Comments on: Digi Download Cleverness: AWOMO

By: AluFTW

AluFTW — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:03:10 +0000

The lack of 64bit operating system support kills the app for me. IT SHOULD BE STATED ON MAIN PAGE “ONLY FOR OLD 32BIT SYSTEMS”. If they want to sell anything to anyone they should be looking to the future and not to the past.

By: Stromko

Stromko — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:43:46 +0000

Correction, seems GamersGate isn’t quite so slow. I was using the old client which they’re switching away from now. When I switched to the new system where I download a little self-downloading exe, it’s up to 250 kb/s.

By: Stromko

Stromko — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:32:46 +0000

I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with the amount of download services I’m using for my games. Direct2Drive, EA Downloader, Steam, Stardock / Impulse, IGOTX’s (Iron Grip: Warlord), and now Gamer’s Gate and AWOMO.

AWOMO seems to be quite fast, 2 megabits per second at times, and indeed Rome: Total War was ready to run in about 10 minutes. It made my PC freeze during the tutorial when I tried right-clicking on a unit to bring up its info.

I also signed up for Gamer’s Gate today so I could get Majesty. I’ve been waiting 20 minutes for it to download so far, at 48 kb/s per second. It estimates it’ll take 3 – 5 hours before I can play. Hmm!

I’m thinking I should really just stick to Steam.

By: Pidesco

Pidesco — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:43:26 +0000

I was happily downloading Rome until I figured out that, against my wishes, the software was downloading all the data to my C: drive. :(

As the option to choose the location of the downloaded games doesn’t exist, this means no AWOMO for me, at least for now.

By: Mo

Mo — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:06:06 +0000

@aiusepsi:

Considering that this technology is going to be retrofitted into already written games, this means the game has no innate concept of content not being always available, so there’s no way to gracefully handle a cache miss.

I thought about this too, but then realized it was a non-issue. What we both failed to realize is that games *do* have an “innate concept of content not being always available” … disk seek time. Even when a game is full-installed on your PC, it still needs to request data from the HDD and the HDD still needs to spin up and seek the data. Since AWOMO controls the file i/o driver, they probably make “downloading unavailable data” equivalent to “disk is seeking”. The game will handle it as extra loading time.

Of course, its success largely depends on how the game is written. My games tend to do, “init, load EVERYTHING AND THEN SOME, start game” which would be a bit shit for this system. :) Additionally, games that do a heavy amount of streaming would suffer, as they’ve been coded with the assumption that HDD latency is < 1 sec.

Regardless of the execution, I like the idea. Retail games can take many hours to download, and I’d like to shorten that wait time as much as possible.

By: Wedge

Wedge — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:29:34 +0000

Kind of a neat idea, but I honestly don’t see it as being worth the investment for what you get. Not to mention the potential it sounds like it could involve for things to go horribly horribly wrong. Games are buggy enough these days without worrying about making them stream onto your system.

I really just don’t mind buying a game then leaving it to d/l overnight if it’s a large multi gig title.

By: michaelfeb16

michaelfeb16 — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:57:56 +0000

I respect another attempt at digital downloads and their idea for decreasing time to play (I expect steam will follow..), but eve for a beta, not having x64 support is unforgivable. You are locking out most of the people who have bought gaming computers in the past two years.

By: Svenska

Svenska — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:53:08 +0000

I still don’t have steam because I’m not always connected to the web, and downloading things from the web still makes me nervous.

I just don’t like the sound of this…

By: Nelson

Nelson — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:07:52 +0000

Looking at the big picture, I don’t want a service that will make it okay that our average bandwidth in the US is so terribly slow and expensive. I want to catch up with the rest of the world, not find more ways to deal with the crap we have.

Also, it seems they’d be better off selling their service to an established online presence like Steam, Impulse, etc.

By: Obdicut

Obdicut — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:12:45 +0000

EA tried this awhile ago, with discs instead of digital content.

It’s a nightmare for developers.

And:

What Catastrophe said.

By: RC-1290'Dreadnought'

RC-1290'Dreadnought' — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:36:43 +0000

Sorry, forgot a word there, the word ‘states’, right after ‘Switch625′. Too bad I can’t edit.

By: RC-1290'Dreadnought'

RC-1290'Dreadnought' — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:35:39 +0000

Like Switch625, it doesn’t seem to work on 64-bit windows, are there plans for that?