I was reading a lot of reviews and comments on it, but kinda with Prime on this even with my PC - it looks/sounds really cool, but based on what I read it needs more optimization before I'll pick it up. Seemed like A LOT of people were complaining about really bad FPS drops and other various issues that were a bad turn off to me.

Appears it is - if you look off to the right on the website, you'll see a list of some of our servers (not all of them, sadly) including ARK and a count showing how many players are online (ex: 0/100) - ARK is currently showing "-" which I'm guessing means it's offline.

I'll give @King8Bit and @Saiboogu a poke about it as soon as I see them around.

Consider me poked. It looks to be up, now. I'm about to login and verify. Sorry for the hiccup there.

Missed this thread before - @Gorian, I never was much for 7DTD but I love this one. Take what you will from that - I'm not sure how functionally similar they are, but this one is a blast. @FuturePrime & @Supplice -- Definitely demanding, but they've done a lot of optimization already. It's definitely better than when you posted those, with more room to go. They claim there's an upcoming NVidia patch in the pipeline too, to optimize a number of things for ARK.

And I can't get over the update cycle -- I haven't done a ton of early accesses, but of the ones I did.. Fastest update cycle out there. Sometimes they slow down a bit... 2, 3 releases in a week? And they're bigger ones, when they aren't daily ones. Even the dailies have tons of new stuff, and if something is particularly broke in a patch they usually get it hotfixed within hours.

'sides, you get to ride dinosaurs. 'nuf said.

Well, I think it's safe to say my viewpoint on it changed a bit, as I'm sure you've seen me playing on it since. But it still does have a wee bit of optimization to go, though it does run fairly well compared to what early reports suggest. Though I'll have to admit I run on an AMD system, so my results might be comparably worse than an nVidia system seeing as a lot of the optimization coming out seems to be focusing for them.

I did notice a lot of what I'm assuming was some sort of artifacting last time I played, and aside from the questionable and frame dips (personally I feel 30 FPS is perfectly playable unlike some out there...) that's really my only complaint. They seem to be working hard to improve the game, and bravo to them for that! By now I've bookmarked their patch notes page and seem to be checking it daily.

Well, that's a bummer. What settings, hardware? 8bit has to crank his down pretty low here, and I can only bump a bit past his settings with a slightly better card on my work machine, but we both get playable frames. Haven't clocked it -- Looks to be in the 30s, and no graphical lags from the game that I've ever seen -- Only when I do something else on the machine to chew up CPU or disk. i3s with lots of RAM, GTS250 (King) / GTX470 (Me) -- Not powerhouses. Settings pretty low, but I found as long as I have the resolution scaling maxed (it isn't marked clearly, but it runs in native res when it's set to the far right) it looks fine. Looks bloody gorgeous cranked up even a smidge (my home machine has a 660TI -- Low Preset :'( -- but still incredible looking at ~30fps).

Anyway, there are optimization guides also. Startup commands to downgrade to DX10 mode, different shader models, etc. I haven't run through them myself because it just works for me.. But maybe worth exploring some. If there's interest I'll try and post a thread. Maybe we need an ARK section.

Yeah, I think NVidia has a pretty good partner program now -- especially for people deving on a big engine like UE4. Evidently a driver update just dropped today, community is scrambling to see if it contains some promised ARK optimizations. Shame AMD isn't I just Googled it out of curiosity, and evidently AMD has developer programs just like NVidia... But where NVidia focuses on optimizing their drivers for the games, AMD tries to assist the devs optimizing their game code for the cards. I can see the perks for AMD and the devs, but it definitely means more work for game devs so I can see why more games are getting NVidia optimizations vs AMD.

This! What's wrong with 30fps? OK, you're semipro in CSGO and your 120fps rig gives you a few millisecond edge.. Alright, I get it. That's not most games though, or most gamers. Hell, 24fps works for multimillion dollar Hollywood films, right? I mean, I'm personally in the "move on, drop the ancient film standards" camp myself, but that doesn't mean I actually find 24fps films unwatchable - It's a fine framerate for all but twitch shooters and the like.

And yeah, I love this development cycle. Sure, lots of weird things. Some feature implementations are weird, or dumbly done.. But they add stuff *constantly,* and they react to feedback on the stuff that's weird/a pain/busted.

And... Mod support, already. Yeah, fun game.

That's basically how I feel at this point! The more Beta/Early Access or plain poorly optimized (or some combination thereof) games that I play, I'm getting more and more comfortable with a 30 FPS frame rate - it's basically "Do I want 30 or 10 frames? I'll take 30, that's playable at least." I definitely notice a bit of a difference between 30 and 60 and would prefer a smooth, sustainable 60 but I won't complain if a game with some issues can sustain 30. That isn't to say, though, that I've known people that absolutely couldn't stand 30 FPS - played the Arma 2 DayZ mod with people who hovered in the 24-32 FPS zone and absolutely couldn't stand it, calling it "unplayable".

As for the devkit thing - this is something I've been wanting to get into a bit, it looks really cool and interesting, I just need to find a time to sit down and get involved with it. I remember working with some Far Cry map editor tools in the past pretty extensively that I felt were pretty basic, and some people have compared it to that - kind of doubtful as to how accurate that will be seeing as it's supposed to let you edit just about everything.