Ark is bad at updates

[Degrelecence]

I think the next patch should be unpackaging their cab files so every update doesn't take so long. If it is a 200 mb update it still takes 20 mins to unpack and repack everything. I can't think of any game that does this. Ark is bad at updates. They should figure this out first and foremost.

[twitch.tv/TehEmoGurl]

TL;DR:
You're all wrong and you're all correct.

Factors involved:

Network:
If on Wi-Fi - Quality of connection. A weak signal will be worse. And a strong single still will not be as stable as a wired connection resulting in more packets having to be resent.
Speed
Latency
Jitter
Firewall Rules
Anti-Virus Configuration

Hard Drive:
-Mechanical:
-Available Space
-RPM
-Cache Size (If existing)

-Solid State:
-Interface
-Speed
-Cache Size
-Cache System
-Cell Levels

RAM:
Capacity
Speed

CPU:
Core Count
Core Speed
L3 Cache Size
(Also L1 and L2 Cache size but less important due to miniscule capacities)
Chipset
Architecture

PSU:
Average Fluctuation
Electrical Impedance Level

Motherboard:
BUS Capacity
BUS Quality
Power Fluctuation Handling

Cables:
Quality

Allot of people often forget that the quality of the cable and/or the plug connecting their devices inside the machine indeed affect the performance of their hardware. Whether it affects it only slightly, or at times greatly. Often when doing tech support for reported hard drive failures it's actually a perfectly working drive and the cable just needs replacing. Before getting to the point of complete failure the drive may seem sluggish or have higher error counts causing data packets to be rewritten more often.

This especially applies to any cable carrying power to a device as any fluctuation in power can cause vast differences in actual performance vs expected/rated performance.

With all these hardware variable before even going into all the software variables. Even if two people were to do a full clean install of the exact same build of the same operating system with the same updates and hotfixes and only installed steam and ark. They could still very easily end up with vastly different speeds for either installing the game from scratch or simply updating it (whether it be a large or small update).

This applies to any game, or any programs for that matter. It even applies to the playback of videos (Whether streamed or not) and Audio. Though we rarely see such differences there due to the little power now required to process such tasks. But 8k or even 4k video playback, you will see the difference there allot across different machines of different tiers.

Now the bigger issue. Yes ark is worse than MOST games. It by far certainly isn't the only game to have poor update protocols. Prime example is Path Of Exile. Allot of people can end up with 20-30min update times on updates as small as 100mb.

This is due to poor optimisation of the update protocol. Whether it is moving things to a temporary download cache and copying it to the final destination for redundancy in-case of a failed update. Or as for previously mentioned compressed packages having to be decompressed (and then removed). There are a myriad of reasons an update process can take stupid amounts of time without ever even going into the size of the game or update itself.

Those using live file scanning with no filters or rules can easily get slow downs on large downloads and updates due to the anti-virus scanning each individual file coming in. In such cases the reading and writing of data from the download + the reading and processing of each downloaded file by the anti-virus can quickly reach 100% disk usage. In this case the download client again has to wait before passing the next piece of data to be written. (This can be a problem even with high end SSD's depending on the software in use)

Also note: A modern computer with fast internet speed but using a Mechanical driver WILL be slowed down when downloading as the swap cache in the operating system will fill up very quickly and the download client will have to wait for it to be written to the very slow drive before it can continue to download.

I would like to point out to Secret_Squirrel that, whilst i don't know what hardware you are using, Degrelecence did state he is using a 10TB HDD, an old one at that. This would certainly cause slower update and load times even if it was brand new. The more it is used however the slower it will be. So it certainly does not surprise me that he is having long wait times for updates and game loads.

Also, If you are Windows 8 or higher, if you yourself have not changed the pagefile manually, then your operating system is managing it for you and will scale it dependant on the capacity of RAM you have installed. So simply having more RAM gives you a larger cache enabling you to run updates and game loads a bit faster than those with less RAM.

Motherboards also have a set number of PCI-E lanes and CPU's have a maximum PCI-E input. If you have to many devices running on PCI-E that they get over saturated and your game is stored on an SSD that uses a PCI-E lane then that drive will be slowed down dramatically. Most BIOS' will immediately step down a saturated set of 8x lanes down to half speed at 4x. Even if you aren't using all the PCI-E I/O's on the motherboard.

I hope this information has helped some to understand the largely complicated issue that is fragmentation of hardware and why some users may complain of an issue whilst others don't.

[zerassar]

Thank you for attending tehemogirl's TED talk :-)

[Lori37]

blame Valve, not Wildcard

[LHammonds]

You are all missing a VERY important point and I did not notice anyone pointing this out.

Windows itself and how it manages partitions/files...particularly when there are a LOT of little files. And as such, you need to look at how many ARK has and compare that to other games and other platforms (such as Linux which organizes files in such a way they don't ever need "defragmenting").

On my installation, ARK is taking up 252,917,165,107 bytes on disk (with some mods) and it contains 120,050 files.

[zerassar]

İlk olarak LHammonds tarafından gönderildi:

You are all missing a VERY important point and I did not notice anyone pointing this out.

Windows itself and how it manages partitions/files...particularly when there are a LOT of little files. And as such, you need to look at how many ARK has and compare that to other games and other platforms (such as Linux which organizes files in such a way they don't ever need "defragmenting").

On my installation, ARK is taking up 252,917,165,107 bytes on disk (with some mods) and it contains 120,050 files.

Defragmenting has been an automated function on Windows since at least Win7.

[twitch.tv/TehEmoGurl]

İlk olarak zerassar tarafından gönderildi:

Thank you for attending tehemogirl's TED talk :-)

LOL

İlk olarak LHammonds tarafından gönderildi:

You are all missing a VERY important point and I did not notice anyone pointing this out.

Windows itself and how it manages partitions/files...particularly when there are a LOT of little files. And as such, you need to look at how many ARK has and compare that to other games and other platforms (such as Linux which organizes files in such a way they don't ever need "defragmenting").

On my installation, ARK is taking up 252,917,165,107 bytes on disk (with some mods) and it contains 120,050 files.

Plenty of games with allot more files that don't have this issue. (Also games that have less files and DO have this issue).

Highly negatable for the following reason: *see next quote*

İlk olarak zerassar tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak LHammonds tarafından gönderildi:

You are all missing a VERY important point and I did not notice anyone pointing this out.

Windows itself and how it manages partitions/files...particularly when there are a LOT of little files. And as such, you need to look at how many ARK has and compare that to other games and other platforms (such as Linux which organizes files in such a way they don't ever need "defragmenting").

On my installation, ARK is taking up 252,917,165,107 bytes on disk (with some mods) and it contains 120,050 files.

Defragmenting has been an automated function on Windows since at least Win7.

^^ This guy is correct. Since the later updates of windows 7, all later windows operating systems have managed this automatically. You can do it manually, but it's unneccesary and not reccomended as windows is actually doing a very good job of it on it's own.

[Degrelecence]

Perfect example today. 2.6 GB patch took about 36 mins to install (started at 11:39 and ended at 12:15). I monitored everything. Steam listed my DL speed as 4.5 MB/s (yes it is MB, not mb, checked 2x). And it lists my computer's disc write speed as 30 MB/s. Now I know my ISP provides 100 mbps downspeed, which should be 12.5 MB/s, but I am pretty sure Steam has a cap. Also my HDD has a write speed of 82.3 MB/s (I looked it up) but I assume it is being otherwise utilized. Regardless, at the listed stats, 2.6 GB is 2,662.4 MB, 4.5 MB/s is 9 mins 51.6 seconds to download and at 30 MB/s it is 1 minute 28.7 seconds to write. It should have taken about 10 mins. It took 36. The reason is that it isn't 1:1. It had to do more then just write the files. It had to decompress then re-package files. Honestly, this isn't a terrible download time. Not worth complaining about, but that's because it was a big download. This game only annoys me when 125 MB downloads take 20 mins to install. I just wanted to post this in reply to the comment that Ark doesn't compress files.

[Secret_Squirrel]

İlk olarak Degrelecence tarafından gönderildi:

I just wanted to post this in reply to the comment that Ark doesn't compress files.

Ark doesn't run off compressed files.... there are some yes... but the bulk of the game is not compressed.

... the downloads are. That was the distinction. 😎

[Uueerdo]

İlk olarak Degrelecence tarafından gönderildi:

@Uueerdo:
Search the install directory for *.pdb those are your cab files. Go to Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64 to see two as an example. Obviously this game doesn't store everything uncompressed.

PDB are not typically cab files, they are debug[en.wikipedia.org] files. 7zip can open cab files, and it can't open those; so that also eliminates the the possiblity they might be renamed cab files using an inappropriate extension. Also, I didn't mean literally everything is uncompressed, I was pointing out there are plenty of complaints around here and on the official forums about how so much is uncompressed; the more accurate point that I've observed from such conversations is that pretty much all major resources are stored uncompressed AND compressed.

[Degrelecence]

@Secret_Squirrel This entire post from the beginning was about how long it takes to do small updates (compared with other games). Not about how well it runs. Although it does have to decompress everytime a world is loaded, just not dynamically decompressed while you are running around.

@Uueerdo They are definately compressed files. I didn't assume they were literally .cab files re-named. The complaints you are referring to isn't the same thing. Those conversations are about individual files compression, rather then bundling files into a compressed file. See below. It isn't saying there aren't cab files. It is saying that there is no compression on their normal files. ... I guess to clarify, a .jpg is a compressed image. A .bmp is an uncompressed image. Saving a huge, detailed picture as a .bmp would be space wasting. That said, .jpg and .rar are both compression methods but completely different.

Discussion examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/8u6mzb/psa_you_can_manually_compress_ark_files_and_still/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/1483233503862353996/
https://arksurvivalevolved26.blogspot.com/2019/02/ark-survival-evolved-how-to-save-66gb.html

[Freddie]

I was researching the same problem: ARK is bad with updates and the devs had the chance to fix it.
ARK isn't using the final release setting for the Unreal-engine. If it's due to bad gamedevelopement or because it simply doesn't work with their workflow is for you to descide. Steams updatepolicie doesn't allow for updates to be done in the games installtion. (You don't want your game - or worse: saves - to be corrupted due to an unexpected systemcrash). Because of that Steam has to copy all folders to the downloading directory that will be changed with the update. Which takes time and alot of diskspace. Then it downloads the actually compressed update and writes to the downloadfolder. If there are cascading folders it needs to uncompress and write the files before continuing the download. After all files are updated it then overwrites the files in the actual installation folder. Which takes some time again.
If your game consits of more than 110,000, like ARK, individual files you made a big mistake in developemnt. But it's too late now to fix, so we're stuck with this mess.
I can confirm that updating takes a lot longer than any other game I own, not any other game on Steam. But I can also confirm, that since quite some time now the game loads much faster. (And the server takes ages to load for some reason even from a SSD?)
And: pls don't kill each other just because you own different PCs where too many factors can impact your downloading experience.

[Nexolight]

The longer this game exists the worse it gets. It takes me 2 hours for a 100mb patch with a WD black RAID1 and yes my io speeds are perfectly normal for what it is.

[Mesond]

İlk olarak Charcharodonto tarafından gönderildi:

They do it for a reason.

The unpacking may take longer, but this is only an issue for slow harddrives.

Not packing the updates means vastly bigger downloads, which really hampers people with slower internet speed, and is expensive for people in countries who pay per GB and not just a monthly subscription.

Like people play ARK paying for each GB they use. Anyone even remotely serious about playing games pays monthly (if not then they're paying more). The game is too much of a time sink for that. You'd end up losing more money playing ARK compared to paying for the internet monthly.

Games also are about 100+gig these days as well. Other games do updates properly. Meaning accurate bars. ARK is the ONLY game that does this that I know of. It's simply misleading to have a bar stating "halfway or done" yet then end up having to wait. Despite the fact it's clearly showing otherwise.

Mainly it's an issue of the bar itself showing one thing when it seems to be another. It's making people confused.

[Snakebite]

İlk olarak Degrelecence tarafından gönderildi:

I have close to 500x games. This one is the only one I have noticed where the download is only 1/4 of the update time. Fanatical fans will defend anything, but obviously this is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ optimization on Ark's part.

You are very correct I absolutely hate updating this game because of this dumbass ♥♥♥♥.

[Snakebite]

İlk olarak Secret_Squirrel tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak Degrelecence tarafından gönderildi:

I have close to 500x games. This one is the only one I have noticed where the download is only 1/4 of the update time. Fanatical fans will defend anything, but obviously this is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ optimization on Ark's part.

What does optimization have to do with download speed?

Throw "fanatical fans" around if you like... but explain that first.

Stop trying to defend the truth, this game is the worst one I have ever seen for updates. I have never had a game with a 5gb update that took me 2 min to download and the rest of the hr i spent updating it was patching and verifying. No other game I have ever installed has done this to a degree where It actually makes me hate my life as im waiting for this stupid ass game to patch and verify multiple times.