ARK Survival Evolved Dev Tracker

Throwback to when my old job really wanted to make sure I knew I was a nerd.

Yes, that's a pocket protector.

All aboard!

If you find yourself in Karlsruhe, be on the lookout for raptors😅

Confession: Neither @Jatheish or I have seen Star Wars. He's at least seen LOTR.

If you were going to recommend Star Wars to someone who has seen 0%, what would you recommend first to get them hooked?

The girl told me, "Take off your sweater"
I said, "Babes, man's not hot"

There's no better feeling than skimming the skies to find the perfect tailwind to surf. Reach your destination in style while landing flashy tricks to improve your speed!

#playARK

OK, maybe I miss dev work just a little. Was talking to a co-worker @Skittlis. So rude!

People who REALLY know me, know this speaks to me since I created mailboxes in Prim+.

That was not a part of the design specifications and it added a ton of complexity onto what was supposed to be a simple item balloon lol.

Me: "Is it OK if players use these as transportation"?

The hardest part obviously being the flight path and allowing the player to set the location. But all in all I got it done (with some help)

And then it spent months and months in QA fixing issues - THE END 😂

Then onto other things like making sure it inflated

Next, QA warned me that players would likely just attach C4 to them and send them to peoples bases, so I had to test

Earlier versions of this balloon had it flying pretty low to the ground and moving up/down depending on what's in front of it.

That served to be too resource-intensive so I went back to the drawing board. I looked at the maps highest Z point and worked my way down. By placing the balloon very high, I'd avoid most flight path scenarios

Hurdle two was accounting for the flight path. How high do you need to send it? Not high enough and it will run into geo. I started with an algorithm that looked X FT ahead and modulated the flight path up or down.

I ran into a lot of issues with this one even though it seemed simple. One the math - you'll learn a lot about our coordinates if you open the dev kit. Mapping our coordinates to the real-world location was hurdle one

The year: 2018

The Mission: Create a balloon where players can send items from one location to the next.

The Problem: The flight path, variable heights (structures and geo), accounting for server crashes (making sure the balloon remembered where to go)

Always good to do a gut check on how you are speaking and coming off to people - even if it's just A.I. lol. It's a bit of self-reflection.

I wonder why these new tones were detected last week.