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Demigod: Two updates in one day? Yes!

Demigod: Two updates in one day? Yes!

I remember when Impulse first came out, some people didn’t like it.  But you know one fringe benefit of Impulse? Very very easy to release updates to lots of people in short amounts of time.

Anyway…

We released an update today and we’re extremely pleased with how it’s gone. We can actually go into the chat area without getting flamed! 

In early blogs, I’ve mentioned that developer Gas Powered Games and publisher Stardock both have multiple sub-teams working on various things in Demigod. 

Or more specifically, this past Monday, I mentioned that there would be a Monday update and a Thursday update.  Well, the Monday update was something of a disaster.  Yea, it worked better than what was up but we were extremely disappointed. Those of you who know me know I was extremely frustrated online about it in the chat area because I had such high hopes for it.  So today we released the update that fully implemented the changes needed to make Monday’s update be what it was supposed to be and that’s why we’re in such good moods.

Anyway, I also had said there would be a Thursday update that would have a lot of good stuff in it.  Well, it’s Thursday and the Impulse team now has their update in.  I think I referred to it as the “end all, be all” update to some people online.  Well, we’re staging it right now.

After this update, the only thing we’ll really have left to do is to turn on the proxy servers for those people who absolutely, positively cannot connect to people along with making the connectivity more robust for people with multiple network cards in their computer (you can do yourself a favor if you get stuck and if you’re like me with 3 network cards and wireless, turn some of them off when playing online until we come up with a good way to bind it).  But those solutions are much easier than what the team has had to do which is major surgery on the network libraries. 

To use an analogy, imaging if a game was released with a new version of a popular 3D engine and it turned out that 3D engine wouldn’t work for people with a popular model of ATI cards and that the only way to get it to work was to largely rewrite the 3D engine in house.  And even though it normally would take months and months to write a 3D engine, you really only have 3 weeks because people are really ticked off.  That’s essentially what we’ve been doing with the MP match making network stuff. 

UPDATE: 

It's here. People seem happy.  

If you have a low end machine and run into any error messages such as "failed to connect to NAT" try this:

download http://draginol.stardock.net/files/impulsereactor-0514.zip 

Unzip it into your Demigod\bin directory (program files\stardock games\demigod\bin).  If you're not having problems don't bother. But we found a Raknet bug that this works around for now on lower end CPU systems.

170,000 views 65 replies
Reply #26 Top

Quoting KenoLFD, reply 23

Told off by the CEO...

Told off? Do retailers, much less publishers, offer refunds on their games? If they all did, people would be using the Netflix model of piracy: burn and return! I'd say he's doing this fine poster a favor.

Reply #28 Top

So you are saying that you released a multiplayer game that wasn't compatible with a very popular brand of network card/router? What kind of policy is that?

Glad you guys aren't a car company.

Reply #30 Top

Quoting Snowju, reply 7
So you are saying that you released a multiplayer game that wasn't compatible with a very popular brand of network card/router? What kind of policy is that?

Glad you guys aren't a car company.

Did you not read correctly?. It is an analogy explaining what they did in terms of difficulty and how fast they did it. The game works fine with ATI cards.

Reply #31 Top

Frogboy, the game works absolutely wonderfully for me. Quick join time, little lag, but this is based off one game. Not enough time to play again tonight.

Great job!

Reply #33 Top

 The game's working fine for me. Had a hell of a Pantheon 3 vs 3... Keep up the effort, Stardock, you're almost here ! (or so I hope, for you, and for this fine game).

Reply #34 Top

My pings are around 2 seconds now.

Reply #35 Top

Well, I haven't tried playing yet but I got into 3 lobbys in a time of probably 5 sec a piece.  I hope the games go that smooth :P

Reply #36 Top

2 patches ftw! :rofl:

Reply #37 Top

KITTENS AND PUPPIES NOW FILL MY SCREEN WHEN I PLAY

Reply #38 Top

First pantheon game after patch...get connected super quick to a 3v3 lobby.  It's the first time I've ever gotten more than 2v2 so I was pretty excited. Then it took a long time to get into the game and the dread started because everytime that happens...

 

"A player has left the game"

 

Sigh..3 people dropped so we end up with 2v1+AI.  Everyone else drops and I just finish the game out to farm some favor.

 

Bleh.

Reply #39 Top

Despayre - I've reported it to GPG.

Reply #40 Top

Don't think he's CEO... and any ETA on the patch today?

 

Brad Wardell = Frogboy = Draginol = SD's CEO

Reply #41 Top

hey guys, anyone tried to boot people from a match in the Pantheon and had the app crash yet?  Just started happening for me consistently on multiple PCs.  If you find that it's happening to you, please respond to my post in the 'problems' forum so we can get some feedback quickly.

 

Thanks!

Reply #43 Top

Quoting Tidus1492, reply 4

Is there any word on improving people who play from the same LAN online? I have a buddy sitting next to me and going online it seems we have a hard time connecting to each other (and others) when we try to play together. Seperately everything seems to work great.
 

Ya, I have two friends and if we wanna play together we pretty much have to do it from each other's houses, when we'd much prefer to just lan at my place since I've got a sweet setup for that.  It's a disappointment and I hope it is fixed... particuarly in time for this weekend and for late june, two lans I got planned.

I'm in the exact same boat.  I do enjoy Tidus' LANs, but 3 players on the same network is pretty much impossible.  And yeah we got seperate port ranges for all the PCs.

 

Reply #44 Top

Quoting Azrailx, reply 12
KITTENS AND PUPPIES NOW FILL MY SCREEN WHEN I PLAY

 

:grin:  

Reply #45 Top

Got into my first 3v3 pantheon game (didn't have anyone drop)... however, the people on my team were substantially less useful than a couple easy AIs(clicking on a group of 3 enemy AI's until you die 18 TIMES is not a good strategy (I'll probably post on the strategy forum to pass that along)... so... oh well, it was painful, BUT IT WORKED!

Reply #46 Top

GJ ON YOUR BAD UPDATE. whereas before i could connect to 3v3 and 4v4 no problem,  now i cannot even get to the connection screen...it just hangs for 30 seconds and times out. SERIOUSLY GG / lawl

Reply #48 Top

I was able to host since day 1 and been having great fun.  But now I go to host and get 2 problems first one it says "cannot connect to nat facilitator. please try again later" so I click ok then the 2nd problem says "host game in CVP failed".Both of these are stacked on each other  makes no sense.  So I tryed hosting and de-selected auto port and was able to create.  Re hosted and had to de and re and de select auto ports to create.   I was fine till now.

I dont have a low end comp its a QX9650 on a 780i board with 4 gig ram and 2 8800gtx's  All was well until last night about 7pm california tyme.   What gives.

Reply #49 Top

Quoting Melric, reply 15

Quoting PunningPundit, reply 16
even while it's been "broken" they've got it working for+90% of the people who are using it.
 
So the chances of getting a 3v3 going are .9^6 = 53%.  That actually seems to match my experience.  I haven't tried the new patch yet, but I have high hopes!  Each time I read a journal entry I get the expectation that it is finally all working. . . then I read the comments.

That really does put things in perspective. Working for 90% of the people out there is still horrible when you consider you need everyone in your lobby to be working in order to play, P2P FTL. I think the 53% would reflect my experience as well. This would mean there is 43% chance of being able to play 4v4 and only 35% chance of 5v5.

Now I just wish there was a special room for people who the game has verified have forwarded ports... I know that sounds exlusive but the games that have worked flawlessly and instantly have all been with people who had port forwards.

 

Reply #50 Top

Quoting bumintraining, reply 21
GJ ON YOUR BAD UPDATE. whereas before i could connect to 3v3 and 4v4 no problem,  now i cannot even get to the connection screen...it just hangs for 30 seconds and times out. SERIOUSLY GG / lawl

What is with the one person making multiple accounts just to flame.