Topic: Impulse Phase 3

[idolminds]

Woo!

Impulse Phase 3 includes five major new features that developer Stardock believes will be compelling to both PC users and software publishers. These new features are:

   1. The Impulse client has had its user interface significantly improved and updated with features such as player rankings, achievements, intelligent match-making, and more. It also includes a new tray application that lets users track friends, receive update notifications, and much more.
   2. The beta of Impulse Anywhere, a new web-based method for users whose home Internet connections are non-ideal to download their software on another machine, take the files home and install them.
   3. The release of Impulse Reactor, a development platform that lets users add many new features to their games without having to re-distribute a third-party client (i.e. users don't have to distribute the Impulse client). Impulse Reactor includes features such as intelligent match-making, multiplayer tournament support, NAT negotiation, friend lists, rankings, community features and much more. Gas Powered Games' much anticipated PC game, Demigod, is being released next week and makes full use of Impulse Reactor.
   4. Impulse Reactor Overlay, an in-game overlay that lets users instantly access chat, friends lists, profile data, micro-expansions, and more. Demigod will also be the first title to make full use of this.
   5. Game Object Obfuscation (Goo) - An alternative method for developers to protect their intellectual property. Goo allows developers to associate licenses with people rather than their PCs which will eliminate the issue of "limited activations". It also provides the underpinnings to support vendor neutral software downloads and transferring of licenses.

So I went to check out Impulse Anywhere. Its fantastic. You log in with your Impulse info and it shows you a list of the games you've bought. Right now its just Stardocks stuff but all new stuff will get the treatment and they will get the back catalog up there as well. So you get links to download a .impulse file which is the actual game, and an installer for Impulse itself (which is just the regular install for that). The awesome part is using the .impulse file, the computer you install it on doesn't even need an internet connection since you've already "verified" yourself by downloading it from the site on whatever computer you downloaded it from. Pretty slick.

[MysterD]

Ooooh, this new interface for "My Games" List looks more Steam-like in style in Details-View mode.

[Xessive]

Updated, for some reason it doesn't sign in anymore, just hangs on the login page saying "verifying account..."

Gonna let it run overnight and see what happens in the morning.

[MysterD]

Idol, that new "Impulse Anywhere" feature sounds nice.

Idol, have you -- or anyone else, for that matter -- ever used the "Achieve Application" function within Impulse to back an entire game up?

[Quemaqua]

Thank you, God, for a company that isn't full of worthless idiots.  Steam updates like once a week and you always have to redownload the entire program even though all they did was fix a typo.  Impulse updates infrequently, and when it does, there's a good reason.  And you don't even *have* to instantly do the update.  Obviously it needs it before you install new applications with it and such, but it doesn't force you out, take a million years to apply the update, then spend fifteen hours reloading itself and logging back in without even asking you if you wanted to quit.  It asks politely if you'd like to restart the program, and you're perfectly able to say "no thanks" if you were in the middle of looking at something or performing some other operation.

WARDOCK ENCROACHES ON YOUR TERRITORY.  ALL YE PRETENDERS TO THE THRONE, FEEEEAR!

[idolminds]

No D, I haven't used the archive function yet. I actually just decided to try it now. I'll let you know how it goes.

*EDIT*

Well that was easy. I backed up Sins since it's all I had available. Right click, Archive, wait a few minutes and its done. Generates one of those .impulse files with the game name, version number, and date that version was released. For example, mine is "Sins of a Solar Empire1.15.048_03.19.2009.impulse"

Which is actually not the newest version. A small patch came out that I havent updated to. So you can archive even if you aren't all patched up. Unlike Steam which requires you to update before you can create a backup. I'm not going to uninstall Sins to see how restoring goes, but I imagine its like everything else on Impulse: it will just work.

The only negative I can say is Impulse moved all the Sins files to a temp directory and created the archive from them. When it was done though it didn't seem to delete those temp files. Maybe it empties them at shutdown or startup or something, but I thought it was strange either way.

[MysterD]

I should look more into backing-up archives.

Are the .impulse (complete games) files something like say a compressed ZIP file or RAR that I'd have to extract myself?
Or an EXE basically?

Or if you say want to reinstall the game, you just say put the file back in your Impulse directory, boot up Impulse Program, and Impulse extracts it all itself?

[idolminds]

Its a compressed archive of some kind, since its smaller than a full install (Sins.impulse ended up being like 700MB, where my regular install directory is 1.2GB). You have to use Impulse to uncompress it. You just do a "Restore Archive", point it to the .impulse file, and away it goes.

[MysterD]

Its a compressed archive of some kind, since its smaller than a full install (Sins.impulse ended up being like 700MB, where my regular install directory is 1.2GB). You have to use Impulse to uncompress it. You just do a "Restore Archive", point it to the .impulse file, and away it goes.

Thanks for the info, Idol.

I'll probably wind up trying that soon, since I'm probably almost done w/ Shadowgrounds -- and lookin' to make some space on C Drive.