ZenRowe

ZenRowe



24 Dec


23 Dec

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They are created with random color sets, but they can't currently be painted or anything like that.


20 Dec

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

This should be fixed in a patch soon (If it hasn't already gone out), but if the chibi was just sitting in your inventory when you logged off or restarted the game, when you come back it might look like 0 exp. re-equip the chibi and it should update, if the patch hasn't gone out though it's not just a visual glitch, don't try to earn alpha exp on an equipped chibi showing 0 xp if it should have more, re-equip it first. If the fix has already gone out, then it should just be a visual glitch that will only affect unequipped chibis.

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

To that point Cedric would love to be able to do what I did here, but often when something goes wrong on that scale, the engineers are being scrambled to figure out the problem and then immediately hop on fixing it. There isn't always someone to give the information in full to Cedric so that he can give a more detailed update. The chain of communication just isn't always established that fast. In some cases, we just flat out can't talk about a particular issue until after it's fixed because people will take advantage of and abuse it (If that is already happening in a particular situation, we w

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

I think I understand where your confusion is coming from.
The change we made was fixing a bug in how mod data is merged in when you launch a game. it was resulting in that, for every single mod installed, the core color definitions were being duplicated. That duplication now no longer happens. ASB is doing assumed correction, and since you weren't using any mods that added new colors it's actually easy to figure out what the right color is in your case. It is mathematically consistent.
This bug was actually how people could breed for mutations of the dye colors (That's a whole other topic

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

I do understand that this inconvenienced a lot of people. I really do. That's why I have been spending my own free time trying to help people understand what happened (even at risk of getting in trouble for oversharing information) and to work on something to prevent it in the future and to try and possibly help find ways to make this less awful for those that were affected by it... all when I would normally be resting.
The change went through testing, but the test conditions that were necessary to have exposed this are not normal for any studio that I have ever interacted with.
Trying to

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

@IanHighlander @CyberAngel67
It is definitely an impressive tool.
But do you see the color indices there on the right?
Notice how they are all at 56 or less?
There are 56 color definitions in the core game currently. (And then the dye indices which are all 200+)
Inside of the tool itself they are all predefined to what color they represent. The amount of data that had to be sorted out and manually entered for this tool is insane.
The only thing the tool is loading from the creature data is that byte value itself:
This is the data I just copied from the tool itself (Dictionaries i

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

Just to double check before I opened my mouth, I downloaded that source, and while I haven't spent a ton of time looking through it I would say it's doing things in a similar manner to the mod I just linked. Except that in this tool, color indices and matching color definitions have been manually entered into dictionaries (and by the looks of it there are collections of value data for at least some mods that it can download from somewhere? I have never used this tool before, but I am assuming that is how it could be determining any offsets that would otherwise mismatch the index numbers).
He

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

Here is an option that should work pretty well for anyone that knows that none of the mods they had installed added any custom colors. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1940481639
This mod will try to correct all of your dino colors. It works by making assumptions about what the color definitions array looked like for you before the update that caused this, so It's not suitable for us to do in the core game... but as an option, this should actually work pretty well for many.

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Originally posted by TiiaAurora

There is a mod out there called "Fix Dino Colors" that brought all my white Dinos finally back to their old color. Not sure if it works with all Mod setups but here it worked. My wyverns and argents are pretty again <3

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1940481639

For anyone interested. My understanding of what this mod is doing means that is should work pretty well for anyone that wasn't using any mods that added new colors.

The mod works by making assumptions about what the definitions array looked like for you before the update that caused this, so It's not suitable for us to do in the core game... but as an option, this should actually work pretty well for many.


19 Dec

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Originally posted by Silfurgames

And yes, this is only affecting people who pander to wildcard so they deserve it! /s Normally I love criticizing them but this was an honest attempt to fix some spaghetti code involving dino colors that had unintended consequences due to something nobody really had control over.

At risk of opening myself up to more criticism...

\clears throat**

Don't be upsetti!
I fixed the spaghetti!

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Originally posted by Sventek70

I get the need to make changes, and the fact that mods are simply that, mods and not supported. But rolling out these changes and forcing them with 0 warning or workaround other than an admin manually recoloring every dino is a joke. I run a small cluster where a few of us have spent hundreds of hours breeding including getting color combinations and to see all of that work just instantly gone on top of all of the other 'fun' bugs lately is making me want to simply put the cluster on life support and just be done with it, and I am sure I am not the only one.

This whole thing is just another huge FU to anyone not on official.

That won't be the only workaround soon. that is only the workaround for this specific instance (Which we were not expecting to occur). I'm getting a command added that will allow server admins to mass reapply colors based on the color definition name. In addition, rather than doing this manual reapplication of colors to fix it this time, if you are willing to wait for it, this command will also reroll mutation colors to replace the ones lost this time around (The data necessary to recover them completely just does not exist at this time for the command to be able to fix this occurrence retroactively).

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

The current plan is that we'll be adding an admin command that can be used to reapply the correct colors on tamed dinos (So that in the future any changes to the color definitions array either by us or by mods will be effectively non-destructive).
In addition, because we can't recover the colors lost from this occurrence (the only factual memory of what those colors were is in your head), those colors that were lost will get re-rolled for new mutation colors.
I don't have an ETA on when that will be available, but it's in the works already.

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Originally posted by Subclavian

Know what you do if your change caused a problem? You back it out if you can't fix it right away. Implement the parts that work instead of being like, 'yeah well, there's bigger things to worry about' because some people will actually care a lot. My mother in law is disabled, playing Ark is one of the few things she can do without being in severe pain and she cares a lot about the color.

Also the explanation doesn't make any sense, how would mods that do nothing to the color array be affected? Explain to me how S+, something has nothing to do with dinos at all, also experiences this issue.

Before this change, for every mod installed, the core color definitions were being duplicated. This only impacted mutation colors though because for mutations it randomly selects from any and all colors in the master color array (rather than only a subset in dino specific color definitions matched by name.) Mutations were selecting duplicated color definitions and now the duplicates are no longer there.

There is also more to the thread this screenshot was taken from, including where I talk about (in addition to trying to make the problem correctable in the future, because this isn't a problem that can be completely removed with respect to mods being able to add new colors at all) also making it so that where these colors were lost that it will reroll new color mutations for everyone that was impacted by this.


18 Dec

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

You only need to increase the max levels on your servers by 5 if you are overriding the exp ramp.
Basically if you have overridden the levels for custom experience ramps and levels the inclusion of the chibis push your max level down by 5.
Ascension, chibis, any max level modifers... they all take up the last set of levels, so if we add some mechanic that is meant to handle a higher max level and you don't have the new max levels in your exp ramp... this is what happens

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

Don't worry it doesn't break the feature of breeding color mutations itself, the problem is just that the array of colors went through a change that got things a little messed up.
We didn't remove any of the available colors, we just removed a ton of duplication that was occurring and making all these color reference inconsistent.


It's any mods. what was happening was that every single mod added was duplicating the color definitions in the array. so there were multiple instances of every color.
When breeding and the game chooses random color mutation it randomly pick

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

Yes, though you should be aware that making any changes to your active mods can still potentially cause this kind of issue for the time being.

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    ZenRowe on Forums - Thread - Direct

After some investigation, I understand the cause of this...


Unfortunately, any colors lost from this update can't be automatically recovered ? .Dino colors, after their randomized selection, are saved to the creature and referenced by an index number only that is associated with a master array of colors. (No we can't change this unless you want your servers to slow to a crawl, string comparisons are resource expensive)


Unofficial servers (and singleplayer) that run mods are vulnerable to this issue and have always been, any change to the order of mods or anything that alt

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Originally posted by HanPolio

Do you work for Wildcard?

Yes

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After some investigation, I understand the cause of this...

Unfortunately, any colors lost from this update can't be automatically recovered :'( .Dino colors, after their randomized selection, are saved to the creature and referenced by an index number only that is associated with a master array of colors. (No we can't change this unless you want your servers to slow to a crawl, string comparisons are resource expensive)

Unofficial servers that run mods are vulnerable to this issue, any change to the order of mods or anything that alters the contents of that array can cause the index to suddenly match up with a different color. It can happen at any time to any unofficial server (This last update had a pretty important change to the way mods merge color definitions to cut down on some bloated data, and that caused the issue this time)

However, I do recognize how much time everyone puts into breeding and hunting for their choice colors, and while we c...

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