Impulse - Phase II Released

Stardock's Digital Distrubtion Platform

Published on August 27, 2008 By Island Dog In GalCiv II News

Stardock is excited to announce that “phase two” of its digital download platform, Impulse, has begun and all updates, new games and software applications will soon be live. Phase two of Impulse sees new games from 2k (Civilizations III, Shattered Union, Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Sid Meier’s Railroads!) and Tilted Mill’s Children of the Nile enhanced edition. New software applications include a host of Corel applications like WordPerfect Office X4, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, and Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 as well as software applications from Genie Soft, Iolo, and AVG Internet Security and Anti-Virus & Anti-Spyware software.

Concurrent with the new games and software applications, Impulse additions now see a refreshed user interface and a major new set of developer features called ImpulseReactor. Stardock’s recent release, The Political Machine 2008 will be the first game to utilize features of ImpulseReactor, and the upcoming Demigod will incorporate the features which consist of the highly anticipated match-making feature, cloud computing, rankings, achievements, multiplayer, NAT negotiation, and more.

Phase two of Impulse also adds the ability for users to install and update third-party and freeware programs that are available via Impulse. This makes the transfer of the catalogue of programs installed on a user’s machine extraordinarily simple from machine to machine as it’s all centrally located on Impulse. Phase two has already addressed user feedback and incorporates significantly faster load times, downloads, a smart queue option and a smarter updating process which exponentially decreases processing time for updates.

All new titles and software applications are now available at www.impulsedriven.com

Comments

Achronous

on Aug 28, 2008

Nice Congratulations. Can't wait till all phases are out of the door, but this is definitely moving things forward.

Bingjack

on Aug 28, 2008

Im very much enjoying Impulse over the old SDC. It works great on Vista , too, which is nice.

Also, it is shiny.

Alstein

on Aug 29, 2008

It's definitely improved, without the quick-load option, it's now only 3 times as slow as SDC (given the added features, that's acceptable)

Edit: I mean the startup, not the downloading speed, that's fine now.

gregus khan

on Aug 30, 2008

I have to say Impulse has a fancy the UI trying to get anything done is is nothing short of exasparating.

I purchased the digital copy of the GCII Twilight of Arnor expansion last night and I was forced to download this. After one hour of downloading Impulse, I spent probably another half hour minimum to figure out where to download the expansion pack I had purchased. It prompted me for the location of Dark Avatar. I showed it the location of Dark Avatar. It installed it. It said that my version of Dark Avatar was out of date. To upgrade that I had to select where GCII was installed. I selected the dir where it was installed but it wouldn't recognize GC II as being installed. So I'm forced to download and install both GC II and Dark Avatar again through Impluse. So it's been a day since I purchased GC II TA and I'm still downloading.

I have to say I sure wish StarDock would ditch the Impulse BS so I could just download and update what I purchased without a lot of hassle. Websites work just fine that. You don't need a yet another download app to do that.

Weidbrewer

on Sep 02, 2008

Wait, wait, wait, WAIT! Back it up. Hold the phone. 2k is going to be distributing through Impulse? No, this is no good at all. Sid Meier seemed hell-bent on making me fail college...and SD has made headway in recent years on making me lose my job. Now they're joining forces? This must be stopped.

...After one more turn, that is.

Pyrion

on Sep 06, 2008

Updating products is broken in phase two. It says update available for Space Rangers 2: Reboot, but hitting update doesn't do anything in the Impulse GUI, it still says update available, and although it does download the update (according to my net graph anyway), I have to wait for the download to finish (when network activity stops) and then hit update again for it to acknowledge that fact. I ended up killing the impulse process after it insisted on silently downloading the update a second time (again without telling me what it's doing).

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!