Overview over Galaxy Conquest games

Hello visitors!

Have you ever played this kind of game, where you start with about one planet that produces ships and you have to conquer the rest of the planets in a given galaxy with those?

I really love this simple but addictive types of games, especially after I got the game Starlink for free as the app of the day in the amazon appshop.

After I spent a couple of hours playing it I felt the need for a game like this on my linux pc, but sadly I did not find any free/open source games out there.
Here is what I found as alternatives though:

• Pax Galaxia by Sillysoft. It's pretty old as of now, but since the game does not need a lot of graphics it could compete easily with the others - if there weren't the 20$ they still demand for this game. I still mention it because it can be seen as a forerunner here.
• GalaxIR by smyno (I think he called himself meryodev before) is an Android only app. I started with this game and the demo is already pretty good as well as it also features a multiplayer mode for 2 players via bluetooth.
• Galcon or Galactic Conquest and Galcon Fusion by Phil Hassey are established trademarks in this field. The games are available for almost every platform (even palm) out there and costs around 10 bucks (at least on steam). There will also be a sequel to it - Galcon 2 - which already successfully absolved its kickstarter campaign.
• Starlink by Tasharen, which I already mentioned. It costs between 2$ (mobile) and 4$ (desktop) and is available for android (google, amazon) and every desktop platform, purchaseble via Desura. A demo can be found on the developer's website.
• Auralux is an incredibly beatiful games which also adds on-way battles instead of just planteside battles to the game. Unfortunately only supports iPhone, Android and Windows - but it's completely free (as far as I could see)
• Currently, I am playing Eufloria. It has a pretty cool story mode and some funny additins, like upgrades. Unfortunatley, on smartphones (where I am playing on), those extra features make the game a bit quirky to control sometmes. It is sill worth the time, although 15€ on Steam (windows only) seem a bit expensive. It is also available on iTunes for 4.49€, Google Play and Amazon Appstore (2.99€ each).

Then, there are other games which can somehow be compared to this kind of game.

• One example is Gratuitous Space Battles by Positech games. Usually it costs between 15 and 17 dollars, but is currently (25th of July to August 1st 2013) available in the humble bundle weekly sale for less than 4$. It's more extensive and doesn't focus on my type of gameplay explained here, but especially the dlc "galactic conquest" looks familiar in the overview map with what I've been doing.
• Another game I found interesting and I wanted to play while researching was "Risk". It is turn based and thus fairly different, but may suit your taste if you liked the above games. Here is a video which attracted me and there is also the steam page of the game, where it is being sold for 10$ (or 10€ in my case)
• Maybe you want to have a look at star twine. It's beautiful, though it didn't really appeal to me as far as gameplay is concerned. Price: 10$ and only windows is supported
• Osmos, by hemisphere games. You are a cell-alike bubble and need to get bigger until you finally dominate all other bubbles on the field. There is not much left of the original priciple of the games above, but I can really recommend it. Available for all platforms, somewhere between 2 and 10 dollars for the mobile and desktop versions.

I hope I could give you an overview over all the available games. If you have a game to add here, leave a comment.

Until then, yours

suluke

[Rezept] Tante Emma Kuchen

Guten Morgen, liebe Backfreudige!

Hiermit teile ich das Rezept zu meinem Lieblingskuchen mit euch, so, wie ich es von meiner Oma übernommen habe:

1. Zutaten:
   
   • Teig:
     
     • 1 Becher Sahne (200ml)
     • 1 Becher Zucker
     • 2 Becher Mehl
     • 4 Eier
     • 1 Päckchen Backpulver
     • 1 Päckchen Vanillezucker
     • Optional: Etwas Zitronenschale und eine Prise Salz
   • Belag
     
     • 200g gehackte Mandeln
     • 1 Becher Zucker
     • 1 Päckchen Vanillezucker
     • 125g zerlassene Butter
     • 4 EL Milch
   • Sonstiges:
     
     • Springform
2. Zubereitung:
   
• Zuerst den Teig durch zusammengeben der Zutaten in einer Schüssel anrichten und gut verrühren. Etwas zum Entlüften stehen lassen schadet nicht, kann aber vernachlässigt werden.
• Teig in die Springform geben und bei 140°C Umluft bzw. 150-160°C Ober- & Unterhitze im vorgeheizten Backofen ca. 20 bis 25 Minuten anbacken.
• In der Zwischenzeit Butter zerlassen und Belag durch Zusammengeben und gutes Verrühren aller Zutaten anrichten.
• Teig auf Konsistenz überprüfen. Er sollte fest genug sein, dass er unbeschadet mit der Mandelmasse bedeckt werden kann. Dies dann auch tuen.
• Anschließend Kuchen für weitere 20-30 Minuten im Backofen bei gleicher Temperatur fertig backen. Der Kuchen ist fertig, wenn der Belag goldbraun karamellisiert ist.
3. Geschätzter Zeitaufwand: 1 bis 1,5 Stunden

Der Grund, warum ich diesen Kuchen so gerne mag, ist nicht nur sein vortrefflicher Geschmack kombiniert mit seinem saftigen Biss, sondern auch die Einfachheit der Zubereitung. Zudem sind Teig und Belag im Rohzustand bereits sehr lecker und eignen sich daher grandios zum Auslecken der Schüsseln.

Die Namensgebung habe ich auch von meiner Großmutter. Ein direkter Vergleich zum Bienenstich liegt nahe, doch es fehlt die Cremefüllung. Daher könnte ich mir mit spezieller Butter und geeigneter Wahl eines Ersatzes für die Sahne und die 4 EL Milch (Wasser? Sojamilch?) auch eine recht einfache laktosefreie Zubereitung vorstellen.

Ich bin mir sicher, er wird euch schmecken :)
Guten Appetit!

[Steam 4 Linux]: Game not starting, only Error message is "SteamAPI_init() failed"

Hello there, reader!

It's summer and this means it is steam sale! This is the good news :) But when you are on linux and you just bought some really cool game, you may still encounter problems due to linux only having received a lot of attention by game developers just for the past couple of months.

So did I, namely with the game "Osmos" by the Hemisphere game studios. I had bought it when it was cheap some days ago, installed it but couldn't get it to start. Clicking on the "play" button within steam would only pop up the "Steam news" dialog - at most.

Commandline debugging

So I started steam from commandline and dug into all the funny warnings it throws during runtime. But the only error I found in connection with my attempts to launch Osmos was 

"SteamAPI_init() failed" - following startup messages of Osmos.bin32 (Unfortunately steam only offers the 32 bit version of the game, although there is a 64 bit version available I think, google for Osmos.bin64)

Missing libs?

I recently switched to arch linux, so of course I thought of missing 32 bit libs at first.

Indeed I was missing lib32-intel-dri (the 32 bit intel driver for mesa) and I think lib32-openal too, but none of them fixed the problem - although the 32 bit graphics driver dramatically increased the performance of half life 1. You may still want to look at the aur package "osmos" to have a look at the immediate dependencies here. I also used the handy command "ldd" on Osmos.bin32 to find out about all libs used by the binary.

Exit: The solution

After a long time I grew more and more desperate searching the internet unsuccessfully, when finally I had the lucky thought to try out something I stumbled upon earlier without giving it too much attention: I did not exit steam via right click on the tray icon but via the "steam" entry in the menu bar of the program. It's funny, but it seems like this is the only way to make steam apply certain updates on shutdown. At least some additional lines in the console output mentioning "package updates" suggest that - and really: After starting Steam again Osmos would finally launch!

Résumé

So I thought I might share this little piece of info with you - namely that you should use the menu button to exit steam from time to time to make sure your installation stays up to date.

If you have some other game making trouble, have a look at the arch wiki's "specific troubleshooting" section here.

I hope this helps. If you liked this, I would be happy if you left me a comment.

See you later, yours

suluke

XFCE suddenly not applying any themes any more

Hello people out there!

Recently I faced some strange behaviour with my Xfce 4 (.10) after I had plugged in a beamer. On first login after startup it wouldn't apply the window theme I set, nor would it use my preferred icon theme.
Also, setting the theme again with the xfce settings dialog (xfce4-appearance-settings) would not have any effect. Logging out and logging in again solved the issue temporarily, though.

Usually I already use a dual monitor setup and the beamer just switched place with my desktop monitor. So this was obviously a dual or multi monitor problem, and the first place I looked in for error messages was ~/.xsession-errors. There I encountered a line saying:

"The program 'xfsettingsd' received an X Window System error"

So the error occured in xfsettingsd, which also explained why using the settings dialogs hadn't had any effect later on.
Luckily, google would directly lead me to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=867455 when searching for this error message, where I found the solution:
By simply deleting

.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/displays.xml

I was able to fix the error. As mentioned in the bug report, the file was recreated. Nevertheless I recommend to backup the file, since one never knows if such a file contains additional configuration markup you would maybe want to have access to later.

I hope this information can help somebody. If you want to thank me or want me to add something or maybe have any suggestions for improvements, I would be glad if you left me a comment.

Until then, see you soon

suluke