The official 0-day update will have more connection info as an option:

#1 cause of custom game pain: People being impatient.  The NAT connection system won’t insert people into the lobby until they’ve connected together. But if people leave, you can end up with it taking a lot longer.

Here’s another cause: Too many people trying to join a given game. Users aren’t inserted into the lobby until they’ve all connected.  Now, you might ask, why not just insert people as they connect to the host? The answer is because it would open a new socket for each one due to the way the lobby interacts with the NAT facilitator. The solution will be to have this dialog become richer so that the host can take people in.

Make sure you go to the technical support group to get answers to common Demigod issues:

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/forum/526

Problem: You load up Demigod, click Multiplayer, choose Internet, and type in your Impulse User Name and password and the game does not accept it.

Most common cause: You purchased the game via Impulse with a different email address (i.e. different account) than the one you're using.

Solution: Merge your accounts: https://www.stardock.com/support/registrations/

Second most common cause: You created a second Impulse account some other way. Solution is same as above.

To recap: Demigod's street date is tomorrow (4/14). But one retailer released it early which, in itself was problematic. Then, a couple days later, warez versions from the retail version started showing up on the net.  Until release day, only the test servers are up.

The result is that multiplayer is likely to be unbelievably slow (in terms of interacting with the Demigod UI).  Now, had the street date had been adhered to, it wouldn't have been a problem (even with piracy) because the servers will be up tomorrow.

However, we are taking this opportunity to launch these servers onto a different cluster and update Demigod today (we hope) with a version that will point to this new data cluster.

The good news is that people with legitimate licenses can download a very small update to Demigod and get very fast performance.  The bad news is that the gameplay experience for warez users will be awful as we plan to migrate most of our remaining test servers over to the release server cluster at the earliest opportunity.

As some people know, Gamestop violated the street date of Demigod and released it last week. There have been plenty of discussions about whether Gamestop did this intentionally or not which I won’t go into here.

Obviously there have been some significant consequences as a result:

First, it was Easter weekend. And many of us had just finished a good solid 8 weeks of massive crunch and were looking forward to the weekend to recover. Instead, we found ourselves back at work having to turn on and configure the multiplayer matchmaking servers (we had enough for a beta but not for thousands of people).

Second, since Demigod has zero copy protection on it, it meant that that piracy on this title will, in theory, be maximized. Stardock’s position on piracy is pretty straight forward but to repeat it here: It’s not that we don’t think piracy is massive. We just aren’t convinced that it results in that many lost sales. Or more to the point, we don’t think intrusive, obnoxious copy protection will result in more sales than we lose from people who don’t want to mess with it.

Imagine if Demigod had shipped with some nasty retail copy protection and got released early. Someone “cracks” it but doesn’t do a good job and the game ends up crashing randomly or something. Most people would just assume the game was buggy and that would likely cause more lost sales than the initial piracy did.

The good news, however, is that we’ll get to actually see the effects of piracy. Since we know Demigod is an outstanding game with a wide appeal with equal retail and digital distribution to other titles that came out this year with similar demographics we can see how well it sells compared to them. 

Third, while the game won’t be on the shelves at other retailers until tomorrow morning, we have elected to make the digitally distributed version available today with beta testers and pre-order customers getting it immediately (as in right now).  Those who have legally purchased the game can get the 0-day update that has all the game play changes that the beta group asked for, multiplayer match-making, and LAN support.

I want to thank the Stardockians who came in on their day off (we are supposed to have the Monday after Easter off) to make sure people who pre-ordered got the game today as well as the beta testers.

See you guys online!

As most of you know, Stardock games ship with zero copy protection.

That means someone could take Demigod and post it up somewhere.  But so far, no one has even though Gamestop violated their agreement and released the game early.  So the potential for "0 day warez" with Demigod is more so than most any other game because there's nothing to "crack".

We (Stardock) have always taken the position that people are fundamentally honest. I tend to think that things get warez'd because the copy protection provides a sort of challenge to overcome.  Since Demigod has no such copy protection on the DVD, there's no challenge and hence no point.

Incidentally, we are working on a demo version as well that should be out as soon as we recover from the initial launch.

Both Gas Powered Games and Stardock have poured their life and souls into this game. We're very proud with how it turned out and we thank those of you who have pre-ordered for sticking with us despite it being available. We'll definitely find some way to thank those users in the future.  We look forward to playing with you guys online and hanging out together in the growing Demigod community.

Happy Easter everyone!

We have identified a case where Demigod won't launch.

The Logitech QuickCam seems to prevent Demigod from launching. We don't know why. Disable the tray item and it should work fine.

Edit: It may also be necessary to close the lvprcinj process via Task Manager (press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and look on the processes tab).

I was reading a forum post about Braid somewhere where the person said they were going to wait until it came out on Steam because “they like all their games on Steam”.  The thing is, you can put all your games on Impulse with a simple drag and drop:

As a Steam user myself, I keep Left4Dead updated still with Steam but play it via loading up Impulse.

Community Features:

Frogboy (me) talking to Draginol (me).