Demigod: Two updates in one day? Yes!

By Frogboy on May 14, 2009 7:18:31 PM from

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.

+912 Karma | 65 Replies

today's updates seemed to help quite a bit. a friend and i had a few 3v3 games and a 4v4, everyone connected quickly and properly and we were ingame in short order.

however, in the 4v4, about 3/4 of the way through the game it split and at least we two had separate instances of the game with all bots. it seems to happen quite often and has persisted since launch.

Targeting bug is still an issue and happens quite often still.

Played a couple of games last night 2v2's. Going into the lobby now seems sorted and starting the game all worked fine. My buddy mentioned the targetting issue occured a couple of times.

All in all very happy

Tals

I like how none of them fixed anything. Excellent job imo.

I feel like a lot of the people complaining now are the people who are pissed that it doesn't work on their 56K dial up connection under a strict government regulated firewall. Well hot damn, you mean you're having trouble connecting? Should have thought of that before you bought it. Personally, my connection sucks, but I've had no problems since day 1. Quite honestly, this is the best service I've ever gotten out of a game company. You know Blizzard would never go this far for their customers...

Thanks Stardock, keep up the good work!

@bewareofthecow:

Wouldn't change anything, I have ports forwarded and still get in none of the games Plus, the number of Europeans will spike in a while thus having even more people that can't connect.

@windshadow333: No, I have a 6 Mbit connection at one of the biggest German ISPs and still haven't been able to connect to 1 game. And frankly, for 30 euro this is not good at all (having payed and not been able to play the meaningful aspect of the game for several weeks now!). I don't have a firewall and I have a router that usually works with EVERY game, except this one.

So, I'd rather lay the blame where it belongs at the people who designed the netcode and the connectivity structure.

And yes, perhaps Blizzard wouldn't go so far, but with them I have no problem when it comes to connectivity, so I don't have to know how far they go or don't go.

I like the game alot and that's why I still sit here and hope.

I am a tiny bit annoyed with the flamers here. Stamping their feet and being generally rude. Part of me hopes they do get a refund and leave the community as their attitude isn't something I enjoy seeing.

This brings me onto a different train of thought. I paid £27 for this game, why should I have to deal with these people causing my games not to work? It's not my fault you can't solve your problem. SD has given a massive level of support and all I see is whining on your part.

Seriously, there are other things in life that are more important than this. Go out and enjoy work or school, see some friends and enjoy life. Come back a week later and see if you can get DG working again. Failing that, give up and ask for a refund.

Every patch made everything worse. The beta patch actually ran fine but this is a MESS.

And people, stop telling others that their settings might suck.....other games work fine. (AND use p2p...)

It seems to me that there are now dozens of workarounds for connectivity in place but instead of fixing things they're just making things more complicated and causing even more errors.

It's a shame a great game is destroyed by such a poor network code.

I don't claim to know anything about networking per se, but it just seems to me that since a majority of people are now able to connect without a problem, the people who still have connectivity issues have a personal connection issue which the devs can't do anything about.

@moddy82: I've always had trouble connecting to others on battlenet (be it SC, WC, or DotA) and I've always just assumed that it was me...

My first comment may have been a little too blunt, but I genuinely would like to know how most can connect while select others can't, without it being a personal connectivity issue. It seems common sense to me, but usually common sense and computers don't go together, lol.

Not quite true - they have an issue that you don't have. That doesn't mean they have anything wrong with their connectivity but something specific to them is causing the issue.

The devs I am sure will narrow down on these ones like they did with the sound issue which is frankly amazing that they sorted

Kudos and lets keep it civil

Tals

I was able to play any online game after the beta patch. Before the beta patch I would connect to no players at all, after it... almost 100%. The patch after that, still worked great, now the May 14th one comes and I can always connect to the host but never to ANYONE else.

When I host a game I can connect to EVERY player but no one can connect to me.

This does not change if I am in the DMZ of my router's firewall, windows firewall on/off both public and domain levels (Windows 7.) If I plug straight into my modem (Qwest ADSL2) or if I forward a million ports, mod games files, .dll's ect...

I have re-installed demigod over 20 times, re-formatted my computer to 3 different OS's (XP 32-bit, Vista 64-bit and Windows 7 RC1 [7100]) several times now. Through all the the rebuilds nothing allowed me to connect to other players and then after my 4th OS rebuild I got the beta patch and it worked. So since I hate Vista I re-installed Windows 7 and LEFT MY FIREWALLS ON and my system and router in default configs, was still able to play fine. Then the may 14th patch came out and everything broke again.

The only thing that ever let me play online was the beta patch, the one after it and that's it. No amount of personal user config affects my ability to play games online at all. It's all Demigod software based at this point.

On a side note, VPN tools and apps such as Hamachi and Gameranger work 100% of the time for me with every and any patch. I play with other people that have purchased their copies of the game to support Stardock and Gaspowered Games as a company. However I would like the ability to play online again.

Please let me know if you need any more information such as dxdiags or what-not.

Thank you,

Shantarr Dal'rae

Took a break for a few days, was able to connect and start a game in a matter of seconds tonight. Looking good. Thanks SD

For myself and my friends in different countries the multiplayer doesnt work in terms of connecting.

But I heard of another friend who was able to play one Pantheon game, 4 of the 6 players where replaced with an AI he told me.

He said it took him 2 hours to be able to get in this 1 Pantheon match.

After having a fast peek in to the forums here Im playing some different gametitles now.

Lets see if Demigod MP works at the end of next week - Would be nice

P.S.

The stats tracking, favour items etc. are broken with the patches 14 & 15 th May too, but I dont even mind of those. Playing a multiplayer game would be nice.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 17

If you feel that way, then please take advantage of Stardock's full refund policy.

GPG simply did not release a complete product and have been using our $40 to finish a title that should have performed properly out of the box--not to mention a full month after release. And no, I do not want a refund--I want the finished product that is advertised on the box. This kind of nonsense needs to be reported to the better business bureau or something. Simply offering a refund to people that are not satisfied is quite the cop out, especially this late after release.

Hopefully Stardock learned something and does not have to deal with lackluster developers like this in the future.

Don't get me wrong--I loved GPG's work with Dungeon Siege and SupCom--but none of those issues come close to the clusterf*%& of problems in Demigod. Quite simply, this release is an embarressment and is a perfect example of how developers are forced to release unfinished products due to deadlines/lack of funds. I'm assuming it was the latter, and to top it off they have the audacity to use the funds from consumers who bought the broken product to attempt to finish it. People don't buy a lawnmower (or anything, really) expecting it to work properly 6 months later.

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Demigod: Two updates in one day? Yes!