Impulse is coming!
Monday, February 4, 2008 by Draginol | Discussion: Personal Computing
Since 1999, Stardock has been a pioneer in digital distribution. The original Galactic Civilizations was the first PC game to be released at retail and digitally at the same time. Its flag-ship product, Object Desktop, made the transition from being a retail product to being digitally distributed with a subscription in 1999.
For the past few years, Stardock has distributed its content with Stardock Central:
Stardock Central
And while Stardock Central was very cutting edge when it was launched back in 2003, it's getting a bit long in the tooth. For the past year, Stardock has been working on a new platform that will finally combine Stardock's various technological assets into a single place. This new platform is called Impulse.
Impulse
Impulse isn't just a cosmetic make-over of Stardock Central. It greatly expands the capabilities of Stardock's digital distribution offerings.
Here are 5 key differentiators of Impulse:
- Users do not have to load Impulse to use the software or games.
- Impulse will support third-parties submitting their software or game, name their price, and then after review having it available -- all done nearly automatically. Stardock already has this system in place on WinCustomize.com with "Master" themes.
- Impulse will integrate its next-generation social networking features in the Community tab that will let users have friends, chat about games, have blogs, and more.
- Impulse includes built in support for backing up your purchase to CD/DVD.
- Impulse allows users who buy software or games at retail to still manage their updates and re-download the entire product on Impulse (for products that support this feature).
Impulse provides a cleaner UI than Stardock Central.
Managing your software on Impulse is a snap. If you bought a game or software program at retail or even from another digital distributor, you may be able to still manage updates and such on Impulse.
Impulse is still in internal beta at Stardock but it expects to release it in mid February with additional features for it being added through the course of the year.
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Reply #42 Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:39 PM
+1
Reply #43 Saturday, March 1, 2008 11:22 AM
As an example: Someone offers great mods for SoaSE and wants to be able to continue to devote large amounts of time to their development. They ask that everyone who uses their mods to buy the game via their site. If they also offer mods for other games as well then the visitor’s interest might be peaked, thus persuading them to purchase a game they might not have considered before.
That sure would provide modders an opportunity to become full or part timers in promoting the games and by being able to produce higher quality mods they would extend the life of games on the market.
Reply #45 Friday, March 7, 2008 11:45 PM
Any chance of a latest update on this wonderful app . . ?
Reply #47 Saturday, March 8, 2008 5:15 PM
Reply #48 Monday, March 17, 2008 10:20 PM
Reply #49 Monday, March 17, 2008 10:26 PM
The Ultimate Windows Experience
By Frogboy Posted March 11, 2008 12:04:42
Reply #50 Wednesday, March 19, 2008 10:05 AM
Reply #51 Thursday, March 20, 2008 11:07 AM
Nope, but it has support for it.
Reply #52 Saturday, March 22, 2008 5:42 PM
Impulse is showing numerous updates which SDC is not. Bad SDC?
I noticed that Impulse is not showing the correct registration codes. Copy/Paste from SDC solves that.
This is a great improvement!! Thanks for the development.
Reply #53 Monday, April 7, 2008 10:19 PM
Since Impulse is close to release, I am redirecting an feedback to this support forum.
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Reply #41 Thursday, February 28, 2008 7:57 PM
Lets say I have had to reinstall windows but did not get a chance to archive my games (which is kinda silly to do anyways considering how much space they take, and how long it will take).
Windows is on its own partition separate from the games. So all the games are still there, they just don't have registry entries. With steam I just reinstall steam, click install on the games, and it finds them and reassociates with them in less then a second. With neverwinter nights I run the updater and it recreates the registry entries in less then a second.
With SDC I have to reinstall and redownload every single game I bought. It is a waste of my time and YOUR money (bandwidth costs money).
I would say every 3 months or so I have to leave the computer on overnight to download and install all my SDC games. When all it should have done was reassociate. It doesn't need a SCAN function (That would be stupid).. just, if installing into an existing directory, check for an existing install.
Heck, its only been a month since I last reformatted (upgraded the motherboard for a new E8400) and now vista SP1 comes out... guess who is formatting again?