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LBXZero

Jul 14, 2017 @ 3:57pm

A little detail about the current size of Ark

Currently, the patch is downloading on my system and may take until later this evening to finish. So I am working with v261.

My current Ark Folder is 101 GB.
Breaking this down, 39.7 GB is in the Content folder, 60.3 GB in SeekFreeContent, and the rest is in the other folders, which includes saves.
Looking at the Content folder, only 1.20GB is for 3rd party mods. The rest is the main game (about 25 GB), Scorched Earth (about 5.8 GB), and the Ragnarok (2.78 GB) and The Center (3.4 GB) maps.
In the SeekFree Content folder, it breaks downs to about 8.67 GB for Scorched Earth, 18.3 GB for The Island (main game), 19.1 GB for Ragnarok, and 9.5 GB for The Center.

To get an idea of how much of this content is empty space, I used 7zip to compress the entire Ark folder. Out of 101 GB, it compresses down to 22.3 GB. Why compress? Typically, dead space is heavily cut down because it is so common. Unique data is harder to compress, only reducing space by a minor amount. Content went from 39.7 GB to 13.7 GB. SeekFreeContent went from 60.3 GB to 8.06 GB.

Overall, it looks like the game data can fit in a much smaller size.

Last edited by LBXZero; Jul 14, 2017 @ 3:58pm

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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments

margalus

Jul 14, 2017 @ 4:00pm

Compression slows down performance and also hurts quality. That is why so many games are moving away from compression nowadays.

If you only play single player I've read that you do not need the seekfree folder, it's only used for multiplayer servers.

Last edited by margalus; Jul 14, 2017 @ 4:00pm

LBXZero

Jul 14, 2017 @ 4:02pm

Originally posted by margalus:
Compression slows down performance and also hurts quality. That is why so many games are moving away from compression nowadays.

If you only play single player I've read that you do not need the seekfree folder, it's only used for multiplayer servers.

That story about compression slowing down performance is actually false. The data is stored on the hard drive in a compressed format, but it gets decompressed, decrypted, when loaded to RAM. The only issue you may see is a slight increase to load time. If you are storing Ark on a conventional HDD, you are losing more performance to seek time than the CPU processing the data into usable objects in RAM.

Also, data compression like what I used does not affect quality at all. It is always lossless. You are thinking of lossy compression which only works for video, images, and sound, reducing definition that is assumed to be rarely detectable by human senses.

Last edited by LBXZero; Jul 14, 2017 @ 4:13pm