The Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 BETA will become available on Thursday, July 24th. As the name states, this is a BETA release and it will have bugs and other issues. Please do not install the BETA unless you're willing to accept all that testing it entails. We will be looking towards users to give us feedback on what's broken and what you'd like to see improved during the test.
The version 1.1 BETA will be available in English only and only via our Impulse client (the final release will be available in multiple languages for those who purchased the game from Kalypso). The Impulse client is free and may be downloaded from http://www.impulsedriven.com.
If you have a forum account here or on any other Stardock website, you may use it to log into Impulse. The Impulse client should automatically see your Sins install; this assumes that you registered Sins of a Solar Empire under the same account (i.e., email address). If you did not, you will need to manually register your game in Impulse by clicking the window icon in the upper right corner (see screenshot below) or clicking on the Orb and selecting "Register a product."
At this point, you should see Sins of a Solar Empire appear under the My Games tab. If you want, you can drag and drop other games' shortcuts into Impulse to launch them from here, but that's off-topic...
As this is a BETA, you will need to tell Impulse that you want to see pre-release versions of the game. You can do this by clicking on the Orb in the upper left and selecting "Show pre-release versions."
Impulse will now check to see if an update is available for Sins. After we've released an update, you will see a separate Update tab in Impulse, but you may also update the game from the My Games tab. Just select Sins of a Solar Empire and click the Update button. Impulse will compare your installed files against what's available on the server and update accordingly.
Some Final Notes on the BETA
The Sins v1.1 BETA will be made available on Thursday, July 24.
UPDATE: If it's taking a long time to download the Sins update, you may want to uninstall the game and reinstall the entire beta fresh. Full installs come off our Cachefly network which has a multiple servers and loads of bandwidth.
That's a big "Doh!" I've updated the post with the correction, thanks. (
Yup. We're in the process (I believe) of expanding our infrastructure to improve the update speed of things, so it should get better down the line.
For those having Impulse download errors, I am unable to reproduce that on any PC I've tried. I've asked the Impulse devs to pop-in and will see what they come back with (this won't happen until tomorrow).
It could be that a virus scanner or something harsh like Norton Internet Security is blocking the transfer. You can try to temporarily shut those down to see if that helps, but that's just my own guess.
Okay, I've got something to try:
For those of you getting the "Download Error" issue, please try the following:
Try installing the game now and see if that resolves the issue. Impulse uses BITS for its default downloader, so if you've disabled that service or something otherwise whacky is taking place, that may be the cause.
If this doesn't work, please PM me or post back here. Thanks!
Lurker - This may work for you as well. If Impulse won't let you in to try, please uninstall it and reinstall from the link below:
milk mclane - Please try the following:
Cancel any Sins download (assuming it's still not working) and open up Explorer to:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock\Impulse\Temporary\DownloadQueue
Delete all of the files and directories in there.
Do the same in:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock\Impulse\Temporary\ExtractedData
Next, switch to the new download system by click on the Orb in the upper-left, selecting Preferences and Connection. Check the box at the bottom to use the new downloading mechanism.
See if this works for you now. If it doesn't try rebooting your PC and trying again. The error you posted indicates that a file is locked which is causing the problem.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
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