Comments on: The Very High Seas: AI War: Fleet Command

By: Chris Park

Chris Park — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:19:21 +0000

@DK: Good eye! For more information on that, see this post .

By: DK

DK — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:05:56 +0000

Addendum – I consider the above to be a good thing. It’s like commanding the evil fleet of badguys in a scrolling shooter instead of the lone hero-ship.

By: DK

DK — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:05:15 +0000

I can’t believe noone mentioned the fact that the sprites for stuff are straight out of Tyrian.

By: frightlever

frightlever — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:55:46 +0000

On sale at nine quid on Impulse this weekend by the looks of it. Think I’ll try it at that price.

By: the affront

the affront — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:07:17 +0000

Yeah, I somehow figured that Impulse couldn’t do it better at the moment, but they seemed to think, judging by their response, that I criticized their installer “firing off various runtimes”, which is inevitable these days, when instead I wanted to criticize its doing so silently – because it would have been different had I installed from a disc, obviously, what with not having to download anything and most probably having a progress bar and all – or just if the dotnet setup wouldn’t run silently in the first place.
Might be better to just beef it up to download the whole dotnetfx35 redist shebang at 200mb for the time being so you can actually see that Impulse is downloading something instead of it then silently subsisting on scraps of 20kb/s of your remaining bandwidth because you don’t notice that it needs any in the first place, and the whole deal taking an hour – but then I have no idea how their customer demographic looks in the bandwidth department, so that could even be worse for some… eh, whatever.

Anyway, appreciate the responses – and it’s not even nearly a big deal in the end, guess I’m just criticizing for criticism’s sake now, so I’ll stop :P.

By: Chris Park

Chris Park — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:12:53 +0000

@affront: Here’s the response from Stardock:

“This is currently normal behavior. Impulse has no way of knowing if a user has the proper versions of .Net, DirectX, etc. already installed, so we force them to do so during a game’s install time. Future versions of the Impulse client are planned to only do this once for certain runtimes (such as DirectX and C++) and then only update as needed, plus be more verbose on non-standard ones. What this customer described is no different than if he’d installed any game from a disc, etc. – the installer still would have fired off various runtimes.”

Stardock is really awesome, but I know they also have a lot more planned for future versions of their Impulse store. So I imagine that will help to make the initial install experience even better with them.

By: Chris Park

Chris Park — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:54:54 +0000

@affront: Thanks for your support! Glad you like it. I’ll have to talk to the folks at Impulse about that, I don’t have anything to do with the way they handle distribution on their platform. But I’ll pass your notes along to them and see what they say. Thanks!

By: the affront

the affront — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:44:00 +0000

You’re 20 bucks richer now, Chris, less however greedy the folks at Stardock are. Nice game.

BTW, I needed to reboot just because of the new Windows installer version – had everything but that and SlimDX already.
Also, the installation via Impulse is really a clusterfuck… downloading dotnetfx35setup.exe, then running it silently, and it then downloading everything it needs AGAIN silently (about 50-100mb or so… even though actually it didn’t need to since I had already installed everything some hours before…) – was sitting here wondering WTF was taking so long because my bandwidth was otherwise in use until I had a look at process explorer and my firewall, since Impulse shows nothing but “installing” for the whole time.

Could really be a little more informative, the whole thing. It would have taken hours if I hadn’t noticed that it tried to download stuff after the download in Impulse itself was already finished.

By: Chris Park

Chris Park — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:38:31 +0000

My pleasure. And thanks!

By: Pace

Pace — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:15:05 +0000

Cheers, thanks for taking the time. And good luck!

By: Chris Park

Chris Park — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:11:48 +0000

@Pace: Oh, I completely understand. It’s a really good idea about the prerequisites explanation, but unfortunately that is handled in the executable “shim” that contains the MSI file, and Advanced Installer won’t let me adjust any dialogs there (grumble). That definitely would have been the ideal solution to this problem, but the only messages I can put in there would come after the prerequisites screens, when it is actually running the MSI package.

On the bright side, I guess, most people hear about the game through a trusted source — be it CNET, Impulse, GamersGate (to a degree), or some site that is giving it coverage like RPS, CrispyGamer, Co-Optimus, etc. I get comparably few “walk ins” from the Internet. Frankly I wish that installers and related were simpler in general, but alas.

By: Pace

Pace — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:48:45 +0000

Chris; I guess it’s more than just the fact that I have to reboot my computer, it’s more the whole process of downloading and installing other stuff that I may not recognize. That usually sets of warning lights in my head, especially when it’s from a company I’m not familiar with. It’s not that big a deal, but if it’s a demo I’m just trying out on a whim it may be enough to make me think twice.
Of course hearing your explanation sets me at ease. Maybe if you think people are being turned off by it you could give a bit more explanation during the installation? I don’t know, just thinkin’.