UFO Base and Spiral Towers

Here is a few pics of my last build.  I spent a few hundred hours on it and we were prob a month into that map when it changed.  I really dislike not being able to complete a project but there simply wasn't enough time.  I really like how it was looking.  This was my third spiral tower and made to look as much like a UFO as possible.  I used multiple tek transmitters in the center to give it a good thick beam of light.

While it looked pretty massive it was designed to use far less structures than my previous build (the one that starred in the Mazion Vid).  This was in the attempt to minimize server lag that big building was causing.  Of course that was before  I found out STRUCTURES DO NOT CAUSE SERVER LAG.  They will cause a FPS drop as you load them in but not lag the server.

I did some research and spoke to an experienced Ark admin and found out some interesting things about Ark lag that explained why all attempts I'd seen of people trying to reduce the problem had failed to make a difference.

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A Network Engineers opinion:  It's badly implemented lag compensation in conjunction with high ping players. The server is trying to keep everyone in sync. The worse someone's connection is, the harder and more resource intensive it is for the server to keep up communications. If there are many players like that, the server can't keep up with them, and there is really bad lag and rollbacks when it syncs to the last state these players' machines fully received from the server (rubberbanding).

When you cannot open doors when lagging that means you truly are out of sync and your more than likely sending a lot of packets or receiving a lot. When your lagging but can still open doors and then lag back to were you started walking is because the server is still in sync but the client is not, the client will send your actions and it's deemed completed but when you recieve the packets back from the server this disagrees with what your client believes and thus lags you back to where you started.

Experienced Admin:  The only time the server has to do anything with structures are when they are put down and calculating any damage they might take. So blowing up a large structure all at once can cause sever lag.  But no builds will strain the server just by being there.  Structure decay can cause lag because the server needs to calculate that damage on each building part which is why private servers are best to turn this off.  You might get an FPS drop if there are a ton of dinos or an absolute ton of building parts in one area but no server lag.  you can even ramp up harvesting rates to 80x without any lag.  Server wont lag because of buildings.  Tamed dinos yes. We had a server crashing because someone let their snails breed freely on pugnacia and there were 14,000 tamed snails.

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So anyone that watched the Mazion Vid will recognise the above Spiral tower.  This is the first that we dubbed the UFO tower.  The bottom of this tower was a small hatchery (much too small in hind sight).

These two images are the original spiral tower I built.  One of the guys on the server setup a community build location so we could all do a small build.  I did this as a showcase of the skills I had at the time.  Not long after this we had the server crash and we all lost everything.  I was really gutted as I had some decent dino's and gear I had wanted to keep.  I lost my breeding Spino's but one of the others on the server lost multiple generations of Spino's.  I believe it was close to 30 of them which is rough.