I remember when Impulse first came out, some people didn’t like it. But you know one fringe benefit of Impulse? Very very easy to release updates to lots of people in short amounts of time.
Anyway…
We released an update today and we’re extremely pleased with how it’s gone. We can actually go into the chat area without getting flamed!
In early blogs, I’ve mentioned that developer Gas Powered Games and publisher Stardock both have multiple sub-teams working on various things in Demigod.
Or more specifically, this past Monday, I mentioned that there would be a Monday update and a Thursday update. Well, the Monday update was something of a disaster. Yea, it worked better than what was up but we were extremely disappointed. Those of you who know me know I was extremely frustrated online about it in the chat area because I had such high hopes for it. So today we released the update that fully implemented the changes needed to make Monday’s update be what it was supposed to be and that’s why we’re in such good moods.
Anyway, I also had said there would be a Thursday update that would have a lot of good stuff in it. Well, it’s Thursday and the Impulse team now has their update in. I think I referred to it as the “end all, be all” update to some people online. Well, we’re staging it right now.
After this update, the only thing we’ll really have left to do is to turn on the proxy servers for those people who absolutely, positively cannot connect to people along with making the connectivity more robust for people with multiple network cards in their computer (you can do yourself a favor if you get stuck and if you’re like me with 3 network cards and wireless, turn some of them off when playing online until we come up with a good way to bind it). But those solutions are much easier than what the team has had to do which is major surgery on the network libraries.
To use an analogy, imaging if a game was released with a new version of a popular 3D engine and it turned out that 3D engine wouldn’t work for people with a popular model of ATI cards and that the only way to get it to work was to largely rewrite the 3D engine in house. And even though it normally would take months and months to write a 3D engine, you really only have 3 weeks because people are really ticked off. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing with the MP match making network stuff.
UPDATE:
It's here. People seem happy.
If you have a low end machine and run into any error messages such as "failed to connect to NAT" try this:
download http://draginol.stardock.net/files/impulsereactor-0514.zip
Unzip it into your Demigod\bin directory (program files\stardock games\demigod\bin). If you're not having problems don't bother. But we found a Raknet bug that this works around for now on lower end CPU systems.
