Q to devs: how much did impulse actually ease 1.10 distribution?

Well, if you take a minute to think about it, it's pretty easy to see how it saves time and resources. How much time I can't say of course, but look at it this way:

The way Impulse installs patches is it checks for file differences and downloads only those needed files that are changed. That means for those with 1.096 the update was pretty small, but those with 1.05 had a larger download.

As standalone, everyone would either have to download the megapatch since all the files would need to be locally available for the installer to check what's different so those with 1.096 would be downloading a lot more than they need to. The only way to avoid that is to make patches for each version (1.05 > 1.1, 1.09 > 1.1, 1.095 > 1.1, 1.096 > 1.1, so on..) which is wasteful in another way

Impulse makes it automatic and users download only what they need

easy is a matter of perspective, since this branch of IT is about as familiar to me as the inner workings of warp drives or even real pieces of more technical equipment. but I get what are saying and thank you for illuminating me. I just thought a rough time estimate would be interesting to hear.

Yeah it would be I'm guessing it would be rather skewed for 1.1 though since we had 3 beta phases and if it was standalone the most likely way would be one megapatch for everyone rather than making 4 different intallers.. but who knows

Its pretty easy for me. I just send the latest version the game's files. Stardock/Impulse figures out the rest of it.

sounds cool. thx man.

Hi Blair, that's an interesting insight into how Impulse works. Seems like it merely does a glorified rsync.. If so, how does it / software developers like you guys handle things like registry entries/config settings files? What if you need to create a new registry entry/settings? Does impulse do that, or do you have to take care of it on execution of the exe?

Not sure if its like rsync or not - I'm at Ironclad not Stardock As for registry stuff, Impulse or the the installer on the DVD handles that but the Sins exe takes care of game specific settings.

It may be easier than rsync - another post from a Stardock was talking about the problems but the patch itself is rather clever in th efact that they use an XML file comparison to check the current version of the files for the game - those that are out of date get patched and those that are current remain.

I would think that since Ironclad knows exactly what files you have in the game folder, and then can do a quick comparison to the current files for 1.1, BAM 3.5mb for the beta to 1.1 and a big old patch from 1.05 to 1.1

The issues from earlier today revolved from Stardock releasing another update to Object Desktop or something

  Hi all, i was on 1.05, i tried to get the 1.09 beta a few weeks ago, but when i thought of over-writing my main game install i backed out of it. I did download the 1.1 today from impulse and it went fairly quickly. It was labelled as 1.5 gb which i thought might take a bit, not knowing what traffic to the impulse servers might be, but i had the download in less than a half hour. It was nice and quick, did the update itself, unlike most patches in the past i have had to download and then install and then configure. The new features,graphics and touchups, fixes and models of 1.1 make it very very nice. Almost like having a new game. 

Take care,

-Teal

It's not like Rsync.  If you were to try a byte and byte comparison between what you have on your PC versus what you have on your computer it would take hours to get an update.

In fact, when Impulse v1.0 first came out, it was doing some (not a lot but some) byte by byte checking to do a sync lik eyou describe and it took 40 minutes on average to do the comparison ("preparing") which is one of the reasons why so many people here got a negative first impression of Impulse.

If you think about the thousands of files involved and the fact we can drop a few files into a directory and Impulse just figures it out and does for, for the user in seconds, it's a no brainer. Especially when you spread it across hundreds of other programs -- not just Sins but GalCiv, Demigod, WindowBlinds, Object Desktop, etc.

I can't even get 1.1

Impulse is awful, they should just go with steam. All I get is a bunch of errors saying to check my internet, On top of that the support is awful too.

didnt see much improvement myself,  usually get patches from filefront,  im downloading with 400 kb/s there,  i got bored waiting for the download to finish so i headed over to my neighbour to play a game of Brawl.....

it didnt save me any time...  only cost me

I updated from 1.096 to 1.1 and my patch download was ~3mb. If I was updating from 1.05, or a standalone installer, it would've been several hundred mb

Sure saved me some time.

Okay Skaaarj, you need to go away. Besides making multiple posts in which multiple people from Stardock have instantly been up to try to help you. You go from post to post trashing Impulse.

So go get a refund. You're done.

Update: Appears Skaarj was a warez user. 

nice frog, guess your one of the first to catch one ??

well, if he pirated the game and it did not work, then I guess Impulse did one of the things it was designed for. among other things.

my problem was just that - before being able to load the actually very small beta 3 -> 1,10 final patch - impulse spent a good amount of time updating itself. yes, the thing just spends too much time with itself, if you use it only once in a while.

may belong to the impulse part of the forums, but I just thought I got that out too.

Hi Frogboy, Yes, after digging around, it makes sense to put the stuff into an XML and then check CRCs or such for changes and then copy the relevant stuff over. Yes, I agree, you guys got it right.. this is the right way to go as opposed to rsync specifically..

But I'm still curious as to how Impulse (and the developers) handle settings. For example, let us say I have a new INI name/value pair (alt. substitute with registry/etc/or even a new INI file) that needs to be included for say a new feature - maybe a user configurable setting, I guess I'm asking if that is the responsibility of sins.exe (as Blair mentioned game specific settings), or does Impulse help to do that?

I ask because this topic is about the benefits of Impulse distribution.. so if Impulse is a delivery system, would it make sense to use other tools (on top of, together with, etc) to handle the installer/upgrades/patching - for example NSIS? Sounds like a dumb question, I know.. sorry if it is

The answer is either/or.   The developer can handle this on their end, or they can have Impulse do it. Impulse can (and does for many games now) handle the installation of the correct DirectX version, installing special SDKs, etc.  As an end-user, you never see this because we run those apps silently (most of the time) and all you see in Impulse is "Installing...".  There's a huge amount of stuff happening behind the scenes of Impulse that the end-user will never be aware of - which is part of the point (make it simple).

I'm not going to question that you say he is, but I AM curious as to WHY you say this is? i.e. how did you determin he was a warez user (apart from heaps of bitching, which in and of itself could mean warez or could just mean having issues.... )

Ummm stupid question.  It helps tremendously since mini minor upadtes like 1.11 can be released quick and easily and downloaded easily making it so consumers don't have to wait long periods of time for a giant update to fix 100 problems at once every month instead of a few everyday or so.

V1.11 is a clearly an example of how Impulse is a good idea - a 10 second update to fix the exploit without everyone having to download a patch that takes someone from either 1.0 or 1.05 to 1.11.

Now if I could just play the game online - can't log into ICO for some reason...

So what - he looked the customer up and realised that he didn't have a registered serial???

It should be pretty easy for the Stardock team to figure out if someone has a warez copy.  The serial number is registered with the servers.  When you register a serial number with impulse it verifies it has a valid, unique number.  If not, my guess is that there is a back end server log that reports which user ID has an illegal copy.  And since you are logged into Impulse with your user name......

And as far as the benefits of Impulse versus other distribution types, I perfer Impulse.  I have used a couple of the others, and have not been the happiest.  The couple I have tried have been relativly slow in my opinion.  I have been downloading the entire SINS games while reading and typing.  Just checked it and I was getting ~850k.  Not sure about alot of people out there, but that is pretty fast for most of everything I have seen in my 15+ years of internet usage and even 10 years of network administration.

Update, in the 30 odd minutes it took me to read and post, Impulse downloaded and installed an entire clean version of SINS........