Humble Indie Bundle 9

Name your price for four excellent indie games -- six, if you pay above the average, which is currently mere USD 4.59! The above-average-price games are Fez and FTL: Faster Than Light which have both received highly favorable reviews. Within the four games that you can get for any price there's for example such a gem as Mark of the Ninja. All the games work for Windows, Linux and Mac. You'll get Steam keys and you also get to download them, free of any DRM technologies that would hinder the gaming experience.

Humble Bundle for Android 4

There's six more days left to get six Android (and PC, and Linux, and Mac) games for whatever price you want to pay! Pay above the average and you'll even get five bonus games!

Frozen Synapse

Frozen Synapse is a cool game where you control a squad of soldiers by giving them orders and then watching them execute the orders for five seconds at a time. Your opponent does the same, and if you anticipated their moves correctly, you should see your soldiers take down theirs. The orders are given as waypoints and they can be arbitrarily complex, such as "back away from the door keeping your sights towards it, then wait for 0.2 seconds before turning and running across the hallway ignoring any possible enemies in there, and then duck behind the cover while taking a particular enemy to your sights". You can finish a turn in five minutes or you can grind it for an hour.

The game has several different modes and a "Dark" and "Light" variant of each. In the Light versions you always see where the enemies are, whereas in the Dark versions you only see the enemies that are currently in the field of vision of your troops. Once you lose a sight to an enemy in a Dark game a "shadow" of the enemy stays at their last known location along with an info text like "Last seen 2.8 seconds ago".

A maneuver assigned to a machine gunner.

The most popular modes are probably Extermination and Disputed. In Extermination both teams try to exterminate the other, plain and simple. In Disputed, the teams also try to kill each other again, but they also try to hold as much ground as possible in order to extract boxes that appear on the map after the fourth turn. Then there's also a Hostage mode where the other player plays as a hostage taker and the other tries to free the hostages. The hostages need to get to the edges of the playing area and they are controlled by the rescuer, but they can only be given instructions once. The hostage taker then tries to prevent the hostages from getting away.

In all game modes you can simulate the end result of a turn in the planning phase. This means that you can also assign commands to the enemy troops and move them around when you try to anticipate what the enemy will actually do. Simulating is crucial. The game is deterministic, so if in your simulation a soldier gets shot, he will get shot the same way in the actual outcome -- provided that everything stayed the same compared to the simulation. A slightly differently placed unit may yield a completely different result.

Let's watch a game of Dark Disputed I just finished. (Unfortunately the replay doesn't show the actual fields of vision for the troops.) The replay doesn't include the planning phases, just the action, so it lasts only 30 seconds. Remember that there was a planning phase every five seconds. I was controlling the green team and my enemy was controlling the red team. I recommend opening the video in a separate window and watching it with the HD quality:

Initially, both players can see the starting positions of each other's troops. I determine that no contact is likely during the first turn and just make my troops spread around and advance. At the end of the first turn, at 00:05, the enemy sniper at the left sees my machine gunner at the bottom and vice versa. The turn ends there and a subsequent simulation reveals that my gunner has no chance against the enemy sniper, so I order him to proceed, ignoring the sniper. On the other hand I turn the guy with the shotgun around, as sniper rifles have a way longer range than shotguns and at this point it doesn't look like it's going to be a close combat situation.

At 00:06 my sniper at the right gets an enemy gunner to his sights and takes him down a couple of seconds later; that's the first casualty of the game. The turn ends a second later when my gunner and an enemy gunner have just opened fire at each other. The simulation reveals that the bullet that's on its way already is going to kill the enemy, so he cannot dodge it and gets shot right at the beginning of turn three. During turn two my other gunner also ran up across the enemy sniper's line of fire because the simulation revealed that the enemy wouldn't have the time to take the shot. From his new position my gunner also opens fire against an enemy gunner trying to run down across the map at 00:10.

Again when I simulate the situation in the planning phase it appears that the enemy running down may be able to escape from my gunner who just opened a fire against him, so I turn the gunner in the middle to face the doorway in case the enemy would try to flank him. Luckily he takes the enemy down himself at 00:14, so there are only two enemies left now. My gunner at the bottom was ready to greet the enemy had he ran downwards instead of just stupidly staying put in the middle.

At the start of turn three my soldiers had caught a glimpse of an enemy gunner going into the room at the upper left corner. Since shotguns are very powerful at close range I decide to have my shotgunner clean the room and make an elaborate plan on how he would enter the room from the top door. I test my plan with the enemy soldier in every corner of the room until my shotgunner comes across as a winner in every scenario. The machine gunner and the sniper are his backup, and indeed the machine gunner engages in a firefight with the enemy right before the shotgunner enters the room and kills him at 00:19.

At 00:20 the fourth turn ends and the red boxes appear. My sniper is on the other side of the playing area and I decide that the three machine gunners are enough to take the final enemy sniper down, so the sniper goes to collect a couple of boxes. The shotgunner stays at the room he just cleaned and guards the windows in case the enemy sniper would run past them. Finally, it's the machine gunner that's ducked in the bottom room who kills the enemy at 00:23. The replay then plays for one more turn that I didn't actually play and you see my sniper exiting the area with the two boxes he had collected.

So, this hopefully gives you a fairly good picture of the game. Besides the multiplayer mode there's also a single player campaign and a possibility to play quick skirmish matches against the AI, but multiplayer is clearly the most interesting part of this game. The game is cross-platform so Windows, Linux & Mac versions exist. The game can also be bought from Steam, and there's an unofficial Frozen Synapse Wiki for you to use as a reference. Finally, it takes a little patience to really get into the game, but if you intend to play it you should probably also read this blog entry called How Not to Be Shot in Frozen Synapse. :)

Windows PowerShell

The Windows PowerShell

One advantage that Linux (and other Unix-like systems) has always had over Windows is the powerful command line interface. Linux systems provide the user with dozens of little programs that can be combined, or piped, together to do more complex things. For example, the ls ("list") command lists the files in the current directory. The wc ("word count") command counts the number of lines, words and/or bytes in the given input. Pipe these together, and you can get the number of files in the current directory: "ls | wc -l".

With the Windows Command Prompt these kind of operations have traditionally been way more difficult. Of course, I guess most people never use the Command Prompt, but those who do miss these powerful features from Unix-like systems. Nowadays, however, we have the Windows PowerShell.

The Windows PowerShell has been around for a few years already and I've been vaguely aware of its existence, but never really looked into it until now. It seems to be readily available on all Windows 7 installations, and most likely on Windows Vista as well. You can find it from the Start Menu.

Basics

When you start the PowerShell, you might want to see what commands are available. You can use the Get-Command command or its alias gcm for that. You'll see many lines of text that end with "...", i.e. they are truncated. Use Get-Command | Format-List  or the short form gcm | fl to see everything, or gcm Some-Specific-Command | fl to get info on some specific command only. And since the PowerShell commands aren't that short, you might only want to see the list of short commands, or aliases, available Get-Alias. The PowerShell commands are case-insensitive, so that would be the same as get-alias. And by the way, the default alias for get-alias is gal.

When you are accustomed to Unix shells the weird part in PowerShell is that it is object oriented. The pipes actually pass around typed objects rather than character streams. So when you "print out a list of files", you are actually rendering a collection object consisting of file objects. I won't go into this in detail but it is good to know this.

Replacements for Unix commands

So, what commands replace the most used Unix commands? Here are some of the most important ones in the format of Unix-command: Windows-command (alias):
grep: Select-String
cat: Get-Content (cat)
ls: Get-ChildItem (ls)
mv: Move-Item (mv)
cp: Copy-Item (cp)
wc: Measure-Object -line -word -character (measure)
cd: Set-Location (cd)
tail -n 15 : cat | select -last 15
tail -f : cat -path -wait

Aliases

OK, so the PowerShell can do pretty much anything a Linux shell could, and often with the same command. However, there aren't ready made aliases for all the commands. Luckily, you can define more of these aliases by yourself. Let's create that grep alias: Set-Alias grep Select-String. There! However, there's still a problem: if you now exit the PowerShell, your brand new alias is deleted. Luckily, you can save these into your profile file. First, type $profile to see the location of your profile file. Chances are it doesn't exist so you need to create it. After you have done that you can add your set-alias commands into it. You can then easily edit the file by typing notepad $profile.

However, when PowerShell starts the next time it will give you a warning that "the execution of scripts is disabled on this system". The command get-help about_signing explains in detail what you can do about this, but the easiest way is to restart PowerShell with the administrator rights and to enter the command set-executionpolicy remotesigned. You can now close the admin shell and open it up again with your normal rights and presto, your aliases are available to you right from the start!

Functions

Unluckily, aliases can only be created for plain commands, not for commands with parameters or pipes. However, these cases can be dealt with by creating functions. Let's create a function called tail. Open your profile file and add these lines to it:

function tail($1, $2) {
    cat $2 | select -last $1
}

Then, in your PowerShell, reload your profile script: . $profile (notice the dot). Now, when you want to see the last 15 lines in the given file, you can just enter this command: tail 15 [filename]. Voilà!

Further resources

I read quite a few web pages when learning the basics of PowerShell and you will probably find them useful as well. First, Microsoft, of course, has an Owner's manual as well as a large collection of useful PowerShell tips. Second, Stack Overflow has thousands of questions about PowerShell answered. Third, a Windows PowerShell blog has a more detailed list of those Unix equivalents in PowerShell. Finally, as usual, Google is your friend!

The Humble Bundle for Android #2

Again, it's time for yet another Humble Bundle. That's five or six games that work on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android, for whatever price you want to pay! There are just seven days left of this offer, so go to humblebundle.com and act now!

Cities in Motion

People getting in and out of a bus

Cities in Motion is a game where your task is to create the public transportation system of a city. The cities in the basic version of the game are European capital cities such as Helsinki and Berlin, but you can build more yourself, download cities made by other players, or buy them as add-ins.

The game looks pretty and works well on a modern PC. It focuses solely on moving people around so there are no cargo trucks or such, but there's plenty of things to do without them anyway. In the campaign mode you move from city to city, and in each city you must complete a certain amount of tasks. The tasks are usually something like "build a line from place A to place B" and it is then up to you to decide how to implement it. You can have multiple tasks going on at once so you can take all the time you need for completing them. This is good if the task is something like "build a metro line from the north side of the city to the south side of the city" and if it seems like there wouldn't be too many passengers between those places. The correct way to do that, then, would be to start somewhere in the middle and to build a line from, say, the railway station to the mall, and then gradually expand it towards the required end points.

A riot in front of the Vienna City Hall

So basically you create lines by placing stops, assigning them into some order and buying vehicles for the route. The lines are routed automatically from stop to stop. The available modes of transportation are buses, trams, metros, ferries and helicopters. There are trains on the maps as well but you cannot manage them, you just need to take care that the people of the city can get to the railway stations, as they are quite popular.

The people of the cities are an interesting point in the game. Each and every little person walking down the street is an individual. You can click any person and get statistics about him or her: where they live, where they work, where are they coming from and where are they going to. Every person also belongs to some social group, such as students, blue-collar workers or businesspeople. Students need an inexpensive method of transportation from the homes to their colleges, whereas businesspeople are busy and rich and can pay more to quickly get to their workplace or, say, the airport. You can also save these people as "customer profiles" in order to check back on them later to see, for example, if a person using a private car has been converted to a user of the public transportation.

The key to making people flow smoothly is to build a network where the vehicles and lines complement each other. It is not uncommon to see a basically dead bus line to start to flourish when a metro stop is added next to one of its stops. People can and will take connections from one line to another if you just plan the network so that it is worthwhile.

Deadlock

Every now and then there are some small events around the city: a fire, a demonstration, a vehicle breaking down, etc. There's not much you can do about fires or demonstrations: they just cut a road until they are over. Vehicles break down every once in a while, but in order to have them quickly repaired you can keep the wages of the technical personnel up and invest into the upkeep of the vehicles. So in addition to creating lines, you are also in charge of the monetary aspects of your company. That includes setting the ticket prices for each method of transportation. When the prices turn green, they are considered inexpensive, and when they turn red, the people think that they are too high. The amount of how much people are willing to pay depend on the current economical situation of the city. If it's going well the people can pay more, but as the unemployment grows the people cannot afford to pay too much. These are all presented as graphs in the menus of the game.

Elevated metro track, passing above the river and over a bridge

The game also offers many kinds of statistics of the city as colored overlays to the map. You can, for example, see where the blue-collar workers live, where they work, where the shopping centers are, where do the tourists live, which roads are congested and where the traffic is flowing well, etc. You will then want to avoid putting bus or tram lines to the congested roads as it will make those waiting at the stops unhappy if their vehicle is not arriving because it is stuck in the traffic.

There aren't many downsides in the game that I have observed. For me the most obvious one is the lack of zoom levels: you cannot zoom as far away as you would like. Zooming in, on the other hand, works perfectly and reveals the excellent graphics. Unfortunately that is not actually the most usable view for playing the game. But there's always a minimap in the corner so you still know where you are. The other thing is that I'd love to get some aggregate information on the passengers inside a vehicle or waiting at a stop. Currently you can only observe individual citizens, as I already explained. This does become less of a problem once you understand the general mechanics of the game, but still. Many times I have found that 90 percent of the passengers of my ten stop bus line just travel between two or three of the stops, so cutting the extra stops saves you both time and money.

Metro, tram & ferry moving people in Vienna

Cities in Motion is anyway the best game I have played for a while. The game is just 19.99 €/$ on Steam, or 39.99 €/$ with the expansions, which I also recommend. The CiMExchange site offers many mods and cities for download. So far I haven't tried any mods but there are some that I will try later, such as the Ultimate Camera Control mod. Finally, there's even a Cities in Motion wiki with all kinds of information about the game. @Citiesinmotion is also in Twitter.

The Humble Bundle for Android

The Humble Bundle is a concept that I've written about several times already. In short, they publish a few cross-platform games and let you pay anything you want for them. The newest addition to the Humble Bundle series is the Humble Bundle for Android which contains four different games that work not only for Android but also for Windows, Linux and Mac! As of writing this post there are still eight days left for you to grab this offer. The games are Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Osmos, Edge and World of Goo.

The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

Last December I wrote about The Humble Indie Bundle #2, a collection of indie games for whatever price you chose to pay. Apparently it was a great success as a new humble bundle is already out: The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle. The games are Trine, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, Shadowgrounds, Splot and Jack Claw. I don't know much about any of them but I bought the bundle anyway. All of the games work on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can also donate part or all of the price to charity. As I'm writing this the bundle has been out only for some 2 to 3 hours and has already been bought more than 27000 times with an average purchase of 5.20 USD. :)

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

There's only 13 hours left of this offer so act quickly: The Humble Indie Bundle #2 offers five indie games for whatever price you choose to pay! The games are Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans and most of them are redeemable on Steam as well. If you pay above what the average user pays (currently 7.80 USD) you'll also get the first Humble Indie Bundle which contains six games, including the hits World of Goo and Gish. World of Goo alone is well worth the 7.80 USD and I have heard good things about Braid, Machinarium and Gish as well. This is the first time I hear about Osmos but it looks interesting too. I already bought the games and might have done that even if I already had all the games as I find the Humble Bundle concept very supportable.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a neat online service for saving your files. It is basically an online hard drive where you can store any kind of files to be accessed from anywhere. Using Dropbox has been made very easy: you register to the site and download and install a client application, which then displays as a regular folder in your file system. The magic happens when you move or copy files into that folder: they are automatically copied into the Dropbox servers and you can access them from any other computer, either by using the online user interface or by the dedicated client! 

The client is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and even some mobile platforms, so there's really no reason not to use Dropbox even if you use multiple computers with different operating systems. I figure Dropbox is a great way of storing data when using a netbook: even if the system breaks, your data will be safe, plus it will be available for your desktop computer as well. It is also unlikely that you will be handling very large files with a netbook that doesn't have too much power so the default amount of 2 GB that you get should be plenty. Register using this link and you'll even get an extra 250 MB of storage space. :)

I registered to Dropbox in the spring when someone wanted to share some photos with me (yes, Dropbox can easily be used for sharing files too, and no, those who then just want to view your files don't need to register). After that I forgot about it until I tried the Jolicloud Linux distribution which has got some sort of a Dropbox integration. I figured Dropbox would be an excellent place to store, for example, my KeePassX password database file so I could access it from both Windows and Linux, and from both my desktop computer and my netbook. I have now also saved the installation packages of some key software to Dropbox so that the next time I'm installing a fresh system I won't have to browse through a dozen web sites to get all the programs I need.