Hey Survivors!

Now that we've submitted the Fear Evolved 2 update to Microsoft for release this week, we'll be getting back to regular development and boy have we got a lot in store for you! Pach ( ) 251 is the big one, it'll introduce 4 New Dinos: Achatina, Megalosaurus, Moschops, and of course the Pachyrhinosaurus! We're also planning on introducing our newly redesigned caves for The Island, that have undergone a huge redesign, both from a visual and gameplay point of view. With this update, of course, it will mean that ALL Cave structures will be wiped due to the changes being made, so if you're in a Cave on The Island - you might want to consider relocation! Keep in mind this is just the first part of the cave update, and we'll be introducing more work done to the under water caves, and Tek Cave!

Although before all that rolls out, we'll have a smaller patch at the end of the week, where we'll bid farewell to Fear Evolved 2 until next time, and introduce some slight QOL changes to the game, including an Ignore All Whistles option for Dinos, A significant server performance increase stemming from replication & physx efficiency improvement, a massive update to the PGM system which should resolve a lot of crashes, problems with Linux and Mac Clients, as well as huge improvements towards the generation and load time of PGMs! So you guys have something to look forward to in the short term too

Extra Life!

Save the date! Saturday, 5th of November 2016 at 09:00 AM PST we'll be beginning a 24-hour stream on www.twitch.tv/survivetheark to raise as much money as possible for Extra Life and Children's Miracle Network Hospitals! Last year the ARK Community raised an outstanding $23,500 and this year we're hoping together we'll be able to beat that target!

The stream will be hosted by the lovely Forest Rapczak and x3Bellex3! They'll be doing a live Q&A, Giveaways, ARK Games, as well as hanging out with some of the other developers, content creators, sneak peek to upcoming content and much more! If you'd like to get involved in the fundraising and join our Extra Life Tribe - don't hesitate to get in touch, otherwise, tune in this weekend and help us save as many kids as we can! You can support the cause by visiting this page or hang out during our marathon and show some encouragement! Every little bit counts and it goes to a great cause. The Children’s Miracle Network Hospital, Extra Life and Studio Wildcard greatly appreciate any support you can provide.

ARK Digest

Here is our question and answer session with Lead Designer, Lead Programmer, Co-Creative Director of ARK: Survival Evolved, and Co-Founder of Studio Wildcard: Jeremy "Drake" Stieglitz!

Survivor, Uskaanax asks, “When will the smithies and other crafting stations be addressed such that mastercraft blueprints can be used instead of held as a flammable trophy?”

Quote At the Tek Tier!

Survivor, vapeur156 asks, “I would love to see an "ignore all whistles" being possible manually (E) for all creatures. It would prevent so many times where the wrong dinos follow you or get whistled to attack or to switch from passive.... We all, I think, experienced that. By default this function will of course be Off.”

Quote v250!

Survivor, McNuggets asks, “Hey guys, Have you ever considered adding showers/bathroom in ark? I think this would be a great addition in Scorched Earth. How about if it adds a temporary protection against hot weather, with like the same mechanic the bug repellant has.”

Quote Toilets gonna happen. You will have to pipe them into a compost bin from which they will give a large compost bonus on any… fertilizer… that you make. And yes probably a temp buff for using it.

Survivor, CyanicEmber asks, “Any update on Torpor inducing Beanbag Ammo for Shotguns? I know Jeremy was considering it at least briefly after it was mentioned in a previous digest. Also any chance of seeing Grapeshot for the Primitive Cannon?”

Quote I’m still thinking about beanbags for non-lethal riot control. Very likely though, because the shotties really could benefit from an alternate ammo type. Grapeshot for the Primitive Cannon sounds awesome though, will get on that.

Survivor, SherlockHunter asks, “Sometime back in a Digest, you guys addressed the issue with black paint not applying properly on tames. I just need assurance that this has not been forgotten because black and red are the main colors I like to theme my tames on.”

Quote Still on the list, just gotta spend more time with the painting material in the weeks ahead.

Survivor, Pastafarian asks, “Are there going to be more Islands on The Island map? We have carno and herbivore and a few snow ones. I know you plan on working on the sea alot more but along with that it would be nice to see a few more islands”

Quote We’ll likely add a couple more scattered islands as we head towards shipping.

Survivor, skywalkered asks, “Will we ever see more items that can be used in the offhand slot? I always thought a lil' backpack would be awesome, maybe for carrying ammo at half the weight or something, maybe it could increase the timer on your items when you die? Maybe purely aesthetic things like capes or wings, or we can just carry a pike or bow around on our back.”

Quote Yes, I have some neat further uses planned for the offhand slot.

Survivor, DinoHunterExtreme asks, “Could you make it so a SP map keeps it's own server settings? So for ex. you could lower EggHatchSpeed on Scorched earth but the Island map EggHatchedSpeed would remain the same and not have to be changed each time you switch maps. This will defiantly help for when you add in procedurally generated arks and people decide to have different settings on each map.”

Quote Yes, I plan to make the server-settings map-specific as we get into the final pass on that UI (and bring over the various exposure of settings to the UI that exists in the Xbox version).

Survivor, Hope asks, “Would it be possible for us to get maybe kayaks or canoes as more mobile versions of rafts? We do hve water mounts and all, but it would be nice to have that as an option as well.”

Quote Will consider having it in the base game, but in the meantime there are various mods that add a canoe, as well as Primitive+ itself!

Survivor, DomiDarko asks, “When can we expect a Spino Roar?”

Quote In forthcoming launch-Dino TLC pass

Survivor, the fuego asks, “Can we please have the option to re-position/reduce the text size of the notifications while gathering/harvesting/killing things? I could swear I saw aSOTF stream a while ago and those notifications were neatly placed in the lower left hand corner of the screen. It would be a huge quality of life improvement.”

Quote The entire UI will be getting an overhaul prior to ship, and indeed that will be among the many changes.

Survivor, Ark247UK asks, “will the chat ever be upgraded... I mean so it stays live as a host and player this is frustrating as obviously I don't watch the server screen but would be amazing to be able to scroll back in some way especially on the host screen with one of the analogue sticks for example press and hold LB and use analogue stick to scroll up much like scrolling through xbox messages so any complaints etc can be reviewed. Also as a player so frustrating if u ask someone a question and then lag out and come back on and u don't know if they replied so u have to ask again”

Quote Yeah, will make it scrollable on Xbox, both in-game and on the server.

Survivor, SurvivalArtist asks, “Can you PLEASE put away that timer while you are writing smt on a note? I can never finish writing the things I want because it suddenly disappears and I am supposed to do it over and over again”

Quote Certainly, removed in v250.

Survivor, OnePotatoChip asks, “Will you guys be updating any models? Legacy animals like the Rex and the Saber don't look as neat as some of the newer animals like the Allosaurus.”

Quote The launch creatures will indeed be getting visual touch-up as we head towards shipping!

Survivor, GamerPerfection asks, “Would it be possible to have some creatures, like a Raptor, crouch when you are mounted, it would be good to have that when trying to sneak up on targets when you're going through think bush-land.”

Quote Very interesting idea, might be good for the Raptor in TLC pass

Survivor, itsr2ghgaming asks, “When is more information on the next modding contest going to be announced? And why don't you guys continue off the work you already started on for revamping the caves? I remember back in Digest 28 possibly of sneak peaks at them!”

Quote In about two weeks for the modding contest. As for the cave revamps, they are based on the work that started back then, it’s the completion of that process (there were a lot of them to redo, and then to add new caves too).

Survivor, Ommy asks, “Tripwire Alarms - Can you make it so tribe members don't set them off?”

Quote Absolutely, in v250!

Survivor, Szat74 asks, “Do you have any timeframe for when ark will be compatable with Xbox play anywhere/windows 10 gaming? I know it's been planned since Xbox play anywhere was unveiled but I wanted to know if you had a basic time frame in mind... Thanks for all the hard work and outstanding updates! Keep it up”

Quote We’re working on it (on the side), requires reformatting ARK’s application handling to work with Universal Windows Platform. Hard to predict exactly when it’ll be ready to release at the moment, but it’s looking like December!

Survivor, DaEndGame asks, “You mentioned a long time ago that we would eventually be getting a higher tiered raft. Is there any chance that you could elaborate on the size it will be and how many structures it can carry?”

Quote It’ll use gasoline and it’ll be at the modern tier, and it’ll be able to carry 2x the number of structures as the basic raft.

Survivor, vapeur156 asks, “I would like to get a few more slots in the preserving bin. There are 12 slots and 1 is for the fuel and there are a LOT of eggs and meats. What about 30? The fridge has 48 I believe.”

Quote Sure, in v250.

Survivor, TR-8R asks, “Alpha wyvern and Alpha death worm head trophy please?”

Quote v250!

Survivor, WoefulMacabre asks, “Will there ever be triggers/dispatchers added for player respawns and login/logout?

Currently, you can only detect when a player spawns, and this only occurs when they "create" a character, not if they respawn. There is also no meansof detecting when a player has logged in or, more specifically and accurately, been assigned the character they will use for play, and the only means of detecting someone leaving the game is by listening to when their controller is destroyed.

All of this can be resolved "adequately" by replacing the GameMode and implementing such detections directly, but this then prevents others from using the GameMode OR can prevent a mod from working when the GameMode gets replaced by a mod that either does use it, or doesn't but is following the bad habit set out from the beginning of specifying your own GameMode even when you don't need to.”

Quote Unfortunately not, since there’s no obvious ‘global’ object upon which to call the event dispatcher (OTHER than typically the GameMode or GameState, which you indicate you don’t want to override because you want full stackability). Thus your best bet is to add, within some Actor or ideally just in a global Actor that you spawn once, a low-frequency timer that makes a list of the connected Playercontrollers via this function: ShooterGameState.BaseGetAllShooterControllers(), and then compare it to a stored list from the previous execution of the timer. If there is a difference between the lists, then figure out which Controller(s) have been added or removed, and do what you’re interested in accordingly. Similarly, you go through the GetPlayerCharacters() of all the controllers to see if any have new Playercharacters (by again comparing against a previous list). This operation won’t be super fast, but if you do it only a single global Actor, you can then make the data available to any other objects/Actors of interest or call any such Events yourself (this might currently be easiest to achieve via a Map Extension that does such global logic within the Map Extension’s Level Blueprint). Hope that helps! In the next DevKit, I will definitely add the capability for every stackable mod to specify its own Global Actor to handle any such persistent logic the mod might want to add into the map.

Survivor, GGSDubSt3pz says, “For now the only way to get a better fishing rod is to hunt yellow/red drops. I think the alpha mosas should also have a chance to drop a fishing rod. that would motivate more players to go underwater and hunt them. Maybe someone tried to fish a mosa and got eaten instead”

Quote Will make it so in v250!

Steam Sale!

We've got around 6 hours left on ARK: Survival Evolved being discounted on Steam by 50% and Scorched Earth also on a 33% discount! Get it whilst you still can!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/346110

http://store.steampowered.com/app/512540/

Until next time...

Wilcard Jat and the ARK: Survival Evolved Team!