Downloads appear to be broken

from Elemental Forums

Thus far, I've been unable to get Fallen Enchantress downloaded. I first decided to try Stardock Central, which downloaded to around 47% then gave an IO exception error. Restarting the download process got a bit farther, then the same error and so on. I then went to the website and downloaded it there. It downloaded completely without error but when I try to install it it says "File is corrupt."

So I think somewhere you've a bug in the process. Since it would appear others have gotten the game I don't imagine it is the source, perhaps one of your cache engines has an invalid copy (my connection is routed through Phoenix, Arizona for reference). If you could take a look at it, I'd appreciate it.

14,382 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

In particular, the error with Stardock Central (I gave it another shot) is "There was a problem downloading the install file for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress: Error retrieving the file due to IOException". This happened at 8% and 30% this time around (I blew away the temporary download file from earlier in case it was the problem).

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

The servers appear a bit saturated. I'm trying it myself.  It looks like we've brought down Cachefly's server network.  

There is...a way I've found around it.

This is a program I've used to download large files before:

http://internetdownloadmanager.com/

Once you have this installed go to http://download.stardock.com and do this:

 

Then in the program put the URL here:

 

I download a lot of large files so I tend to run into this sort of thing.  Stardock Central is generally pretty robust but it's never been put under this kind of strain before. They'll have to improve it tomorrow before we start sending out the emails to existing customers.

I want to emphasize that this is NOT an official recommendation. This is just my personal solution when I download large files off the Internet.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I got a 2.1gb download from the HTTP site too.  Using the chrome download manager which should be sufficient.

 

Oh, and it's slow.  Not that that's the biggest issue but still.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I got it to download via simply retrying on SDCentral multiple times. Each time went a little farther and eventually that all finished. I just wanted to make you aware of the details of the problem with the specific errors, rather than random angry rants I've seen in a couple other threads.

The reason I suspect a cache engine problem is that the HTTP download actually worked fine, it completed and didn't time out, but the file was corrupt and would not install.

The SDCentral download broke multiple times, but the file in the end was complete and valid and installed without error. Something that could be done is simply to make SDCentral retry on error, rather than throw an error to the user and stop.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

A small Stardock Central update with additional logging for errors has been pushed out. We're putting additional retries into place if it hits a speed bump in the download process, but that's still being tested internally. Best additional suggestion testing here today: exclude the %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\Stardock directory from your anti-virus, or turn the AV off during the download. We've got at least one reproducible test case with file i/o getting blocked by the AV during download. 

You can also email kwilas at stardock dot com and I can provide an alternative download in smaller chunks in the meantime. 

Kris

 

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Based on feedback and error logging on the server, we've put together an updated Stardock Central that should handle some conditions better.

https://stardock.cachefly.net/stardockcentral285-setup.exe

Added checking md5 of chunks after each chunk is written to disk (vs just in memory)
Added retries around the new code path for checking md5 after the chunks were written
Added additional error logging to server (for more verbose reporting of md5 vs file locking timeouts)
Updated file handler to improve compatibility with anti-virus scanning during downloads
Additional retries around in-memory md5 errors
.tmp file directory moved to LOCALAPPDATA\Temp\StardockCentral (to avoid indexing)
Updated error message on some IOException's to suggest temporarily disabling anti-virus

Kris