There are news that we do not necessarily expect. Today, Ankama has left the pen to its “Launcher” teams in order to detail an improvement of the latter. With an update of Cytrus, these will improve the speed of downloading files, “like magic”.
The Ankama Launcher will download your games faster
Since its arrival, the Ankama game centralization application, or Zaap of its code name, improves the experience of players year after year. From the multi-account on Dofus to the new options of Wakfu, the “Launcher” represents a revolution, piloted by a dedicated team in the company.
The latter now tackles a recurring problem of this one: the size and duration of downloads.
Indeed, its members worked on the sixth version of Cytrus. This is the development framework or internal “framework” acting as an engine for the Ankama Launcher. Historically, it derives from the Agrum, “Ankama Games Releases and Updates Manager”, corresponding to the old Dofus, Arena or Wakfu update application.
This new version of the tool leads to an overhaul of the management of download packages. The latter previously recovered each file of a game independently of the others and despite optimizations, it was not very efficient. The example that we will report because the most obvious comes back to the translation files. That of the French version weighs around thirty MB and had to be redownloaded in full at the slightest modification. A simple patch of Dofus could thus quickly become heavy without really requiring it.
From now on, the Ankama Launcher will no longer manage the “file by file” mode but “chunk by chunk” (like on Minecraft, but not for exploring the world). The games will be split into bundles (in MB) grouping together several pieces of files, the chunks (in KB). It will therefore no longer be necessary to transfer the entire file, but the actually modified part. This also makes it possible to reduce the number of objects to be downloaded strictly speaking. For example, Dofus 2 required 8400 independent downloads for its files whereas it now comes down to only 324 Bundles.
TL:DR: The Ankama Launcher will make fewer major changes, especially on “minor” updates or patches, reducing waiting times and download sizes. It will better target what needs to be changed.
Iterative, regular and effective improvements
The project team seems to be on a good run. Between the KROSMOZ application and other recent improvements, the only thing left now is Dofus as a pet peeve regarding its more or less buggy links with the Launcher. Nothing insurmountable, especially since the Unity porting project is on the horizon.