Opening several Dofus clients with the Ankama Launcher on a Mac

Adding your accounts to the Launcher

Everything happens in the Launcher's account management, once and for all. Every account you add is then offered at each launch, with nothing to type again.

1. 1Open account managementClick the avatar at the top right of the Launcher, then « Gestion des comptes », account management.
2. 2Add an accountClick « Ajouter un compte » and follow the page that opens in your browser: username, password, and two-step verification if you have turned it on, which you should.
3. 3Repeat for each accountThe Launcher accepts as many accounts as you own. Each then appears in the list, with a switch to activate or deactivate it.

Opening one client per account

Once the accounts are registered, the Play button on the Dofus tab opens a session for every active account. You can deactivate the ones you are not playing tonight, from account management or from the game's own multi-account interface: only active accounts are launched.

The Launcher is built for this. Its own documentation says so: it lets you run several games, or several instances of one game, at the same time. On a Mac, that gives one Dofus icon in the Dock and, behind it, as many windows as accounts. That is normal, and it is exactly what makes the rest necessary.

Each client opens at the size and position it remembers. With four accounts, that is four windows half covering each other, and the first reflex is to tidy them by hand. Resist it: that tidying is exactly what DofusMulti does on its own.

The old method, and why it no longer serves

Before the Launcher managed accounts, the only way to open Dofus twice on a Mac was to get around a macOS rule, which refuses to launch the same application twice from the Dock. The command open -n -a Dofus in the Terminal forced a new instance, and it had to be typed for every account.

It still works. But every instance launched that way bypasses the Launcher, and so its registered accounts, its updates and its two-step verification. You retype your credentials, you miss the fixes, and you gain nothing. Keep the command as trivia.

Memory, resolution, heat

Dofus 3 runs on Unity, and every client is a complete game in memory. On a Mac with 8 GB, three or four clients fight for room with the browser, Discord and everything else; the system starts writing to disk, and everything slows down at once.

• Close what has no business being there. A browser with twenty tabs weighs as much as a client.
• Lower the graphics quality in the game's options, on every account. Effects and shadows cost more than they show on a window you look at once per turn.
• Keep one resolution for every client. Windows of different sizes force the system to redraw more than it needs to, and your eye to readjust at every switch.
• On a laptop, heat comes mostly from animations. A client idle at the back of the stack uses little; the one in front does most of the work.

Stacking the windows helps here too: instead of four small windows to draw at once, the screen shows one, full size, and the others wait their turn behind it.

What DofusMulti detects

Once the Launcher has opened your clients, there is nothing to configure. DofusMulti watches for Dofus windows as they appear, recognises them, and stacks them in the same place as soon as they are ready. The character is read from the window title, so every account takes its class portrait in the bar without you naming it.

A client you close keeps its place in the rotation; relaunch it from the Launcher and it gets it back. Change character on an account, and the portrait follows. The full list of what the application does fits in eighteen points, and not one more.

The Launcher opens the doors; DofusMulti tidies the house. The two complete each other, and neither touches the game.

Further reading

• Dofus 3 multiboxing on a Mac
• Switching Dofus accounts from the keyboard on a Mac