Pain Testing: Phase 2

"Ah, another visitor...stay awhile...stay..forever"

from GalCiv2 Forums

To recap:  To try to ensure that the release day's digital downloading extravaganza is kept to a painthreshold of merely excrutiating nightmare, we implemented a policy of pre-loading most of the game.

On February 14th, members of the beta group were allowed to pre-order and we took notes on their experiences and made some tweaks and adjustments to the servers based ont hat.

On Wednesday late afternoon EST, users who pre-ordered the game (But we not part of the beta) will have their orders processed and sent an email that should include a serial # and a link to download Stardock Central.

IF you ordered just the retail box from us, fear not. You will receive a temporary serial # to use while you wait for your box to arrive in case you want download it digitally.

The preload won't allow you to play the game until February 21st still.  But it will ensure that 99.5% of the game is already installed so that on February 21st you don't have much to download.

There will be several Stardock provided flame threads created for your convenience in case you want to participate in this voluntary form of masochism.  Reports from today indicated that things went far better than anticipated and even with a couple thousand people downloading at once our bandwidth only peaked at 22% of capacity. Some users reported download speeds of 600k on the multimedia and other bigger files (the base game however is currently slower due to the additional security on that which we're working to streamline but 200k per second should be a reasonable expectation for tomorrow).

Note: If your email address that you used to create your account here is different than your email address that you used to pre-order, make sure you put in that information into Stardock Central in the tools->register products.

16,178 views 21 replies
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Impossible Mission! My favorite part about that game was the button with little cat footprints on it (the "paws" button). Ahhh the memories of my good 'ol Commodore 64.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
"Destroy him my Robots!"

Err, nothing else to say. Just jumping on the Impossible Mission fan wangon.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
*leans back in his chair, pets his already pre-downloaded version and prepares to enjoy the show*

Brad, perhaps you should put a ransom on really catastrophic reports - it was almost boring yesterday!
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
I am NOT a beta tester, but I have been able to preload through Stardock. Excellent, everything went smoothly , as smooth as a baby.... skin.
I can't wait to be able to download the final 1% in one week and start playing.

Only one question: the total download is 204Mb and, of course, there are no cinematics: I will be able to download them later, I suppose ?

Mario
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Isn't there a small "+" button next to the GalCiv II entry in Stardock Central that shows you the three sub-modules?
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
My download folder is over a Gigabyte after all four options were downloaded (the game, tutorials, multimedia, movies). I installed Bink and am happily watching the tutorials, which are very well done. Something strange about hearing the poweruser.tv podcasts for the last few months then hearing Kristen doing the voice work on the tutorials. Not bad strange, just familiar strange. I only watched a couple of them so far, but they are excellent.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Found! Downloading now ! Thank you!
Mario
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Just a quick reminder for Brad here that there actually ARE people in Europe who DO possess computers. Don't forget us when you send out the serial numbers, OK?
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
I now have everything that is available downloaded and installed, now I'm just waiting for the final bit on Feb. 21.
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Got it all at just over 800k/s today...
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
Just a quick reminder for Brad here that there actually ARE people in Europe who DO possess computers. Don't forget us when you send out the serial numbers, OK?


I think they indiscrimately sending them out to everyone who ordered direct
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Bah, single game serials are for whiners anyway. Join Totalgaming.net asap!
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

I can't believe some of you guys have such monster connections though. 800k per second? One guy reported 1.2 MEGS per second download.  I mean, where are you guys living that have these kinds of connections?

In MY day, we copied our C-64 floppies bit by bit.  A 180K floppy would take over an hour to copy on a 1541 floppy drive to another.  And my BBS proudly could do 1,200bps (bits per second).

Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
Download complete! Woohoo! Now waiting for the exe's..
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
I might be a little off topic, but I can't really find a better place to ask, so:

Is it ok to preload (and possibly later run) the game on both my laptop and my desktop? Before trying I can't really be sure if the game runs on the laptop, which would be my preferred machine to play GalCiv II, if it won't I would of course like to play on the desktop machine (which I know will handle the game well).

Is there a licensing issue to consider? Will I burn in hell (longer)?
Reply #17 from Stardock Forums Top
@Crustacean: My comment was aimed at a joke Brad made on Poweruser TV last week about Europeans having no computers at all.

In MY day, we copied our C-64 floppies bit by bit. A 180K floppy would take over an hour to copy on a 1541 floppy drive to another. And my BBS proudly could do 1,200bps (bits per second).


I never had a C64, but my first PC had a 20 MB harddrive, was running DOS only and the screen could display two colours (orange/white on black). What a time...

BTW, my connection speed last night was averaging 120 KB/s. The way from Germany is a lot longer, I guess....
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
It should be fine, MadMirko. Stardock's licensing is generally per-user, not per-machine, so if you're the primary user of those machines, then you can install it on both of them. Just don't try to install it on every machine at your office.
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
Stardock's licensing is generally per-user, not per-machine


Excellent!

Just don't try to install it on every machine at your office


Considering that that would be on the about 2500 (Windows) clients and another 300 (Windows) servers I admin, I guess I wouldn't be able to afford GalCiv3 then. A job / salary is quite handy for such things, after all.
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
So.. if I could get some clarrification on whether I understand this correctly or not:

I should have already received a link to download stardock central - and a serial #, since I pre-ordered the game (but I am not a beta player) - Correct?

Just because.. well.. I haven't.

Sam W.
Reply #21 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Check your junkmail/spam folders - it could've ended up there.

And of course, make sure you're checking the correct email account.

In my case...check the delete folder since my wife decided to clean up our emails and neither Stardock or Galactic Civilations II mean anything to her (so they looked like garbage).

Edit...probably depends how you pre-ordered too. I orded CDs from Stardock themselves. I'm also an existing customer from GalCiv1 so I already have SDC and I'm registered. All I had to do was fire up SDC and click to download. If you didn't order directly from Stardock you might want to figure out whether you get a temp serial number for pre-download. Seems like it'd be tough for Stardock to contact you if you preordered thru someone else.