Global and Zenkai: Two Very Different Sides of the Same Coin

  • Yep. It's one of these threads. I'm sure this hasn't been done to death, by now, ha hah.


    Anyway. I've played a little bit of both of these projects and both of them are very impressive in their own ways. However, each of them also has their own flaws…


    Dragon Ball Online Global / Revival


    Overview:
    A nearly-complete experience that focuses on functionality over "flash", but still has a long way to go before it's "definitive".

    Dragon Ball Online Zenkai


    Overview:
    A very pretty and very professional-looking experience, but very much an ongoing effort which isn't for the impatient.


    Honestly, I'd love to see these two versions of the game come together and make an ultimate version that's pretty, authentic, and lots of fun, but I understand that the founders of each project have their own differing priorities. For my (non-)money, though? I'm leaning toward Global as the version to play, right now because, despite the text formatting bugs and the somewhat annoying automated events and notifications, it really does feel more "finished" than Zenkai. That, and I'm a player who constantly needs to organize their inventory. So, you know, not being able to do that in Zenkai really kind of ruins things for me. Hee~


    Thanks for reading!

  • Hey, thanks for all the feedback! I'll give you some notes on some of the negatives as to where we are on things.

    • The launcher requires confirmation via User Control Account to run under modern versions of Windows. (Old / unsigned software usually triggers this.)

    This is something I intentionally did to the launcher, it's not a relic. I wanted to enforce this because sometimes people put the files in places that will bug out if you don't have admin permissions when writing.

    • The launcher doesn't close when the DragonBallOnline client opens.

    I can add an option for this if you guys want, I just leave it on right now because many players multi client.

    • Small community with minimal players online at any given time.

    The reality is, there are a lot of DBO servers, and this game lacks a lot of polish that gold standard mmo's have. We've been the biggest on average for the last couple of years, but yeah, there aren't enough players to keep the map and towns full. I have a lot of work planned that should both bring more players, and make the world feel a bit more full, so we should keep slowly growing as I bring more features/polish online.

    • Some translation errors and inconsistencies. ("Orc Monument" rather than "Beastman Monument"?)
    • Some untranslated content such as side-quests and characters.
    • Occasional line break issues and frequent text overflow in dialogue boxes. (For example, the word "loaded" may end up displaying as "load" with "ed" on the next line.)
    • No clear indication about how much of the content has been translated, nor in what languages.

    We're currently working through the English translations. The reason it's taking us a bit is because we're focusing on only one language at a time, and double checking all inherited translations from the old teams before we move on to another language. Looking at 240k strings can take a while for volunteers. We'll get it all translated and making sense.


    Believe me the line break thing drives me nuts. It happens because the client was originally set up for Eastern languages with characters that support hard coding line breaks, and it just doesn't work with other languages. The reason we haven't changed it is because we're still on the newest TW client, the other devs are working on the older open source client as we speak. This means I can't currently add dynamic line breaks, but it's coming in the future.


    As for indicating where we're at on translations, I can look into posting something on the website for each language, but the reality is until I get into the old team's translations for other languages, we won't know. I can give you an accurate % of where we're at for English, but what I got for the other languages is currently unclear until I bring on the other translation teams and see how it looks under the hood. The reason we're focusing on English first is so that we have a solid base for the other languages to work with, instead of going from sometimes unclear Eastern languages to Portuguese, for example. It's a lot harder to find someone who knows Japanese and Portuguese than someone who knows English and Portuguese.

    • Game and forum accounts are separate. (A player has to register for the forum separately from the game and vice-versa.)

    We've almost completed design for a new website, and I'll write the site once we're past 2.0. When that happens I'll merge the forum and game accounts, and archive the old site/forum.


    Thanks for letting us know all this! Feedback always helps us make a roadmap for what to work on next. We'll get this game up to speed!

  • Hello! Thank you for reading my post! I'm glad you guys found my analysis useful~ I don't know if there's any sort of contention between the two game versions or anything like that, so I was a little worried about posting something like this, but it doesn't seem like it upset anyone yet, so yay~!


    It's interesting that the launcher is purposely "unsigned" as a precaution. I'm a person who takes those kinds of warnings seriously and virus scans files obsessively, so that's definitely appreciated! I doubted anything actually did have a virus, but yeah. Overly cautious~ I also didn't take into consideration that players might multi-box. So… yeah, maybe don't bother with that "close on launch" thing? Nice that there's a reason rather than it being an oversight, though!


    Now, as for the line break thing… I'm honestly not sure how that sort of thing works, but I'm guessing it's based on the character set encoding? I don't know much about this sort of thing, but it seems like if you're just overwriting the Korean / Chinese / Japanese text with English without changing the encoding, then the game is going to keep encoding the text like it's Asian language, thus you get things like…


    words bein

    g cut off in

    rather od

    d places.


    Most programs I've used which support other languages seem to figure it out easily enough: block characters wrap wherever there's space while Latin characters wrap by the blocks of letters with specific rules for… specific… characters– oh. Oh, I see what you mean. If the original client had absolutely no "behavioral language" for non-Asian languages, then it wouldn't have any idea what it's doing is "wrong". Oof. That's gonna be a pain to program in, huh?


    Anyway, most of the stuff I brought up was in direct comparison to Zenkai, but as I also said, both teams have slightly different goal in minds. I'm just grateful that there's even one team working on this game for Latin-based languages – English, in particular! You guys – both teams – are absolutely doing Shin's work~!

    Ha hah, I'm sorry.

  • With the recent closure of DBOZ I may contemplate coming back to DBOG, given that it's the most alive.
    But I'll also keep an eye out for other projects, I gotha admit I really liked DBOZ's presentation, Global could take a page out of Zenkai's book on that and I agree on how pleasant its in-game font looked.

  • Most programs I've used which support other languages seem to figure it out easily enough: block characters wrap wherever there's space while Latin characters wrap by the blocks of letters with specific rules for… specific… characters– oh. Oh, I see what you mean. If the original client had absolutely no "behavioral language" for non-Asian languages, then it wouldn't have any idea what it's doing is "wrong". Oof. That's gonna be a pain to program in, huh?

    It won't be that bad. Currently it's just wrapping in the middle of words, or when we specify line breaks in the translation files. We'll just give it some better word wrap logic, should be easy.

    Global could take a page out of Zenkai's book

    I'm sure we'll do the no brainer stuff that they did like guild customization and stuff, but the reality is there's not much to copy, they didn't release all that much. A lot of the ideas they were demoing in videos are standard kit for mmo's, we'll do all that stuff eventually after the new client is ready.

  • It won't be that bad. Currently it's just wrapping in the middle of words, or when we specify line breaks in the translation files. We'll just give it some better word wrap logic, should be easy.

    I'm sure we'll do the no brainer stuff that they did like guild customization and stuff, but the reality is there's not much to copy, they didn't release all that much. A lot of the ideas they were demoing in videos are standard kit for mmo's, we'll do all that stuff eventually after the new client is ready.

    Really appreciate you answering all those questions. Can't wait for it. Thanks for all the hard work.

  • Thanks for this comparison but sad news,


    apparently they are gonna close the project. Yesterday came a post from one of the mods about the server state. Check out their Forum for more info I guess

    …!! I killed Dragon Ball Online Zenkai. ;v;

    (I'm kidding, but the timing is definitely a little spooky.)

    It won't be that bad. Currently it's just wrapping in the middle of words, or when we specify line breaks in the translation files. We'll just give it some better word wrap logic, should be easy.

    Oh, good, good… I hoped it wasn't as bad as I thought. I imagine it's a fairly low priority at this moment, though. I mean, the English game is playable and understandable, so. Heh.


    Either way, I look forward to the future! 👍

  • Really appreciate you answering all those questions. Can't wait for it. Thanks for all the hard work.

    No problem!

    Oh, good, good… I hoped it wasn't as bad as I thought. I imagine it's a fairly low priority at this moment, though. I mean, the English game is playable and understandable, so. Heh.


    Either way, I look forward to the future! 👍

    We've got lots of good stuff coming for you guys!

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