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For those that enjoy it, the ARK: Survival Evolved [Steam] launch trailer has arrived ahead of the launch next week.

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You can see the announcement about the trailer and what's to come here.

I've still yet to see them comment anywhere about the broken water on Linux, so it seems with only a few days left it will launch with that broken. The water is still a rather ugly plain brown texture, which isn't great.

What I am pleased to say, is that the graphical bugs inside caves are indeed fixed. You need a recent version of the NVIDIA driver, at least 384.59 (I tested with 384.69). You also need to ensure you wipe the NVIDIA cache stored in your home in a hidden folder named ".nv" (I just deleted the folder). It's entirely possible the game is just not adjusting the shaders for new drivers. Even though I did the same before, it seems it's a probable driver bug (or recent NVIDIA drivers have a work-around for a game issue).

The bug when you leave the water, with a laser light-show happening is still there, at least for me. It's nice to be able to see actual progress though, so my thoughts on it aren't as bad as before. I still think for a £49.99 game that they need to step up their Linux support.

They won't be using Vulkan any time soon either, as they recently got asked about using Vulkan and their answer was this:
QuoteUnreal 4’s own official Vulkan integration was only like half-functional when I last reviewed it a few months ago. I’ll take a look shortly to see if it’s farther along. Once Epic has got it going fully well (fully matching the functionality and pipeline of DX11 & Shader Model 5), I’d like to try to incorporate it into ARK.

However, it's nice to see them actually respond to and it remain open to doing it.

It seems players on Steam aren't particularly happy with ARK overall. The Steam users reviews are "Mixed", with all the most helpful showing on the Steam store page being negative. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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25 comments
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m0nt3 Aug 25, 2017
Ever since they released the new rendering the game has been full of artifacts for me on Mesa.
TheRiddick Aug 25, 2017
Quoting: ArdjeAh, I nice showcase of how much better vulkan is according to Epic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKu7MLB7vQ
Actually they don't show anything really, but they do say some important stuff, like with vulkan you can keep everything in the gpu.

That is mostly for mobile, which Vulkan works quite well on. It seems the UNREAL engine guys have really not done much to advance their engine under PC for some time, it puzzles me why some companies are taking so long to adopt VulkanAPI after we have seen MUCH MUCH smaller devs push out versions quite quickly (Talos for example).

I'm going to assume some of these BIG engine development companies don't have enough programmers capable of dealing with graphics engine API work, which is a SAD sign of the times.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 25 August 2017 at 10:43 pm UTC
Gnurfos Aug 31, 2017
What's special about the 2 drivers versions mentionned ? I have the first (384.59) and the game seems as glitchy to me as ever (plus the brown seas), even after removing ~/.nv
Gnurfos Sep 1, 2017
Quoting: GuestThe driver version you speak of and removing the ~/.nv directory was for fixing the caves on Ark. Did you try to go into any caves to test it?

I tried with that driver but before removing ~/.nv. I met a black could thingy near the entrace of a cave so I turned back. I have no idea whether this was "the cave bug" or "just" the usual dino effects bug, to me they could well be the same thing.

I will retry the cave when I can. All other problems (dino effects, rain) are still there even after removing ~/.nv though.
Gnurfos Sep 2, 2017
I re-tried a cave after the removal of ~/.nv. I think that one has waterfalls, because the glitches were similar to the ones from the rain. Plus the black clouds seeem to be from dung beetles. Maybe there were more/different bugs before, I don't know, but caves are still not playable unfortunately. I'm not sure redownloading the game would help, and it's a big download (and I fear losing my world).
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