The water in ARK: Survival Evolved [Steam] is broken on certain maps, instead of water you see some horrible plain brown texture. It seems the developers have finally acknowledged it and here's a temp fix.
Here's what the developer said on September 16th:
This is on our to-do list, we will be resolving this, as well as taking a look at the other Mac and Linux graphical issues. I don't have a timeline for it right now, it will be when an engineer is available, but we haven't forgotten, in addition to taking a look at working with Vulcan in the future. Thank you guys for being so patient, I understand how frustrating it is so we'll look at taking care of this as soon as possible.
Also, it turns out there is a temporary workaround to get water looking nice again. Since it's not actually an issue on all maps. With thanks to this post on the ARK forum, here's what to do.
First, you need to have "The Center - ARK Expansion Map" (free) installed. Annoyingly, all the normal methods of trying to install it failed, they just loaded ARK or showed me the Steam page for the free DLC inside the in-game overlay and nothing happened. I tried many other ways, but the only thing that worked was opting into the Steam Beta Client which somehow suddenly made it work.
Here's how the water looks right now on maps like The Island:
Not pretty is it?
How to fix the water
First, open up the install folder for ARK. If you don't know where it is: right click on ARK, go to properties, click the local files tab and click the browse local files button.
Once you have The Center installed, copy this file:
./Content/Mods/TheCenter/Assets/Mic/Water_DepthBlur_MIC.uasset
Overwrite this file with the one above:
./Content/PrimalEarth/Environment/Water/Water_DepthBlur_MIC.uasset
You should then see the water fixed. Here's a shot I took on our ARK server after doing the above:
You might need to repeat that on updates, after verifying files (which would see it as wrong) and so on. It's a temp fix until the developers actually sort it out.
It's pretty nuts that we have to go to such lengths, with this bug being well known for months. To have a temp fix of replacing one file with another, that the developer could likely just do themselves in the main build. I find that utterly shocking.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: BrisseAnd also Mr. Developer, Vulkan, as in the Vulkan graphics API is spelled with 'k', not 'c'.
Anyone remember how they listed directx 12 with 20% perf increase for many months in the upcoming patches?
The ARK devs are a bunch of clowns.
If I knew that that many people needed to hear it outside the ark and steam forums I would have echo-ed it.
Personally I quit all steam forums about ark, except the linux bug track, and I only read ark forums a tiny bit. The original forums are a bit less salty. Endless tirades of "I bought this game in 2015 for less than $20 and I had at least 2000 hours fun with it, but because you have nerfed/bugged/bugsolved something I have to do things in another way and I now demand all my money back and I will sue your asses off", ok, slightly reworded, because I think that **** and ***** swear words. Oh, and don't forget that almost everybody is a better programmer :-).
I do want to try to install the windows version (using steamcmd), and try swapping assets... Not sure if that is possible.
And I need to free 200GB of diskspace for that...
If we get some limited/password beta test channel that gets a build that reports missing asset bugs and things like that, it might actually help them and us both out.
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