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 Other relics whose usefulness has long gone out of date will be given a full burial with all the usual honors etc…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