We are prepping a major update for Impulse for release prior to the upcoming release of Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1.

Version 1.1 of Sins of a Solar Empire is the first update to the award-winning PC strategy game to require Impulse for downloading the update.  During the beta process of Sins v1.1 we got a lot of feedback from players -- a lot of it very negative.

The first question people ask is, why are we requiring Impulse for Sins of a Solar Empire? We released a number of stand-alone patches for Sins earlier in the year so why require Impulse now?

There are a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is that Impulse wasn't available then. In the user manual for Sins of a Solar Empire we actually mention Impulse as it was intended to be used for updating the game.

But more importantly, Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 is a gigantic update. It's even a bigger update in many respects than the recently released Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 (which also requires Impulse). Making a smart installer for it would have required a great deal of effort to keep the size under control. 

There's a lot to making game updates that aren't obvious. For instance, does the game update combined with the demo allow the player to have essentially a full game? You'd be surprised to discover how many games in the past have fallen into that problem. Having Impulse simplifies that sort of thing.

In addition, there's the issue of on-going support for Sins of a Solar Empire. Ironclad and Stardock want to put out more releases and make it easy for people to get the micro expansion packs such as Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment which is scheduled to go into public beta shortly. Impulse vastly simplifies and improves this user experience.

So what are some of the things we've done with Impulse that will be out soon?

Check out the screenshots below:

Besides the user interface being cleaned up, the performance has been significantly enhanced. It's a lot snappier all around, particularly on Windows XP systems.

Another addition is that tabs are only displayed when there are items in them. So if a program is being downloaded, a download tab shows up.  If there are updates, the update tab shows up. The idea is to provide a much cleaner experience.

So does this mean that Impulse is perfect? No. We still have a lot of features to add to it. We're always striving to make it better.

But hopefully users will be able to see some of the progress that's been made based on their feedback.  When Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 ships, hopefully users will find Impulse to be something highly useful rather than as simply a download manager. 

Stay tuned!