Hello everybody!

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Tyn (some of you know me by the name of Nimaoh), and I am the DOFUS client development manager here at Ankama. I said I’d cook up this l entry to go through some important aspects of DOFUS 2.0, whose release was announced last Friday.

First of all, I’ve noticed while reading your reactions that most of you were worried about performance. Will DOFUS still run on my current PC? Will I have to side-step Zaap maps for fear of my processor melting down? From the beginning, our intentions on this point have been clear: DOFUS 2.0 is designed with the same minimum system requirements as its younger brother in mind.

We think we’ll be able to achieve this objective by entirely rewriting the game client and optimising client/server communication. Let me explain: while the DOFUS you now know is a patchwork of 23 versions (already!), each of which adds its web of features, corrections, and problems, DOFUS 2.0 will be rewritten from zero. This will give us an opportunity to reassess and optimise any issues concerning the functioning of the program with the benefit of what we now know about how it’s used. Other relics whose usefulness has long gone out of date will be given a full burial with all the usual honors etc…


We’re also taking this chance to put many more options for improving performance in place – now you’ll be able to toggle the decorative effects in order to gain a few FPS (Frames Per Second, ie images per second), to reduce the resolution a little or to reduce the size of some caches to reduce memory consumption. A good number of other optimisations will become possible with the rewrite.

Staying with the technical side of things, another question I saw repeated a few times was – is DOFUS 2.0 in Flash? Well the answer is yes. Flash technology has always been one of Ankama’s strong points With DOFUS we pushed this technology further than we could have imagined up to then. With DOFUS 2.0, the leap forward will be almost as considerable. The years of experience garnered by our team (who’ve been excellent) have given us an impressive prowess in Flash.

By the way, if you’re a Flash/Actionscript 3 coder yourself, we are always looking for people with a high level of expertise in this area who are prepared to join us in overcoming the daily challenges we face in our work (abrakedabra!)

Now let’s talk about the graphical side of things. We’ll we’ve been through them with a fine toothed comb and couldn’t help notice that not everyone was quite happy with the DOFUS 2.0 screenshots that were sent out last Friday, particularly with the character design. You must understand that these characters were taken from Dofus Arena and are not necessarily the same as the characters in DOFUS 2.0. In fact designing avatars is a high priority in DOFUS 2.0. We don’t want to change their appearance completely, but we’d like to spruce them up a bit all the same.

Although characters in DOFUS 2.0 will be based on a universal ‘skeleton’ in order to facilitate their integration into the game and the placing of various equipment on them, this generic form will be ‘personalised’ according to class. So a Xelor will always be a little smaller than a Iop but bigger than an Eni… We’re really doing our best to make this skeleton as discreet as possible in game. Above all, we’re trying to retain that particular DOFUS spirit even if this might entail a little change in approach.

This tendency towards the use of generic skeletons will also serve to unify character design in Dofus Arena, Wakfu and DOFUS 2.0. There are various changes being made in order to knit these games closer together, while ensuring that they all keep their respective styles. Our focus on cross-game content is increasing as we try to unite all three communities across particular bridges between them. We want players to mingle regardless of which game they play and the possibilities that this sort of super-community suggest mean that we’ll certainly be paying more and more attention to this in future.

Another reaction we noticed on the forums was to the resemblance between Wakfu and Dofus Arena. I repeat that although there are many aspects of the design of all games that are drifting together, DOFUS 2.0 will remain DOFUS - we have no intention of changing that. The approach to the two games is different. Shadows in DOFUS 2.0 are created using rounded patches while in Wakfu they are done on a cell-by-cell basis. The transition between textures is softer in DOFUS, and more pronounced in Wakfu. Relief is approached in different ways in each game.

Most importantly, I want to tell you that your remarks have not fallen on deaf ears. We have a precise vision of where we want DOFUS to go, but since many aspects of the project remain ‘works-in-progress’, your opinion is always welcome. After all, we’re doing all this for you!

This post is by TYN

For the past weeks, if you are an early bird at least, you may have seen these messages in-game:

Server backup processing… You can keep on playing, but access to the server is temporarily blocked. You will be able to access the server within a few moments. Thank you for your patience.
And a few minutes later...
Server backup completed. You can now access the server. Thank you for your understanding.

We have finally introduced a new system which allow us to backup data much more securely than before.

Historically, backups done during the day did not take into account ‘in-game’ elements which were being modified at the time. Only data outside the game, that is data of disconnected players, were saved in their final form.

To illustrate this, let us take the example of inventory backup. Inventories are backed up every X minutes and again when players disconnect. As a result, in the event of a server crash, certain data may not be up to date in the database. For example, you lend your Bora to a friend, you disconnect, you are saved without the Bora. The server then crashes before your friend’s details have been backed up. Your friend will also be saved without the Bora and so the Bora will disappear. Conversely, if you lend your Bora to a friend and stay in game and your friend disconnects, both of you will be saved with the Bora in the event of a server crash, and so the item is duplicated.

The only backups which were 100% secure were those done during the total shutdown on Tuesdays and Fridays, since server activity was nil.

All this has since changed. Backup now includes in-game elements, characters are frozen for several tenths of a second, in order to prepare the backup, and everything is correctly saved.
The cost of this procedure is minimal. Connections to the server are refused for its duration. In fact, to ensure that data is not changed along the way, the database is frozen for reading as well as writing.

Very soon we plan to back data up daily, probably around 6am. We are trying to establish other ideal times to back data up. Ideally this would occur around 11am and again around 4pm. The goal is to have regular backup events which will ensure that any rollback that occurs due to a crash (which we would rather avoid altogether) will be of a few hours at the most. So players will no longer lose huge amounts of data.

Since blocking connections to the server is disruptive, we must avoid periods of high volume. Peaks in connection, during the week at least, occur around midday and between 6pm and 10pm.

Dofus and your computer’s memory… this subject regularly finds its way to the discussion table, so let me clarify a few points.
DOFUS consumes between 160 and 180 Mb of memory on average.

This figure can increase greatly if:

• You use the minimap (+20 Mb of RAM)

Reason:
Storing of map images in memory

• You are taking part in a fight (+5 to 20 Mb of RAM)

Reasons:
1. Loading of monsters’ skin
2. Loading of monster animations (increase in memory usage each time an animation is used for the first time)

• You are on a highly populated map

Reason:
Loading of players’ skins, guild insignias and mounts

• You enter a well-stocked market (a Resources' Market for example) (+10 to 30 Mb of RAM)

Reason:
Loading of object images (usually more than one hundred at once)

The above factors explain why the DOFUS client takes up more memory.


Why does memory usage not decrease once a fight has ended or I leave an over-populated map?

Simply because Flash stores this data in case it needs it later on. It will only delete this data if it has insufficient memory. In the same way, if you enjoy launching several clients at the same time, you’ll notice that each one takes up less space. It’s normal – Flash needs some memory so it does what it can to get it.

The problem is that you don’t quite have a handle on memory management.

Nevertheless, we are striving to improve consumption whenever we have the possibility.

A few tips:

- The power of your processor is very important since Flash currently does not use graphics cards
- You should use creature mode when in overpopulated areas (lowers memory usage noticeably and processer usage considerably)
- Close and relaunch the client from time to time if you notice that too much RAM is being taken up (lowers memory usage)
- Relaunch windows at least once a day
- Play in low or medium quality if you open more than one account at once (lowers processor usage.)

What an uphill battle...

Many of you have been complaining of the recent lags, so I would like to elaborate on some aspects of this. We are working on several fronts to improve the situation.

First of all: the hosting. Although it’s not the primary cause of lag issues, it limits our capacity to open new servers and it’s always beneficial to have some reserves. We were hoping to do it for the start of the year, it shouldn’t be long now. We’ve been announcing it for two months, but unfortunately it can’t happen overnight. We can’t just decided one day to ‘move house’, the servers must be prepared on the other side, their performance (which is a bit problematic at the moment) must be tested, network settings must be established and I won’t even get started on the administrative issues involved. I still can’t give you a date unfortunately, but it should happen soon.

As for the servers, we are making the most of the migration to refurbish them all. But that won’t change a whole lot as far as game performances are concerned. As it is now, the servers aren’t 100% occupied even at the busiest times during the day.

There are two types of lag, or three if you take all the elements into account.

First of all: the network lag. As for the servers, there’s nothing more to say, all is going well, though the ping speed leaves a lot to be desired. There could be several factors behind this. If it’s happening to everybody, it must be an issue with the server, or it could be due to an incident with their fibres or it could be something more suspect. If it’s not affecting everybody, it could be due to a problematic link with a particular service provider. These providers often share lines, so a problem from one provider can affect people from the others, even foreign ones who transmit information through French systems to access our servers. So if it affects only you, it must be a very narrow, localized issue, either with your computer or on the DSLAM or equivalent you are using.

As for mini-disconnections that happens in every system. Even if your MSN account seems to remain connected throughout, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the fault of our server. The thing is, MSN reconnects in half a second, with DOFUS, you notice it happening, it has to be done by hand. What is more, when you’re navigating between sites, a mini-disconnection has no impact. DOFUS requires a permanent connection, so one disconnection makes a big mess. We are continuing to test a solution which will allow reconnection during combat, this solution being necessary before the launch of the heroic server, but it’s not perfect just yet. Unfortunately DOFUS was designed in this way from the outset, so there are four or five years of code to adapt…

The second type of lag is ‘residual’, which usually happens when the system becomes saturated. In general, this type of lag is minimal and almost unnoticeable because it usually only lasts a few milliseconds. When the duration of this lag (which we see in real time and which lasts for as long as it takes for the instruction from the flash client to be received and to be processed by the server) reaches a certain point, we begin to intervene. We see if there are too many chat messages being sent, and if there are, we limit them. If there are too many players on certain maps, we render them instanced (which means that only one person may occupy each map at a time and you won’t see them nor they you). If it persists, we usually re launch the server to free up its memory and resources.

The corrections introduced on the 4th of January to the friend search function was linked to this residual lag, since searching was taking too long and, with several thousand connected, it was more common to see many searches being carried out at the same time. Everyone suffered.

In fact, it is the last case which is most frustrating, peaks of lag which can go on for as long as tens of seconds. This type of lag occurs relatively infrequently (during times of high use, we can get up to three or four per hour on highly populated server) and does not last too long (usually one to two minutes). We have identified some of the problems, which will be rectified along with the migration to the new server. It is caused by a sufficiently large number of packets being sent by the server. It is not solely an issue with bandwidth, the servers very rarely exceed the bandwidth allocated them even though the connection is 20 times faster, but more concerned with the number of packets which are transmitted. Suffice it to say that sending a packet of 10,000 bytes is quick but sending 10,000 packets of one byte is much slower, above all when it concerns thousands of recipients. The duration of this lag is not excessive, but it is very visible and frustrating.

We have put a sort of a ‘sniffer dog’ in place which specifically analyses the traffic during lag peaks of this kind. We have received very precise data on which areas to improve and step by step the developers are modifying each potential source of the lags.

We therefore expect great improvements to the game on this score. The new hoster will give us a lot of leeway, since the total network structures will have doubled and load-sharing will occur in real time.

In addition, many modifications are about to come on stream, and these will be put on line with each weekly maintenance. You may not notice a thing, but these improvements will group all these small messages into larger, but fewer, messages. The idea is simple, but adapting it to the system is not necessarily so. If a small package needs to be sent, you could say that it’s best to wait until more messages arrive so that they can be grouped together. But this creates a lag for the recipient who’s waiting for the information… We must therefore differentiate between packets according to their importance in order to send urgent elements right away and try to gather other messages into groups.

Las month was more difficult than most since it was holiday season and the normal rhythm of server population (peaks between 6:00 and 8:00 pm) turned into a constant demand. This understandably contributed to the level of latency, but on the bright side, it gave us an opportunity to look over a good number of potential factors linked to the lags. If only one element lay behind the issue, we would have sorted it out long ago, but many distinct and minute factors contribute which, when they occur at the same moment, can lead to a lag peak.

So, a few words before the Tuesday/Friday maintenances. These maintenances, even if they don’t add any elements to the game, will systematically introduce changes on the servers. They also serve to clean up character databases, to wipe the servers’ memory and to carry out work on the disks and the connection databases. Without these maintenances, queues and other annoying little things would occur much more frequently.

It can happen that a bug occurs in the course of a maintenance, even if work was only being carried out on non-game elements. In this case, according to the severity of the bug and the time it takes to correct it, we have to re launch the servers, or if the problem is not too critical, we can wait until the next maintenance. But the intention from the outset, the modifications carried out, would still constitute an over all improvement, be it to performance, stability or security.

Well, there you have it. Please don’t be too harsh on my spelling mistakes, it’s late and I doubt Kaoly will have the time to read over this. I hope I have managed to answer some of your questions and given you some confidence in the next few advances we are preparing to bring to the game.


Concerning connection problems:

For some days now we have been experiencing crashes in the chain of connection, which according to reports are due to an excessive number of simultaneous connections. As much as I’d like to believe it at 6pm, I have more doubts about the origin of the problem when it happens at five o’clock in the morning.

We therefore intend to do two things right away:
• Develop crash-proof servers (well, that doesn’t exist, but we’re going to develop more powerful servers which will be able to take more of a beating)
• Limit the number of IP connections within certain time frames to put an end to improper use.
The entire structure of the game is already in the process of being redeveloped so as to solve the case of the ‘missing server’.

A few weeks ago, we put a series of server optimisations on stream, which we were able to finalize during the holidays. Some will say that it’s coming a bit late, but it’s better late than never, as they say.

We should experience a considerable gain in terms of lags, which should be much less evident in the game.
As you know, the holidays, are over, so the daytime is a more ‘chilled out’ time for the servers, but the peak period between eight and nine o’clock on some days demonstrated that these modifications brought the desired results.

We are not resting on our laurels, though. We are continuing to track the sources of the lags and constantly trying to anticipate what might cause them to manifest themselves.

Happy gaming!

More and more of you are connecting to DOFUS, obviously captivated by the universe and its inhabitants. But have you ever found yourself cut off from the community, alone on a desert island far from the continent of the game? Well now, imagine the near future where the game and its world follow you wherever you go. Forget the barriers that ring the DOFUS kingdom while you read this article… Are you tempted? Well, come this way.

You’re out of the house, and you don’t have access to the internet. Ordinarily, you’d be gripped with a panic, but now, with your mobile phone, you can stay in touch with the community by accessing messages from the game and responding to them. Your friends see you’re connected and you can talk to them as if you were right there! After all, isn’t your phone made for communication?
Time goes by and you still don’t have your computer, but the game continues to develop without you… Maybe your territory is under attack or your collector is threatened… so as you don’t let the side down, you can activate alerts in the game to ensure you are notified in real time of the dangers that threaten your team.

The danger has been averted, but the world of DOFUS evolves ceaselessly, your enemies gain experience, while you… you choose to roam free but still evolve your character through combat with other mobile phone users. Your hero and inventory follow you no matter where you go, ready to act under any conditions. Between fights, you can even swap items in your inventory… Used properly, this can save you a lot of bother.
When you’ve overcome all your opponents, sit back and enjoy the latest DOFUS video or read some of the Manga while you await a combatant who’s worth getting your boots on for ;)

And so you see, the life of a wandering player will be as close to the game as these advances could be to today’s mobile phone technology. So hang on tight, and join us in our dream of making DOFUS a little bit more yours.

Addition to post, 20th December 2007

Upon reading some early remarks concerning the posts on mobile phone services for DOFUS, we thought it necessary to clarify certain aspects of the project.

First and foremost, “playing mobile” doesn’t mean “playing more” but rather, “playing differently”. It’s not a question of producing a distinct mobile version of DOFUS, but rather of offering new features in order to expand upon the community dimension of the game by allowing new forms of exchange between players.

By presenting the scenarios we did, we simply wished to get an idea of the community’s take on certain types of roaming play: we would love to mix game and mobile phone and we expect to deepen communication within the community.

What is more, one of the founding concepts of the project has always been the use of the portable phone. With this we propose something better than overpriced SMS messages within limited services. The need for these developments leaves room for us to create a service with real added value.
We hope to have responded in some way to your initial reactions and we remain open to suggestions of all kinds from the community.

Heyyy, look. I’m the first dev to write in this thing!

So where do I begin? We already introduced you to the whole team here. But, how about I introduce you to the development team in more detail, zapping quickly over the rest of the DOFUS team!

Basically, the group of people who get involved in this kind of project is diverse. You have the game designers, who make the game content and dialogues etc., then there’s the graphic designers who make the pictures… There are musicians/noisemakers, translators, Support, the web team who take care of the websites and the marketing people... Oh yeah, and some bunch called the Community Managers.

And you have the Devs. Being a developer is the most thankless job ever. When it doesn’t work it has to be our fault and when it does, it’s thanks to somebody else… On the other hand it is we who wield the tru Powahhh… we can smack down the game designers if they get a bit too enthusiastic (impossible to code), or decide on the basic order of the game’s evolution. Well, as much as the bosses let us anyway.
The development team is split into three main groups:

- The server devs, that’s me and some other folk “quelquonque”, code the majority of new material. Like mounts, paddocks, Soul Stones, or just the classic effects like class spell bonuses or sets. You could say we work on optimizing the game, too, as extensions bring new content to DOFUS.

- The client devs, mainly Nimaoh and Simsoft, see that the game interfaces are as intuitive as possible and add new interfaces and functionalities to make sure that you, the player can make the most of the content.

- Lastly, the “hardware and database” devs, with their guru Rogers at the stern, install machines, clean up the database, optimise game performances and help me with the server maintenance every Thursday… or crashes them on other days.

Okay, let’s get to the good stuff, the things that are going on at the moment that will appear in game in the next few months:

I’m gonna take you through the problems with data we had a few weeks ago. It’s a bit like last year during the infamous blackout in December when we had big problems with disappearing items. When the server is in operation and the players are playing, data is not saved in real time in the database. I know that with some games, this is the case, but these games, the most famous has three letter (well, two, the first and the last are the same) do not have as many items or possible interactions between players. The data on DOFUS is extremely volatile, and changes within it are sometimes considerable, too large to be saved in real time. So, characters are saved when they disconnect and also every X minutes in-game but not every time they move an item in their inventory. The problem with this is that if all data is regularly saved, it is saved in an asynchronous way. In other words, there is a discrepancy between the saving of different parts of the game.

When there is a crash, whether it be on the game or the data server, and the server is restarted, there are discrepancies. The only perfect saves are those that are done on Tuesdays when the servers are switched off, since there is no longer a single player to exchange, move or fight.

We are trying to introduce this kind of save on a more frequent basis because when there is a crash, we won’t have to worry about disappearing items anymore, but servers will be inaccessible for a few minutes every once in a while if we decide to take this approach… Since it’s a bit tricky in principle, we’re trying to find a way to make it as transparent to you as possible. And considering the amount of data there is to be saved, we’re trying to make something that’ll go clean and quick. That takes time.

There are also the hoster charges to worry about which have been a little high for a while now. For two years, we’ve known that we’ll have to find a better hoster. For one year we’ve been looking around, but we can’t always make the same level of investment as bigger companies can. On top of that, we’re not really experts on the world of hosters, so it’s not as if we can be sure of securing certain guarantees.

Sooo, some good news, since the beginning of last summer, we have found a new future hoster, who’s far better than the last one and with an infrastructure pretty much all over the world. As well as that, they’ve already hosted MMO so they’ll understand how to deal with our requirements and expectations. It’s just the changeover that takes time, the terrain must be prepared, all sorts of things have to be tested to be sure it’s working right. All going well, we’ll be on the new hoster by the beginning of 2008. I hope that’ll brighten up the New Year for all of you! We expect accessing the game to improve and also a gross improvement in the detection/anticipation of malfunctions. So, everything should go smoothly. We’ll just have to stick it out till then.

At the same time, we’re working on a new type of server which should be ready by the end of the year. The beta is almost ready, we’re just a little worried about the new downloading system but it shouldn’t be long now. We’re hoping that everyone who was there for the first few months of DOFUS will recognise the style and that all new players will find a new way to enjoy the game
We’ve also worked on a huge migration of our database. 4 million accounts or so (don’t confuse this with 4 million subscribers… if only), that’s a lot of data. On top of that, you’ve got the 20 game servers plus access through sites. We’ve had to make some changes to improve the performance of all the servers.

We’re trying to improve lags (latency) in the game… It’s not as if changing the server will change everything. The servers are still far from being full, the CPU apace is, even during the evening, available, a lot of memory is free too. The big worry at the moment is network bundles. During peak time (evenings) we are at about 80% of bandwidth capacity. The problem is that DOFUS generates a lot of information bundles each of a very small size. So if not a lot of data is transferred, the network is still heavily used. We’re doing what’s necessary to change that, but there’s no doubt that we’re going to gain ground when we move to the new hoster with its new architecture. New state of the art servers, a top of the range network with redundancy and load-balancing of all material. We should be ok for a few years at least!

We have a few new additions to the game in the pipeline, but I think Lichen is the man to speak to about that. I’ll pass the word to him then.