I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt like playing some SoaSE, but I thought that this would be a good opportunity to finally get around to doing two semi-related things:
I’d wanted to see Stardock’s Steam alternative was any good. Their DRM-free policy along with the fairly pleasant experience I had getting SoaSE through their now-obsolete Impulse predecessor convinced me that it might be worth my time to try to get the Impulse Beta working.
In short however, something small component of Impulse seems to be critically broken. It is indeed very slick, and arguably zippier than Steam is. I haven’t gotten their Friends system working yet, primarily due to my lack of any friends who have also opted into the beta. I’m definitely happy about how games operate independently of Impulse (and Stardock Central too, to be fair), even though having Steam running concurrently with my games hasn’t bothered me so far. Whoever is managing their network infrastructure seems to be doing things right, as my GalCivII download was chugging along at an impressively consistent 1500 kb/s. This is consistent from what I observed when I downloaded SoaSE two days after it was released, when one could assume there would be a reasonable amount of traffic on their servers. On the best of days, Steam manages around 800; getting TF2 on release day was pretty much an exercise in futility. To be fair however, Steam manages far more traffic than Stardock probably ever will.
The one thing that bothered me however, was the fact that Impulse seems to have a bug in it which renders it completely unusable. As in, unable to install and update games. The above instance of GalCivII was purchased on Impulse, but after a half-hour of wrangling with the Impulse auto-update, I was forced to utilize Stardock Central for the actual download. I assume that since Stardock manages the networks of both SDC and Impulse, that the front-end client, whether it be SDC or Impulse, would have little effect on download speed and server stability.
I have yet to start playing GalCivII, but I would imagine it would do little to raise or lower Impulse in my eyes since as I mentioned above, one of the advertised features of Impulse/SDC is its complete independence from the games it installs. I think Impulse looks damn pretty, and has huge potential given how smooth at least the purchasing component was. It’s a shame someone doesn’t do the occasional test from a fresh install as I have found few forum posts with my specific issue, leading me to believe that this is a problem only with people doing a brand-new install.
