Don't retire Stardock Central just yet...

from GalCiv2 Forums

Last night I was enjoying a TA game when I encountered the escalating research cost problem. My opponents didn't seem to be affected and quickly built up an overwhelming tech advantage so I resigned the game and decided to download 1.95. SD Central 2.54.522 doesn't have TA 1.95 (or Sins of a Solar Empire 1.05) so I searched for Impulse, eventually found a link to the site, clicked the download button and ran the install. The application would get some random distance, 45% maximum, and hang.

To check connectivity with Stardock, I went back into SD Central and successfully installed the heightmaps for GC2. SD Central also suffers frequent connection timeouts but all you have to do is click the install button again and it picks up where it left off so, eventually, the install works. The need to babysit the dowwnload to recover from connection timeouts can be frustrating but updates aren't that frequent so it's managable.

Not sure what is causing this but suspect my low speed (sustained transfer rate ~ 35Kb/Sec)  broadband connection has something to do with it. The bandwidth throttling mechanism my ISP uses to create the low speed offering may be responsible for the connection timeouts but I have no problem with downloads from other sites. The computer is running Vista Business 32bit SP1. Admin user with UAC turned off.

Bottom line: I now have 2 programs - Twilight of the Arnor and Sins of a Solar Empire that I can't update because Impulse won't install. Please keep publishing updates on the old SD Central system until you have the wrinkles ironed out of the new one!

4,875 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Impulse won't install? That's odd because Impulse itself is really, really small. Or did you mean the games won't install through Impulse?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The Impulse setup download is fine but, when you run it, it seems to pull a lot more data from the Internet and will display a status line with a byte count and a percentage. It freezes at some point during this phase, once at 6%, a couple of times in the 20% range, once I made it all the way to 45%. I just ran it now and it got to:

Status:
920,448, 6%

It's still running but it isn't doing anything. Once I left it for 30 minutes to see if it would start moving again. No luck. If I cancel, it asks are you sure and then does nothing except gray out all the control buttons. I haven't been quite as patient here and normally use task manager to kill it.

I suspect it's a connection timeout issue because I get them frequently when downloading from SD Central but freely admit that's just a guess.
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
If the net install of impulse isn't working, there's also a full installer available.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
That worked, thanks. Game icons are covering the installed and available version information on the update screen. Probably because I am using large fonts.