Why only cosmetic rewards? Can't we have something powerful in DF2?DF2 is a strictly non Pay2Win title. If we allowed powerful paid items from DF1 into DF2, it would immediately lose it's status, and people would call the game P2W again. Unfortunately cosmetic upgrades are really the only thing we can grant without tainting the new game's reputation.
I have multiple DF accounts, can I still transfer everything?Yes! You can apply rewards from multiple DF1 accounts to a single DF2 account. All credits and cosmetic items will be pooled together. If you end up multiple copies of the same reward, that will allow you to have the item on more than one DF2 character at the same time.
I am banned in DF1, can I play in DF 2?Yes, we are not carrying over old bans to DF2. It's a totally clean slate so you're more than welcome to play the new game.
What are the minimum specs for DF2?At this stage we do not have exact specs as we would need to do in-depth testing of the final game to determine this. But I can say that the current build runs fine on my 4 year old budget laptop. My goal is to have the graphics scale down low enough that everyone will be able to enjoy it.
Can you explain how X works in DF2 in detail?More details will be released about the new game over the next few weeks/months, as well as screenshots and videos. There is a lot to cover (too much for this post) and there is some stuff we'd like to keep as a surprise until we are near release. Don't worry though, I can promise it'll be good :-)
Why didn't you just update the existing Dead Frontier? Wouldn't that be quicker/easier?In a nutshell no, it was actually far easier to start work on a new game. Below is a full explanation (be warned, it's long!)
Back in 2007 I started work on Dead Frontier. I was 20 and had been running my little indie games business for about 4 years already. Whilst I could program (and had been since I was a little kid), I was entirely self-taught, and to be honest my code was an utter mess. Dead Frontier was my first real attempt an doing anything online, and my knowledge of client/server tech was literally zero. I didn't even know the basics of PHP and MySQL at that time. Effectively I made the game by installing some free forum software, hacking it to store some extra variables about each user, and then slapped some flash elements in various places. Job done! It wasn't exactly the game I was dreaming of making, but it was a good enough approximation.
Whilst it kind of worked, it was incredibly inefficient, slow and buggy. Over time my programming skills improved massively and with some help & guidance from Niosop I managed to improve the online side of things. However I never fully managed to unentangle the game from the forum software it was based upon, and even now DF is still running with various bits of ancient code that I had copy/pasted from the internet. Over the years my updates have effectively been band-aids, temporarily keeping things running, but never actually fixing the core problems. Fixing the core problems, would pretty much mean a complete rewrite of the server-side, something that I've honestly been too scared to attempt, for fear of breaking things and upsetting players.
As anyone who works in the tech industry will know, applying updates to big, messy, badly designed code is an utter nightmare. Changing even small things can unexpectedly cause big problems. Generally I spend 20x more time fixing bugs and patching security holes than I do adding anything new to DF.
The 3D rewrite of the inner city was actually an improvement in this area. It was much better designed than the 2D client, and made updates and fixes a lot easier for a while. However even that improved style of coding is still far below the standard I would be writing today. Also, in an attempt to prevent certain types of cheating, I introduced more and more complex security systems to the 3D client over time. Whilst these system did (and still do) prevent a lot of cheating, they are incredibly hard to manage. For example the last big round of 3D client updates had lots of bugs which triggered the security systems, leading people to be banned unfairly. Further updates to the client are likely to have the same, or worse problems.
Ever since Google Chrome announced that it would be droppping NPAPI (the tech that allows the IC to run in the browser) I realized that the clock was ticking for Dead Frontier. My initial response to that was simply to create the standalone client. However this was only ever going to be a temporary solution. The system of clicking through links to startup the game each time you visit the city is incredibly messy. I also knew that Flash was dying, and it wouldn't be long before it too was blocked in most browsers.
I knew that the only real solution to this problem would be to have Dead Frontier running as a proper, all-in-one client. A single EXE that runs everything from the IC, the marketplace, the market, the forums; all in one app. However I must admit that when it came time to start on this project, I was immediately hit with a wave of depression. I was about to embark on a lot of hard work, but at the end of it all, after all the endless bugs and fixes, we'd still just have the same old Dead Frontier, built on top of the same buggy, badly designed server-side that we've always had. I forced myself to start work on it, but progress was incredibly slow and demoralizing.
As I worked on it, I began to realize there were a lot of other things I didn't like about Dead Frontier, beside the programming. Whilst I've always been proud of the game, I made some questionable design descisions. Such as:
1. Complicated and confusing food/drink/health/repair system2. Dying in the outpost.2. Weird/quirky controls (drag food to your mouth? lol)3. Too much walking4. Unbalanced high inflation economy5. Too much grind6. Short sighted stats system (lack of rewards for high levels)7. Lack of build variety8. Power creep 9. Too much Pay2Win
And probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting.
I did plan to add more features to address these issues, but it felt like I was just sticking band-aids on again. It would be a huge upheavale to change the core design of the game enough to fix these problems. Some things (such as the economy) might be never actually be fixed, as it's hard to get rid of items/cash already in circulation. There is pretty no way to undo the "P2W" elements of DF1 at this stage either.
I was also very aware that DF looked incredibly dated, and our stats were showing that we quite literally were not attracting any new players anymore. New accounts are now just old players returning to see how things had (or had not) changed. So I began to think about improving the graphics, maybe launching an HD version of the game so that we could attract a new audience.
Then in late 2016, it suddenly hit me. Making all these changes was a huge and scary undertaking that would probably require several years to complete, and by that time I exepcted that the dwindling player base would already be gone. Not to mention we'd still be running on the same unstable roots. I realized that making a new game would actually be *a lot* easier than trying to drag the existing DF into the current gen of games.
For the first time in years, I actually felt excited about working on DF again. A new game would be a chance to get things "right", taking into account everything I've learned about game development over the last 10 years, whilst getting rid of the shackles of the old design and code.
I really feel like making DF2 was the right choice, and I'm confident most of you guys will agree once you've seen it :-)
If you're at all interested in DF2, please visit deadfrontier2.com and sign up to the newsletter and/or follow the new Facebook/Twitter pages to be kept up to date with developments. I will of course be posting more information, screenshots, videos etc as time goes on, and we get closer to that April 2018 launch date.
2017年11月02日 06点11分
10
这回真全了吧?
2017年11月02日 07点11分