Indeed.

You'd be hard pressed to find any company who has never gone back on their word. Look at release dates. As a recent example, GTA4 on the PC was going to be released 21st november. Its been delayed to 2nd December. They went back on their word, but that won't stop people buying it.

Obviously, this situation is different, but unfortunately its just progress. New systems come along, the older ones don't get supported anymore. Vista's here, win 98 isn't supported. Its just something you have to get used to. And regarding the Windows 2000 issue, just because it says the game supports win2000, it doesn't say anything about the patches. You'd expect them to run on the game, and there are very few games that wouldn't patch and still be playable, but you're just unlucky and you'll have to upgrade. You can't keep sitting on Win2000 forever, anyway.

Buying a game based on its supported platforms is a choice. Announcing the 2.0 patch as available on that platform and then dropping it right before launch is just mean.

o rly?

how bout the fact that impulse never worked on my *ahem* windows xp (not 2k) comp? does this make me a whiner? in order to download and install GCII and expansions last month i had to use SDC. so i'm rather bummed at this news.

but i still have several games in progress that i'd wanna finish up before patching to the latest version anyhows. and hopefully impulse will work for me by then.

Time and work are money, especially when it comes to businesses with paid employees. It may be weak in your eyes but it makes financial sense in their eyes. Sometimes yes companies have to make difficult decisions regarding the future of their products. Stardock has been working on Impulse and are doing their best to resolve any isues with platforms that Impulse supports.

It's very likely they took the lessons they learned from SDC and applied them to Impule, so Impulse is very likely a much easier platform to work with and develop for. Adding a feature to Impulse is likely much easier and uses less time and money than adding the same feature to SDC. So continuing to support SDC is likely a drain on their time and money - time and money that Impulse is meant to avoid having to spend. But it only saves that time and money if Impulse eventually replaces SDC rather than being in addition to SDC.

Can you describe the problem(s) you have been encountering?

That's fine, no problem . The patch will be there when you finish your games.

Let's get this cleared up: Stardock never "promised" 2.0 on SDC.  A developer on GalCiv said in a comment on a forum post that it would.  Perhaps you would prefer we have a policy that from here on out developers don't hang out on forums because they may say something that turns out to be wrong?

You guys are really making the long hard work we put into 2.0 seem like a big waste of our time.  

In the time you've spent complaining about Impulse you coudl have installed it, downloaded the update and been done.

It's thanks to Impulse that we'll be able to have mod broadcasting in our games, virtualized saved games, persistent multiplayer games, free micro-updates, and tons of other stuff.  With Stardock Central, we had to make source code changes to get things to work because it's gotten so long in the tooth.

all im saying is that i have never had a problem with impulse, it has been fast and convienent.  none of the people i know that have used impulse have had an issue with it.  maybe its an issue on YOUR systems and not an issue with impulse.  just whining to stardock about not updating a game on a system that they said was being shut down just makes you, like i said before, WHINERS!

Odok, just let it drop.  You're not helping.

Check your firewall, check any routers on the Internet, and check any proxy settings if you need them. Most of the time you won't need any proxy settings.

My firewall shows Impulse as using port 53095 - make sure nothing else is using that port, and make sure the firewall and any routers on the network aren't doing anything weird like rerouting it or anything.

Networking is, unfortunately, soemthing that's still very complex and can break down at one of many points. Could be you, could be them - could even be some computer in between. Too many people forget that there are machines between themselves and the servers they are accessing - and that yes, soemthing could happen there as well.

The best thing you can do is to test each step to the best of your ability. check to see if it's sending packets to your network, and check to see if the packets are leaving your network.

Although it's not something most people know how to use, I usually keep a packet sniffer on my system to figure out what's happening with the packets. You'd be surprised how many times something that appears to be "them" is really something that is myself having misconfigured something.

For the record, I enjoy free updates . I know that you could very well charge for them or not give them out at all.

As they say - "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

Compared to pretty much every other company I've dealt with, Stardock's support for their products is outstanding - this is well above and beyond the level of support I've had with any other company.

heh, what do ya know? same situation with impulse, as with SDC when i installed the games. won't work on my profile, but worked on my fiance's (admin as well) profile, on the same computer.

so got impulse updating the games right now.

Just came back to the game when I saw the new version.

Read the headline on the homepage and ran SDC.... hmm no new version.  Go read the details and there is something about impulse.  I check the link in the site and wonder what the hell is impulse and why do I need it?  Not really a fan of dark websites and flash block shows a bunch of blocked content.  A little to much wiz bang for me.

I read on and find i need it to get impulse to update the game.  Why not position Impulse as an upgrade to SDC and tell me it will improve my world. 

Anyway i swallow the pill and install impulse and it pulls my data from the SDC install and it wasn't that painful.  It detects new versions of GC2 and the 2 expansions, so i click upgrade all.  It warns me that TA needs to be uninstalled?  I click ok or whatever is needed to get the popup out of the way.  The other versions of the games patch and the TA version is uninstalled.  TA disappears from the update menu and i find it hiding in the my games menu declaring a reboot is required.  Why does a game need a system reboot?  I havn't played the game in months so it wasn't run this boot, but if you say its required then it must be...

So i reboot and run impulse again and it starts downloading TA automatically after some warnings that it is paused.  Not the end of the world.   But now it needs to download a fresh 340+ mb?  Waiting on the download now...

XP System fully patched.  SDC with GC2 +all expansions fully patched prior to impulse.  No issues with impulse install or running it, though it is slow like most .Net apps. 

Thanks for the patch and think you stir up fewer moans and groans if you sell on impulse before requiring it for a patch.