Games for May

As you know, I was online earlier and everything was working fine. I'm now on a different PC (my main one) and it gets stuck at "downloading landscape data". I hear birds chirping in the background, but that's about it. I can also hear UI sounds if I press the End key. I don't know if that means I'm already connected, if there's a serverside issue, or what. I logged out in my house, if it matters.

In the task manager I can see the process is using about 8% of the CPU but the RAM usage isn't changing at all. I've tried looking through the game's directory for logs but there don't seem to be any. The version number is 0.72.3.5. I've tried setting the executable to run as administrator but it didn't help.

These are my specs, though they're not that different from the other PC apart from having more RAM. The parts in the other PC are even older than these.
Asus M4A87TD EVO
AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM
Asus GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1
2 monitors (both 1680x1050)

I realize there's not much to go on but I'm mostly wondering if it's really "downloading landscape data" at that screen or if there's something else it's trying to do that's causing problems.

Hi cc, thanks for the detailed report.

The game stores its downloads in your user AppData folder, please could you have a look in C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\GamesForMay\The Universal\maps and check:

1) Is there an Alpha.imp file there? If so what size is it (in bytes)?
2) Is there an Alpha.bvh file there?

The message is on-screen while the client is fetching the .imp file (which contains the landscape heightmap data and the patternmap that defines where roads and things are). The file is cached (and not updated very regularly at the moment) so once the game has downloaded it once it won't need to do it again for a while.

A few other people have been having similar issues ; the landscape file is coming directly from the game-server at the moment and I suspect its not handling any packetloss on the file-transfer 100% reliably on 'large' file downloads. I plan to move the download to a http content server, which will speed up and make the download more reliable, meanwhile for most people the problem seems to have resolved itself after a few tries..

There's no Alpha.bvh file, but there's Alpha.imp.tmp file. That file was 100 kB the first time I checked, but I noticed that, looking at it while the game is at that screen, it gets remade and then slowly grows, but after several tries it always seems to stall at some point (varied from 80 kB to 650+ kB). I guess the download is really the issue, then.

edit: Tried leaving it at the screen for an hour, it was still there when I came back. Seems that it won't go anywhere once it's stalled.
edit #2: After 30+ tries it finally managed to download the whole 724 kB file. Some ingame asset downloads still stall, though. Had to restart the game to force it to cancel and retry those.

I plan to move the download to a http content server, which will speed up and make the download more reliable

This has been done now. You will need to have the latest client (0.73.0.0) to connect - Steam should update you automatically at some point but to speed that up :
Select the game in your library and select Properties.
Click the 'Local Files' tab then select 'Verify Integrity of game files'.