Slow startup with network blocked

When I try to start the game with a network connection active, but Elemental access blocked through firewall (zone alarm), it takes 10x a long to start up the game than when I have the network disconnected. Being a largely single player game, its seems odd that it would try to connect to the net when there is no reason to.

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It has impulse built in so it tries to connect to impulse. Similar to steam only you don't need to actually connect (or set it to offline mode) to play. Its for all the nifty shift+tab functions. Not a big deal either way.. you can block it or allow it without any noticeable difference(other than a slightly longer loading time you pointed out) in single player games. Unless you hop in the chat room or care about achievements then blocking it would prevent that.

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Hmm for me it never works to start Elemental from behind proxy. If I shift+tab i can't login.Without shif+tab i get an error message saying something about firewall blocks, etc.

Impulse itself works fine using proxy.

Do i need to set impulse to offline mode to get it work?

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Quoting calmon,

reply 2

Hmm for me it never works to start Elemental from behind proxy. If I shift+tab i can't login.Without shif+tab i get an error message saying something about firewall blocks, etc.

Impulse itself works fine using proxy.

Do i need to set impulse to offline mode to get it work?

Elemental doesn't require an internet connection to play. Unless your running a beta patch. Which if you are.. update to 1.1 lol

Far as i know there is no "offline mode" for impulse because again you don't have to run or connect to impulse to play elemental.

Now if your referring to multiplayer then i'm clueless cause i never play multiplayer.

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Thanks! Exact the problem i run into. 1.1 works perfect.

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When I try to start the game with a network connection active, but Elemental access blocked through firewall (zone alarm)

If the firewall is holding the connection, then the game is going to wait until the connection times out on the update check before proceeding because it registers as a live connection. Were it disabled entirely, it'd detect that and skip the check for updates.

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Is there any way to change the time out value? Timing it last night, it looks to be 100 seconds. If I could change that to 10 through a config file that would be perfect.

If that is not possible, is there a chance that the game could load up to the menu, and then either wait until I attempt multiplayer or try and update before trying to connect. It is highly annoying that I can crawl under my desk, unplug the network, start up Elemental, crawl under again, plug the network back in, and still be playing faster than if I start by waiting for the timeout to expire.

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