Ftp access

When importing ARK savegame files, you can directly do that by accessing them via an ftp connection.

Setup

• Go to Settings - Import Savegame
• Add a new savegame file location by clicking on Add Savegame File Location
• Enter a convenient name (this will be shown in the menus to recognize that file)
• You can enter a server name which will be applied to all imported creatures
• Enter the file location, i.e. the ftp adress, e.g. ftp://203.0.113.12:27015/ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/TheIsland.ark

When you use this file import entry, you'll be asked to enter the credentials to login. After that the file will be downloaded and imported.

Use a wildcard to get the newest save file

If there are multiple savefiles with timestamps you can insert an asterisk (*) in the filename, then the last modified file will be downloaded.

E.g. use ftp://203.0.113.12:27015/ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/TheIsland_*.ark for the file location. All files in the folder ftp://203.0.113.12:27015/ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/ that start with TheIsland_ and end with .ark (e.g. TheIsland_2022-10-21_16-38-55.ark) will be ordered by the last time modified, and the newest of them will be downloaded.

Use named regex groups to get the newest file

Sometimes the LastModified property of server files don't result in the latest file with the previous method. Then you can use a regular expression (or regex in short) to get the newest file by filename. Basically you enter a pattern to tell the app to order the filename according to specific parts of the filename. Only the filepath part after the last / is parsed as a regex, so slashes, dots etc before that don't need to be escaped. The pattern needs to contain named groups which are used to order the files. A named group e.g. looks like (?<myGroupName>\d+). This pattern would match a single or more digits (\d+) and make them accessible via the group myGroupName. If the server saves the files according to this pattern TheIsland_[yyyy]-[MM]-[dd]_[HH]-[mm]-[ss].ark, e.g. TheIsland_2022-10-21_16-38-55.ark, you can use this pattern: ftp://…/TheIsland_(?<orderGroup>[\d_\-]+)\.ark. When using regular expressions you have to escape some characters like . and - with a backslash \.

Some servers use timestamps that cannot be sorted trivially, e.g. TheIsland_[dd]-[MM]-[yyyy]_[HH]-[mm]-[ss].ark. Then you need multiple named groups to order the files. The names of the named groups are ordered alphabetically and the matched values are ordered in that order. E.g. for the mentioned timestamp format you can use ftp://…/TheIsland_(?<g3>\d+)-(?<g2>\d+)-(?<g1>\d+)_(?<g4>[\d_\-]+)\.ark, so the files are first ordered by year, then month, then day, hour, minute and second.