Aven Colony

Aven Colony is a sci-fi colony-building sim - create humanity's first settlement on an extrasolar world! · By mothership, Mothership Entertainment, ellie_team17

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Download problems

A topic by vyktorabyss created Sep 09, 2016 Views: 2,266 Replies: 8

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vyktorabyss8 years ago

This is the first time I've used Itch.io. I use steam regularly and have roughly 30 games bought and downloaded through Steam and have never had a problem downloading anything through Steam. I have to say I'm incredibly disappointed with the itch.io service.

After buying Aven Colony for £23.28p (Which at no point is even listed with a cost in pounds), I first tried 3 or 4 times to download the game from the link in my purchase - all of these downloads failed after up to an hour downloading with a "server error" message and having to start again. Roughly about 3 hours downloading time wasted.

I then tried downloading the itch.io client and using that to download the game... hoping for a bit more stability. I installed the client and started the Aven colony download.

After leaving the computer on overnight I woke up this morning and the 4.46GB download was still not finished. The speed appeared to be crawling at 220KB/s, which would be fine, but then after breakfast I watch the final part of the download end, return to the client and click the finished download attempting to install and it returns the message "hashtag does not match" and the download has obviously failed. Obviously the checksum is a mess - so another 8 hours of downloading wasted.

So here I am restarting the download wondering will I have to now effectively have to wait another day to find out I can't even download the game I paid for yesterday. This does not happen on Steam - my downloads are fine there and in all my downloads from them I have never had a game fail after downloading with their client. Itch.io servers seem slow and unreliable and the whole experience is becoming very vexing.

If it fails again this time I will be scrapping plans to even play Aven colony, I will pursuing a refund and at least waiting until it becomes available on steam.

Any help or advice appreciated on how to actually get a working copy of this game? I am also very disappointed to hear buying through itch won't give me a steam key.... why can I buy really old boxed games that I later can add to steam, but I won't be able to use this itch purchase in steam? I read the FAQ and the 'different price points argument' and that doesn't make sense. My purchase should be from Mothership games, and whichever client supplies the software should be unimportant.

Sorry to grumble, but I'd rather be playing a game on my day off than writing about failed downloads. Bring back boxed copies of stuff. Cheers.

satoru8 years ago

The downloads are pretty much over HTTP so there's not a lot of weirdness going on with that

What is your bandwidth pipe though? I've not seen itch.io have any major problems pumping out sufficient bandwidth. You may want to try changing your DNS settings to OpenDNS/GoogleDNS.

Tallon8 years ago

Ive never had issues either, Download speeds of 5MB/s 50Mbit connection so it allows for my full bandwidth....

vyktorabyss8 years ago

My ISP is a bit crap to be honest, using Talk Talk 2 Mb wireless broadband. I'm used to waiting a couple hours to download most modern games, but 7-9 hours or whatever it was is very excessively slow. Are the download servers in the US? I'm on a fairly up to date skylake PC running Windows 10 (or whatever the latest is) and am not familiar with messing round with DNS since the old days of Win95 or XP.

The client doesn't have a download speed on it, but like I said the file download was a pretty static 220KB/s when I used it. Current download via latest itch client started 1 hour 50m ago and says 1.2 GB has been downloaded, although I have been playing a different (offline) game in the meantime although I doubt that would make any difference. Cheers.

mothershipDeveloper8 years ago

Sorry to hear you are having these problems -- am I correct that this is happening with the latest version of the itch.io launcher (18.7.0)? My understanding is that the good people at itch.io are working on further improvements for download performance.

vyktorabyss8 years ago

Just finished the 2nd download (7 hours), and it has apparently worked this time. I am indeed using the latest 18.7.0 launcher.

Would still like to know a bit more about why after it is released through Steam I can't somehow transfer my digital rights to play the game to their library (as I personally believe their server performance/modding etc is better from my perspective).

Thanks for the response(s) anyway. Jay / Vyktor.

satoru8 years ago

http://avencolony.com/aven-colony-faq/

A lot of their reasoning is covered in their FAQ here

vyktorabyss8 years ago

I read hat line in the FAQ thanks but doesn't really say a lot about it.

Just wanted to also ask why after I download the latest 150MB update the itch client is then trying to download 4.4GB (presunably the whole Aven colony game) after I already have it. Shouldn't it just download the update then try to install it?

Cheers.

NB - also found a few bugs or issues, where's the best place to mention them? Tx

satoru8 years ago (2 edits)

itch.io has a binary patching system in place. It may not have taken because the previous install basically 'failed' so the binary patcher likely just thought "well this is totally screwed up you'd better download the entire game again!". For future patches you should in theory only get delta patches

If you have any bugs, create a new thread and report it. Please ensure you try to be as verbose as possible. If you can include both a save game that is affected and any logs that would also be helpful. Also include your basic system specs (CPU/GPU/OS)