorrectly, or left a minute hole that we can and do address through Level Design.
You can read the rest of the developer diary here:
Undermeshing has been a thorn in the side of both players as well as the enforcement team, and a serious concern for the development team. To help mitigate this, we have further upgraded our anti-undermeshing system in order to help the enforcement team track down problematic map areas, as well as tracking down people who are breaking the ARK Code of Conduct.
This underlying system has been in place for a while now, gathering useful data, and we have been testing it to make sure that it works reliably. We wanted to make sure that it minimizes the amount of false positives - we don't want it to flag locations where players can get to during normal play
Now that this system has been proven to be effective, we've now built another layer on top of it to take advantage of this data. I don't want to give specific numbers here because it can only help bad actors try to find new exploits, but I'll explain how this system works: 1) If we detect a player undermeshing for a certain amount of time, it will teleport them to a valid position that they were previously at. It will then monitor that player for an amount of time. 2) If the system finds that player undermeshing again within that time, or if it's not able to teleport the player to a previous position, then the player's character will die. Any items being carried will remain at that location. 3) The system is aware of what the character is doing, and will take certain actions into account to help prevent player frustration. The system, whilst in a state were confident will have an impact on limiting meshing, is in a state of ongoing development. We will continually make improvements and updates, along with rolling out more definitive undermeshing-resolving changes in the next week. While we continue to introduce new content and experiences to fans of ARK we will remain focused on ensuring that everyone has a fair playing experience on the Official Network.
By default, the anti meshing system will be on for the Official Network
For Unofficials, these launch parameters can be used:
-noundermeshchecking // Will turn it off the anti meshing system entirely
-noundermeshkilling // Will turn it off the anti meshing player kills (but still allow teleporting)
Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark[ 2020-01-23 01:27:59 CET ] [ Original post ]
ARK: Survival Evolved
Studio Wildcard
Developer
Studio Wildcard
Publisher
2017-08-29
Release
FREE
Game News Posts:
346
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🎮 Full Controller Support
🎮 Full Controller Support
Very Positive
(529376 reviews)
The Game includes VR Support
Keyboard & mouse: 1
Gamepad support: 1
Seated: 1
Available DLCs:
- The Center - ARK Expansion Map
- Primitive+ - ARK Total Conversion
- ARK: Scorched Earth - Expansion Pack
- Ragnarok - ARK Expansion Map
- ARK: Aberration - Expansion Pack
- ARK: Extinction - Expansion Pack
- Valguero - ARK Expansion Map
- ARK: Genesis Season Pass
- Crystal Isles - ARK Expansion Map
- Lost Island - ARK Expansion Map
- Fjordur - ARK Expansion Map
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame & breed the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!
The following features are in the game on its Day-1 Early Access release. We have many more aspects and refinements planned for the long-term development roadmap, and here's what you get to experience right now in ARK:
![]()
Dinosaurs, Creatures, & Breeding! -- over 60+ currently at Early Access and 100+ planned for final release -- can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your Pet, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Pets, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger pets can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival. Pets can also be mated with the opposite gender, to selectively breed successive generations using a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance. This process includes both egg-based incubation and mammalian gestation lifecycles! Or put more simply, breed & raise Dino Babies!
![]()
You must eat and drink to survive, with different kinds of plants & meat having different nutritional properties, including human meat. Ensuring a supply of fresh water to your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at a cost of food and water, long-distance travel is fraught with subsistence peril! Inventory weight makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomized weather patterns add another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. Build a fire or shelter, and craft a large variety of customizable clothing & armors, to help protect yourself against locational damage & extreme temperatures using the dynamic indoor/outdoor insulation calculation system!
![]()
By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash! Weapons, clothing & armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.
![]()
Pick seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you lay down, water them and nurture them with fertilizer (everything poops after consuming calories, which can then be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare fruits, which can also be used to cook a plethora of logical recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians & vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to master and conquer the ARK in a non-violent manner!
![]()
By bringing sufficient rare sacrificial items to special Summon locations, you can capture the attention of the one of the ARK’s god-like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These gargantuan monstrosities provide an end-game goal for the most experienced groups of players and their armies of pets, and will yield extremely valuable progression items if they are defeated.
![]()
Create a Tribe and add your friends to it, and all your Pets can be commanded by and allied to anyone in your Tribe. Your Tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote members to Tribe Admins to reduce the burden of management. Distribute key items and pass-codes to provide access your shared village!
![]()
All items are crafted from Blueprints that have variable statistics and qualities, and require corresponding resources. More remote and harsh locales across the ARK tend to have better resources, including the tallest mountains, darkest caves, and depths of the ocean! Level-Up your player character by gaining experience through performance actions, Level-Up your Pets, and learn new "Engrams" to be able to craft Items from memory without the use of blueprints, even if you die! Customize the underlying physical look of your character with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers.
![]()
Everything you craft has durability and will wear-out from extended use if not repaired, and when you leave the game, your character remains sleeping in the persistent world. Your inventory physically exists in boxes or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to achieve security you must build-up, team-up, or have pets to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even knock out, capture, and force-feed other players to use them for your own purposes, such as extracting their blood to for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your carnivorous pets!
![]()
The mysterious ARK is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and unnatural structures, above-ground, below-ground, and underwater. By fully exploring its secrets, you’ll find the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare blueprints. Also to be found are Explorer Notes that are dynamically updated into the game, written by previous human denizens of the ARK from across the millennia, creatively detailing the creatures and backstory of the ARK and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, write custom points of interest onto it, and craft a Compass or GPS coordinates to aid exploring with other players, whom you can communicate with via proximity text & voice chat, or long-distance radio. Construct & draw in-game signs for other players to help them or lead them astray... And yet.. how do you ultimately challenge the Creators and Conquer the ARK? A definitive end-game is planned.
![]()
On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your pets, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK's by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time -- special official ARKs will be unveiled on
the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items!
![]()
You can play single-player local games, and bring your character and items between unofficial player-hosted servers, back and forth from singleplayer to multiplayer. Mod the game, with full Steam Workshop support and customized Unreal Engine 4 editor. See how we built our ARK using our maps and assets as an example. Host your own server and configure your ARK precisely to your liking. We want to see what you create!
![]()
The over-the-top hyper real imagery of the ARK its creatures is brought to expressive life using a highly-customized Unreal Engine 4, with fully dynamic lighting & global illumination, weather systems (rain, fog, snow, etc) & true-to-life volumetric cloud simulation, and the latest in advanced DirectX11 and DirectX12 rendering techniques. Music by award-winning composer of "Ori and the Blind Forest", Gareth Coker!
The following features are in the game on its Day-1 Early Access release. We have many more aspects and refinements planned for the long-term development roadmap, and here's what you get to experience right now in ARK:
Dinosaurs, Creatures, & Breeding! -- over 60+ currently at Early Access and 100+ planned for final release -- can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your Pet, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Pets, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger pets can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival. Pets can also be mated with the opposite gender, to selectively breed successive generations using a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance. This process includes both egg-based incubation and mammalian gestation lifecycles! Or put more simply, breed & raise Dino Babies!
You must eat and drink to survive, with different kinds of plants & meat having different nutritional properties, including human meat. Ensuring a supply of fresh water to your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at a cost of food and water, long-distance travel is fraught with subsistence peril! Inventory weight makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomized weather patterns add another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. Build a fire or shelter, and craft a large variety of customizable clothing & armors, to help protect yourself against locational damage & extreme temperatures using the dynamic indoor/outdoor insulation calculation system!
By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash! Weapons, clothing & armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.
Pick seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you lay down, water them and nurture them with fertilizer (everything poops after consuming calories, which can then be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare fruits, which can also be used to cook a plethora of logical recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians & vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to master and conquer the ARK in a non-violent manner!
By bringing sufficient rare sacrificial items to special Summon locations, you can capture the attention of the one of the ARK’s god-like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These gargantuan monstrosities provide an end-game goal for the most experienced groups of players and their armies of pets, and will yield extremely valuable progression items if they are defeated.
Create a Tribe and add your friends to it, and all your Pets can be commanded by and allied to anyone in your Tribe. Your Tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote members to Tribe Admins to reduce the burden of management. Distribute key items and pass-codes to provide access your shared village!
All items are crafted from Blueprints that have variable statistics and qualities, and require corresponding resources. More remote and harsh locales across the ARK tend to have better resources, including the tallest mountains, darkest caves, and depths of the ocean! Level-Up your player character by gaining experience through performance actions, Level-Up your Pets, and learn new "Engrams" to be able to craft Items from memory without the use of blueprints, even if you die! Customize the underlying physical look of your character with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers.
Everything you craft has durability and will wear-out from extended use if not repaired, and when you leave the game, your character remains sleeping in the persistent world. Your inventory physically exists in boxes or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to achieve security you must build-up, team-up, or have pets to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even knock out, capture, and force-feed other players to use them for your own purposes, such as extracting their blood to for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your carnivorous pets!
The mysterious ARK is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and unnatural structures, above-ground, below-ground, and underwater. By fully exploring its secrets, you’ll find the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare blueprints. Also to be found are Explorer Notes that are dynamically updated into the game, written by previous human denizens of the ARK from across the millennia, creatively detailing the creatures and backstory of the ARK and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, write custom points of interest onto it, and craft a Compass or GPS coordinates to aid exploring with other players, whom you can communicate with via proximity text & voice chat, or long-distance radio. Construct & draw in-game signs for other players to help them or lead them astray... And yet.. how do you ultimately challenge the Creators and Conquer the ARK? A definitive end-game is planned.
On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your pets, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK's by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time -- special official ARKs will be unveiled on
the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items!
You can play single-player local games, and bring your character and items between unofficial player-hosted servers, back and forth from singleplayer to multiplayer. Mod the game, with full Steam Workshop support and customized Unreal Engine 4 editor. See how we built our ARK using our maps and assets as an example. Host your own server and configure your ARK precisely to your liking. We want to see what you create!
The over-the-top hyper real imagery of the ARK its creatures is brought to expressive life using a highly-customized Unreal Engine 4, with fully dynamic lighting & global illumination, weather systems (rain, fog, snow, etc) & true-to-life volumetric cloud simulation, and the latest in advanced DirectX11 and DirectX12 rendering techniques. Music by award-winning composer of "Ori and the Blind Forest", Gareth Coker!
MINIMAL SETUP
- OS: Ubuntu Equivalent Distro
- Processor: 2 GHz 64-bit CPUMemory: 4000 MB RAM
- Memory: 4000 MB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3 Compatible GPU with 1GB Video RAM
- Storage: 20000 MB available space
GAMEBILLET
[ 5499 ]
GAMERSGATE
[ 1846 ]
FANATICAL BUNDLES
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HUMBLE BUNDLES
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