ARK: Survival Evolved works again on Linux, water still broken on some maps

It's probably been proposed many times already, but why not contact Icculus, Timothee Besset or other porters to help them, if they are unable to do it themselves?!

It's probably been proposed many times already, but why not contact Icculus, Timothee Besset or other porters to help them, if they are unable to do it themselves?!

Icculus is ( no offense , he is a great guy ) just helping small indie 2d games now.

So when he was saying " I don't need money , i just want to help games come to Linux " , he was obviously talking about small games ; alas people just kept dreaming 3d games and slightly bigger games than End Is Nigh.

It's probably been proposed many times already, but why not contact Icculus, Timothee Besset or other porters to help them, if they are unable to do it themselves?!

Icculus is ( no offense , he is a great guy ) just helping small indie 2d games now.

So when he was saying " I don't need money , i just want to help games come to Linux " , he was obviously talking about small games ; alas people just kept dreaming 3d games and slightly bigger games than End Is Nigh.

Maybe, but still, help is available elsewhere. I'm not going to buy this game until it's fixed. Not at this premium price.

Studio Wildcard repeatedly let Linux gamers down with their game. I will always give credit where it's due, but they've let the Linux version sit in such a poor state for far too long.They seemed to have no idea if the water rendering issue would be fixed or not "Would be good to know if the water is sorted out too", to me that says they don't test it.

Their kickstarter raised $17,000,000. They have sold hundreds of thousands of units of the game & various paid DLC's. There are currently 52,824 people playing this game according to steam right now. The game costs $50 /£49.99. It has 132,000 reviews on Steam ( a lot are negative ).

My young nephew could install Linux in less than 15 minuets on a PC that costs less than $500 and test if a game has broken water or even launches.


Last edited by on 14 Dec 2017 at 5:35 pm UTC

Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm starting to get the impression they're not having great quality management...

Personally I hate manual testing, but I think they should have spent a little time setting up an environment for automated testing. They can then write some simple tests to detect differences between the platforms. Water is broken? Setup a scene with the same textures and light settings and render it on all OSes. If it doesn't look the same or at least very similar, then you know it is still broken.

Has anyone tested this new build on mesa? Last time I tried I would get this red blob that would fill the screen. I have not tried it in a few months.

Anyone still wants to support this company buying this game? I mean, they sell this as a AAA game, they launched for PS4, Xbox One, Windows, Linux but all versions have problems. They have the money to fix a lot of the issues but if they cant even setup a PC with a linux distribution to test the game, for me it just seems like lazy work that it does not deserve my money.

I wish the game was in a good state so i could play with my friends, but i prefer investing my money on better companies

Personally I hate manual testing, but I think they should have spent a little time setting up an environment for automated testing. They can then write some simple tests to detect differences between the platforms. Water is broken? Setup a scene with the same textures and light settings and render it on all OSes. If it doesn't look the same or at least very similar, then you know it is still broken.

Their team appears to be primarily, disproportionately artists. Which would also explain a few other issues. Automated testing is the last thing on their minds.

[quote=meggerman]

My young nephew could install Linux in less than 15 minuets on a PC that costs less than $500 and test if a game has broken water or even launches.

500$ is just enough to pay for a GPU that can handle ARC properly. At least if you don't wanna play it with 5 fps or something.

Though I have to agree with you, a developer/ developer team should be more than able to install a Linux distro like Ubuntu.

I personally still blame Epic for poor performance and graphics bugs in any UE4 game.

They advertised themselves as having good GNU/Linux support, and yet the only game they've made with Linux support has the Linux download hidden because they know how crappy it is. For a while they even had it in a private forum and told people not to give out links and the main download page looks as if the game is win/mac only.
They've also had the exact same graphics bugs release after release with seemingly 0 interest in ever fixing them.

I don't like pointing fingers at Epic, and I am grateful that they're supporting us at all (and I do think it'll get a lot better in the future), but honestly it's not fair to blame games using their engine right now for the engine's problems. All that's going to do is make those game companies start to question their Linux support because we're basically getting on their case for not fixing bugs that really shouldn't be their responsibility in the first place.

It's strange that there's very little Linux talk on the UE4 forums too. It seems like everyone is busy complaining about performance to their clients rather than to Epic themselves. Maybe that has something to do with why Epic seems to have low interest in fixing our bugs.


Last edited by ison111 on 15 Dec 2017 at 8:05 am UTC

A question to Liam: is the photo on title a screenshot of linux client? I have an NVIDIA GTX 970, but i don't have such a graphic like that photo...
After the last 150mb patch of yesterday water and rain works again (on The Center and Aberration); fps became also better, but the graphic is far away from that. Thank you


Last edited by evergreen on 15 Dec 2017 at 8:11 am UTC

When this game was first advertised i wanted to buy it, as i like games with a survival aspect. Thankfully i didn't, it seems like it's always severely bugged. Also, I think the 60-100€ price tag seems way too high, considering you can get games of this kind for ~20€.

When this game was first advertised i wanted to buy it, as i like games with a survival aspect. Thankfully i didn't, it seems like it's always severely bugged. Also, I think the 60-100€ price tag seems way too high, considering you can get games of this kind for ~20€.

I've bought it for 20 euro, back in 2015, got my fair share of fun out of it. I saw massive upgrades to the game that only made the game play better on linux.
I also lost my first home, because the map was updated and it changed into a snow biome, in which I lasted 1 minute.
I've thrown money away to projects that were not as fun as I thought. But I didn't waste it on ARK, I still feel every euro spend was a euro spend well. I still hope vulkan will come to ark, and that it will fix most of the linux glitches. I don't care about having the same visuals as the windows version though.
I have bought all DLC's when they came out, and I still spend less money on ARK than on other games.
There is only one game that I really regret having spend time and money on: mobile strike.
No really, if you want to complain about something, that's the game.

The real disappointment in ARK is that they request 60 euro for the base, and those glitches aren't worth 60 euro's. Another one is that I don't see how they continue getting money. Online gameplay needs server leases... How long are they going to keep that up? There is a moment that can't be paid out of the game sales. Otoh: how long would the game exist and sell when there was a subscription?

There is one method to make them care about their overall game quality and this is creating "let's plays". If potential customers see that brown water and black caves they might think twice before buying it.

It is slightly better one mesa now. As long as you dont look at the water it renders correctly, the water render correctly on "The Island" however it will give off a large white blob.

It is slightly better one mesa now. As long as you dont look at the water it renders correctly, the water render correctly on "The Island" however it will give off a large white blob.

The lastest patch has a fix for those issues according to the release log...
Haven't tried it since...
Edit: sorry, I read white flash... I have no idea how it works on mesa... I have to upgrade my desktop pc for that.


Last edited by Ardje on 19 Dec 2017 at 1:45 pm UTC

Ark took forever to update after download for me so I deleted it from my harddrive. It will probably be reinstalled at some point, but not now.

I've just tested the last patch, 275.43, and in my case, water now renders correctly and overall performance improved a lot. I stopped playing ark some months ago because of horrible performance, stutter and the water rendering problem, but at least for now it seems to be solved.

I sadly was forced to install seven to play the game with modern graphic. Aberration looks in opengl so bad I thought I was playing Unreal Tournament 1 in low settings... now I’m dual booter again. Sound also feels amazing with supported logitech drivers on my g930. I hope vulkan will change things, or wine, or cloud gaming, or steam, or the entire community will begin to work together and not fragmentated as it does: 1000s of distros, several graphic servers, a multitude of desktop frontends etc.
Linus save the clients!!!