Direct link to game patches

It's against piracy and I think it works too.

~SDC~

The first patch/upgrade is an gc.exe update, a dll update, and a multimedia to go with the gc.exe, IIRC. So how are pirates going to use that to run the game?

Pirates probably already have the game on the warez and Usenet already. They had all the candidate release betas from what I've read here.

As a retail CD purchaser, I'd prefer to not install GDC just to get a patch or update. Particularly considering GDC in the past deleted your hard drive, and has had numerous other problems listed in the last few builds. GalCiv I trust. The worst it does is corrupt a saved game and crash to desktop. GDC?

If these patches are made available via a simple link on a website, every pirate can download it and install it over his warez version. Since GalCiv doesn't have any cd protections it's easy as pie for a pirate to play the full retail game for free, unless of course they connect a serial to the downloads if that's possible.

~SDC~

There's already an anti-piracy feature there. You have to enter your CD key in order to access the downloads on the website.

Yeah, but that download was mainly invented when SDC had (have?) problems downloading the game from overloaded servers. It was not in the original plan.

~SDC~

So every time I want to even look for updates, I have to re-enter my serial number and email address? Or that is just for the original bonus pack?

This doesn't make a lot of sense to this confused newbie. Pirates won't have a problem getting the game. There is always some dorko who will pack up the game and make it available to them, and someone to crack whatever needs cracking. So protecting updates does nothing but be bad customer service/relations, as only the honest customers will bother with it. The pirates will pick up the updates where they get the rest of their warez. One stop shopping and all that...

Naah the updates will most likely be linked to from the download page describing what it is. Only needing serial for downloading them. But dont expect those updates to be released that often.

Personally Im lucky enough not to have any problems getting the patches through SDC. Is there anything I can do to help you get the SDC working?

~SDC~

The anti-piracy part of using SDC for updates is that instead of punishing legitimate users with copy protection schemes (that sometimes won't even allow you to run the game), it rewards legitimate purchasers by giving them a huge stream of contstant "mini-updates" that you can only download from SDC.

Now, eventually, a chunk of these "mini-updates" will be bundled together into a larger Update/Patch that will be available for download from the website. So eventually *all* users will get *all* the updates, but the catch is that the legitimate users who can and do use SDC will get their game updated much more frequently. The larger updates, btw, are supposed to come with about the same frequency that most other games on the market release patches for their games. Which probably translates to once every month or two at the most, I'd guess.

~SDC~

Humm... as often as other games? That's 3 in the first 2 weeks, one 3 months later, and one last, final patch another 7 months after that? No fun.

Mind you, I'm not worried about anything bad in GalCiv. Just SDC itself.

You just need to run SDC with the parameter /pleasedonthurtme

LOL

Naah, that bug was fixed some time ago now and the flawed version wasnt out that long. But it sure was very sad that it made some coumputers out there unstartable.

~SDC~

We don't need SDC to prevent piracy. Really. Why don't they have us send our email address, check the database, then send us back a dynamicly generated link to the files. Easy and they did it already with the direct downloads. It works and it's way faster than the buggy SDC.

I get the impression that SDC is meant as a cool distribution tool. You know, an interface to allow you, the customer, to make sure you are well connected to the official GalCiv community (forums, news), and make it easy for you to download updates to your machine.

I suspect that the 'quick mini updates' available to the SDC using members will drop off, as the customer base grows. Just a wild guess on my part, but the more users you have, the less forgiving some of them are bound to be about bugged updates.