A technical question about falling through the map

[Tessrana]

Hello everyone!
First of, this is not a post about a Bug I have but a question of interest.
Here the litte story about how that question emerged because I somwhow messed up with admin commands (i play SP), if you not want to read, skip to the next paragraph:
I was doing the lava cave on the island on my thyla. When I went back, my thyla could obviously do not fit to the narrow path which had crystals on the ceiling. I made dumb move to try to jump from my mount with the crystals right above me. I ended up being stuck to them in fall animation. I used 'ghostto free myself, jumped back onto my thyla, used 'walk' while still on there and jumped off again... and got back to the fall animation and was sent stright through the floor, I chatched myself with 'ghost', managed to find 'hurtme' to end this problem, lost my items under the map in the the process and cheated the artifact back to my inventory.

When I fell through the ground I noticeed that the Area unter it was a very huge nothingness but I wondered on what would happen if I would just have let my Char fall. I mean, the "worldbox" must have a border somewhere, right? Would the game crash if I reached it? Would the game just put my char on the upper end of the worldbox? Some games nowadays recognize ewhen you are too far from the bounds of the mao and put you back somewhere on standable territory, but Ark..?

[🦊 Hermit]

Ark has 'killzones' just a little behind the walls/floors which are supposed to automatically kill any player or tamed creature which enter them. This is to prevent players who glitch through the world geometry accidentally getting stuck there permanently. However on single player I believe they are inactive, and there are server config options to turn them off on multiplayer too. And given how glitchy Ark is, I for one make sure to turn it off on any server I host, because I've had experiences of people getting killed by the zones even when they were in legitimate gameplay areas.

I don't know how people used to 'undermesh' on the old official servers to gain an advantage against rival tribes, when the killzones were supposed to delete them for being there. Perhaps they mapped the zones out and knew where they could go to avoid getting tagged by them. Never played an official more than a couple of hours so never bothered to investigate it further.

And I've never allowed myself to fall to the extreme map boundaries when I glitched through the geometry either, so I don't know what would happen if you just let it continue. I do know that the boss arenas are hidden down below the maps somewhere (on most maps anyway, The Center's one is up on the cliff to the south of the map), and if you know their location you can admin ghost from the surface down into their mini environments. And I believe the map Fjordur has multiple 'maps' stacked on top of each other to represent the different realms, so theoretically one could use admin commands to swap between those too. Never tried those things myself though.

[william_es]

This problem is pretty common in unreal engine games. There's something built into unreal to handle it, but developers sometimes add their own solutions.

Unreal was made for arena first person shooters games. The base engine files for unreal game engines are literally named "shootergame" unless the dev team goes to the effort to change it throughout the files. Most teams don't bother.

It was never really intended for simulating entire huge worlds, and there are many situation that cause players to fall through the terrain. Conan exiles had such a huge issue that when they finally implemented mounts, they had to handle the mounts as _flyers_. When you ride a horse, your character is flying, with an animated horse model below your character. Their code for following the topography was actually pretty innovative, but they could replace the horse model with a broom and it would work the same.

[Tessrana]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

Ark has 'killzones' just a little behind the walls/floors which are supposed to automatically kill any player or tamed creature which enter them. This is to prevent players who glitch through the world geometry accidentally getting stuck there permanently. However on single player I believe they are inactive, and there are server config options to turn them off on multiplayer too. And given how glitchy Ark is, I for one make sure to turn it off on any server I host, because I've had experiences of people getting killed by the zones even when they were in legitimate gameplay areas.

[....]
I do know that the boss arenas are hidden down below the maps somewhere (on most maps anyway, .

I just imagined letting my char fall and end up landing on top of a boss, thanks for the laugh :)
I am curious about another thing then, I heard from the ice caves on the island that there are wrongfully designated areas which kill you if you touch them. Are these such 'killzones' wrongfully allocated? If they are, that would mean that I do not need to worry about them in SP?

Originally posted by william_es:

Unreal was made for arena first person shooters games. The base engine files for unreal game engines are literally named "shootergame" unless the dev team goes to the effort to change it throughout the files. Most teams don't bother.

That explains the strange foldername Ark has, cool to know^^

[🦊 Hermit]

Which areas in the ice caves are you thinking of? Most of the glitch zones that I know are on Aberration (probably easiest to find them there because that map also has climbing picks, so people clamber all over the walls and come into contact with them more often than on other maps where walking on the floor is normal). I think I have heard of a few on other maps, but they're much less common there far as I know.

And off the top of my head I can't think of any in the ice caves, no. There are some killzones in the crouch cave on the coast, but those are deathpits intentionally placed there to kill the player if they fall, so those ones can't be turned off (there's a cave like that on Scorched Earth too).