this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
822 points (98.0% liked)
Greentext
4610 readers
835 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm no game dev, but did they not consider saving the dinos once and loading them in to each map as required?
I knew there was a cool technical term for what I've been doing all these years.
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:
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.
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