In this GDC 2011 talk, Rutgers University’s Nina H. Fefferman explains how an unexpected outbreak of Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood Plague in the early days of World of Warcraft helped Epidemiologists better understand the flow of diseases in society.

Fefferman discusses how the corrupted blood incident began as a coding error, turning into a plague after the virtual disease spread to different parts of World of Warcraft, causing a pandemic to spread throughout the land. 

She also talks about how the accidental plague was studied by epidemiologists years after the event, leading to papers being published about how the virtual world could help study and predict human behavior.

It was an informative talk that’s definitely worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

You may remember that a few years ago, former BioWare Jennifer Hepler discussed the possibility of a role-playing game that would let players skip past combat so they could experience the story moments more frequently. 

While many players and developers expressed frustration at this idea (and then at the harassment Hepler endured afterward), one developer, Wadjet Eye Games’ Dave Gilbert, began thinking “wait, why doesn’t that game exist?”

It turns out, this is part of the origin story behind Unavowed, a new adventure game from Wadjet Eye Games. Forgoing the combat that fills up may BioWare RPGs, Unavowed instead presents the player both with a character who has a customizable backstory, and a selection of supporting characters that can be swapped out from mission to mission.

To learn more about pushing the envelope in the point-and-click adventure game genre, we reached out to Gilbert for a conversation about the making of Unavowed earlier today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, which you can now watch in the video above. Watch the conversation if you’re a developer working on managing narrative scope, or you want to know how Gilbert takes inspiration from his home town of New York City when making his games. 

And while you’re at it, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary. 

Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover all the new games coming soon to Xbox One! Every week the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console. To find out what’s coming soon to Xbox One, read on below and click on each of the game profiles for pre-order details (dates are subject to change).

Games

August 21, 2018

Xbox One X Enhanced – With online play and couch co-op support, as well as a large roster full of characters each with their own unique style of play, Brawlout looks to effectively blend platform and traditional fighting gameplay into a stylish, aerobatic game the whole family can enjoy, but is a deep enough challenge for veterans of the genre.

Games

August 21, 2018

Two classics return in a classic tale of revenge and mystery with Shenmue I & II featuring an updated interface, control options, and Japanese audio – a first for a global audience. Become immersed in a fully interactive world of 1980s Japan and Hong Kong, China as you track down the man who killed Ryo Hazuki’s father.

Games

August 21, 2018

Drift through looping bends, soar over monumental jumps and defy gravity itself around tubular tracks in this colorful racer. Pick your favorite character and battle across a series of championships as you race nine other racers. Features online racing as well as support for up to four-player local split-screen action.

Games

August 21, 2018

Take on the role of Tyler, a spunky miniature robot who after many years of powering down has accidentally come back online in the midst of a thunderstorm – and to find his creator missing. Navigate your surroundings, collect objects, and solve puzzles along the way in this platforming adventure.

Games

August 24, 2018

In this narrative-focused adventure game, pick a side in the growing conflict between man and ape. Based on the recent films in this fabled sci-fi series, Last Frontier aims to deliver a tale of conquest, betrayal, and survival that will send you either towards establishing a fragile peace or a bloody war.

Games

August 24, 2018

Spectrum describes itself as taking place in a stunning, abstract world where players can jump, dive, and flow through 80 levels of unique shapes and colors. Combined with an atmospheric soundtrack, Spectrum aims to create an immersive, zen-like platforming experience.

Games

August 24, 2018

Xbox One X Enhanced – Become immersed in the world of Formula 1 racing by building your reputation on and off the track as you navigate not only racing at lightning speed, but with time-pressured interviews that will influence your driver’s career path. Featuring more classic F1 cars than ever before, as well as the series most accurate simulation model to date.

Games

August 24, 2018

Inspired by “The Thing,” a helicopter crash has left a group of explorers stranded near an arctic base. Not only do they need to find ways to survive but also find out how to combat a terrifying force that aims to suck the life from their bodies. It’s up to you to guide these survivors through a randomly-generated base and overcome the deadly climate and a mysterious force.

Games

August 24, 2018

This side-scrolling, platforming, beat ’em up sequel to Haunted: Halloween ’85 comes with a completely overhauled combat system with new attack, defensive, and evasive moves as well as improved graphics that feature split-screen side scrolling and animated backgrounds, aiming to be an incredibly faithful 8-bit gaming experience in 2018.

Games

August 24, 2018

Capture islands, sink ships, defend your towns, and discover an exciting world full of adventure in this sandbox adventure pirate RPG that lets you explore a massive world full of unique islands, colorful landscapes, and the open sea while keeping your crew alive (and your ship afloat).

 

Games

August 24, 2018

A turn-based strategy game set during the Cold War, Phantom Doctrine looks to draw its inspiration from classic spy films and novels as you carry out secret missions, investigate classified intel, and interrogate your enemies in this spy vs spy thriller told across an epic 40-hour single-player campaign.

“In the past years, some very violent and offensive games have reached the market, and of course I’m speaking about Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.” It was 9th December 1993, and the then-president of Nintendo of America, Howard Lincoln, was giving a statement at a US congressional hearing on violent video games. Mortal Kombat had already been released on the SNES, but it was a heavily censored version: the blood had been replaced with sweat and its notorious fatality moves had been removed.

As for Night Trap – the Mega CD game that featured full-motion video (FMV) of scantily-clad teenagers in mild peril – Lincoln was more scathing. “Let me say that for the record,” he told the hearing, “I want to state that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Obviously, it would never pass our guidelines.”

In hindsight, Lincoln’s speech was less a moral crusade and more an attempt to keep the senators happy and make Nintendo look like the good guys. As soon as it became clear that the blood-soaked Mega Drive version of Mortal Kombat was vastly outselling the censored SNES one, those guidelines Lincoln spoke of were changed pronto. Mortal Kombat 2 was released fully uncut on Nintendo’s system, with fatalities and gore a-plenty.

Night Trap, meanwhile, never did make it to a Nintendo console during Lincoln’s reign, but that was more likely due to technical reasons: the company’s refusal to embrace CD-ROM meant neither the SNES or the N64 would have really been able to handle a game that consisted entirely of video clips. By the time the GameCube launched and Nintendo had a system with adequate storage, the FMV genre was already dead and Night Trap was ancient history. That was then, though. They say you should never say never, and what we have here is a shining example of this. An entire quarter of a century later, despite what Howard Lincoln promised, Night Trap has appeared on a Nintendo system, in a 25th anniversary remaster.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the game puts you in charge of a bank of eight security cameras, each set up in a different room of the Martin household. A bunch of teenagers recently disappeared after a trip to the Martins’, so it’s up to you to figure out what’s going on by using the cameras to keep an eye on a second group spending the night there (one of whom is an undercover agent working for you).

It quickly becomes clear that the house is swarming with Augers, a group of shambling, toothless vampires who need to use a special claw tool to extract blood from their victims. It’s up to you to catch the Augers by activating one of the many traps littered around the house. Press the trap button just as an Auger passes over the right spot and they’ll be caught: miss too many of them and it’s game over.

The trick, then, is scanning through each room, attempting to catch as many Augers as you can while still trying to eavesdrop on the various conversations going on throughout the house. It’s important you do so, too, because sometimes the residents – suspicious that someone’s onto them – will change the security colour code for the traps and you’ll need to change yours accordingly in order to keep catching the blood-sucking bad guys.

Since it’s essentially just made up of a bunch of video clips, Night Trap is an extremely linear game and a short one at that: a perfect run takes around half an hour. The fun comes in trying to achieve that level of perfection, though, by slowly but surely memorising the sequence of events and learning which dialogue scenes you should watch and which can be ignored. If you prefer your games to be a completely different experience each time you play, then Night Trap certainly isn’t for you. This is about playing the events of one evening over and over, Groundhog Day-style, until you figure out how to handle it flawlessly. There’s a brilliant reason for doing so in this version, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

This 25th anniversary edition of Night Trap – originally developed by one-man team Screaming Villains and ported to Switch by Limited Run – delivers by far the best-looking version of the game. At the time it was originally released on Mega CD (and later PC and 3DO), CD-ROM video technology was still in its infancy and the extreme compression meant the video quality was horrendous. Footage was blocky and grainy, the video window was tiny and the frame rate was cut heavily in order to fit everything in.

For this version, the developer was given access to the original tapes containing all the footage shot at the time. This meant the game had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, but the result is picture quality that absolutely demolishes the ‘90s versions: the video window is satisfyingly big, the detail is far greater than before and the frame rate has been brought up to movie standard.

There are some issues, though. The game over scenes – in which your commander gives you a piece of his mind for messing up – were shot years after the other footage, and so high-quality versions of them don’t exist. As a result, these scenes appear in a tiny window in the corner of the screen, which is disappointing. The original tapes have also suffered some damage over the years, so there’s some visible picture tearing and interference in some scenes near the end – though it could be argued that this just adds to the cheesy ‘80s VHS aesthetic.

The Switch port, in particular, has its own quirks not present in the previously released PS4 version. Video can occasionally be a little janky in handheld mode and a couple of the longer scenes – the infamous ‘party’ scene where the actors all ham it up to the official Night Trap theme tune being the most notable example – are noticeably more compressed, presumably to help the Switch handle them a little better.

That’s the game itself, then: ultimately, it remains as divisive as it was when it first launched back in 1993. You’re either going to love the way it cleverly uses and interconnects video clips to give the impression you’re genuinely analysing the goings-on in this house, or you’re going to hate its linear gameplay and the fact that every game plays out exactly the same way. What’s less arguable, though, is the quality of everything else you get in this anniversary edition.

As well as the remastered version of the game itself, this shiny new Night Trap package also includes a bunch of bonus features. Some are fairly throwaway: the Survival mode randomly arranges clips of Augers in the house and tasks you with catching as many as possible, which should amuse you for a while but is a bit soulless. Far better are the other goodies. Theater mode appears when you beat the game and lets you replay any of the dialogue scenes you stumbled upon, giving you the chance to enjoy them uninterrupted without the need to jump to another room to trap someone. Meanwhile, there are two brilliant documentaries – one recorded in the ‘90s shortly after the congressional hearings and a more recent one shot in 2017 for this new edition – which are well worth a watch.

Even better, get a perfect game by capturing all the Augers and you’ll unlock Scene Of The Crime, the unreleased 1986 prototype of Night Trap that was created as a sort of proof-of-concept when the idea was being pitched to toy company Hasbro for the NEMO game system. This is an absolutely incredible addition: for years Night Trap fans had only seen tiny, seconds-long snippets of Scene Of The Crime, so to not only see the full thing but actually be able to play it too is beyond belief.

As a game it’s fair to say Night Trap is an acquired taste: on one hand, it has limited interactivity and B-movie acting that’s cheesier than Wallace and Gromit’s fridge, but on the other, its inventive use of FMV and unique trapping mechanic has earned it a cult following. There’s no denying the quality of the surrounding package, though, and regardless of your thoughts on Night Trap itself, the addition of a pair of lengthy documentaries and a playable version of its fabled prototype make it fascinating for gaming historians.

MU Legend is Now Available on Steam!

Following the footsteps of the successful titles MU Online and MU Origin, MU Legend offers an authentic alternative to the dungeon crawler gaming experience.

A game with its own unique signature, MU Legend blends the dark fantasy world of an MMO with the richness of hack ‘n’ slash gaming.

In previous installments of this series, you learned about directories and how permissions to access directories work. Most of what you learned in those articles can be applied to files, except how to make a file executable.

So let’s deal with that before moving on.

No .exe Needed

In other operating systems, the nature of a file is often determined by its extension. If a file has a .jpg extension, the OS guesses it is an image; if it ends in .wav, it is an audio file; and if it has an .exe tacked onto the end of the file name, it is a program you can execute.

This leads to serious problems, like trojans posing as documents. Fortunately, that is not how things work in Linux. Sure, you may see occasional executable file endings in .sh that indicate they are runnable shell scripts, but this is mostly for the benefit of humans eyeballing files, the same way when you use ls --color, the names of executable files show up in bright green.

The fact is most applications have no extension at all. What determines whether a file is really program is the x (for executable) bit. You can make any file executable by running

chmod a+x some_program

regardless of its extension or lack thereof. The x in the command above sets the x bit and the a says you are setting it for all users. You could also set it only for the group of users that own the file (g+x), or for only one user, the owner (u+x).

Although we will be covering creating and running scripts from the command line later in this series, know that you can run a program by writing the path to it and then tacking on the name of the program on the end:

path/to/directory/some_program

Or, if you are currently in the same directory, you can use:

./some_program

There are other ways of making your program available from anywhere in the directory tree (hint: look up the $PATH environment variable), but you will be reading about those when we talk about shell scripting.

Copying, Moving, Linking

Obviously, there are more ways of modifying and handling files from the command line than just playing around with their permissions. Most applications will create a new file if you still try to open a file that doesn’t exist. Both

nano test.txt

and

vim test.txt

(nano and vim being to popular command line text editors) will create an empty test.txt file for you to edit if test.txt didn’t exist beforehand.

You can also create an empty file by touching it:

touch test.txt

Will create a file, but not open it in any application.

You can use cp to make a copy of a file in another location or under a new name:

cp test.txt copy_of_test.txt

You can also copy a whole bunch of files:

cp *.png /home//images

The instruction above copies all the PNG files in the current directory into an images/ directory hanging off of your home directory. The images/ directory has to exist before you try this, or cp will show an error. Also, be warned that, if you copy a file to a directory that contains another file with the same name, cp will silently overwrite the old file with the new one.

You can use

cp -i *.png /home//images

If you want cp to warn you of any dangers (the -i options stands for interactive).

You can also copy whole directories, but you need the -r option for that:

cp -rv directory_a/ directory_b

The -r option stands for recursive, meaning that cp will drill down into directory_a, copying over all the files and subdirectories contained within. I personally like to include the -v option, as it makes cp verbose, meaning that it will show you what it is doing instead of just copying silently and then exiting.

The mv command moves stuff. That is, it changes files from one location to another. In its simplest form, mv looks a lot like cp:

mv test.txt new_test.txt

The command above makes new_test.txt appear and test.txt disappear.

mv *.png /home//images

Moves all the PNG files in the current directory to a directory called images/ hanging of your home directory. Again you have to be careful you do not overwrite existing files by accident. Use

mv -i *.png /home//images

the same way you would with cp if you want to be on the safe side.

Apart from moving versus copying, another difference between mv and cpis when you move a directory:

mv directory_a/ directory_b

No need for a recursive flag here. This is because what you are really doing is renaming the directory, the same way in the first example, you were renaming the file*. In fact, even when you “move” a file from one directory to another, as long as both directories are on the same storage device and partition, you are renaming the file.

You can do an experiment to prove it. time is a tool that lets you measure how long a command takes to execute. Look for a hefty file, something that weighs several hundred MBs or even some GBs (say, something like a long video) and try copying it from one directory to another like this:

$ time cp hefty_file.mkv another_directory/

real 0m3,868s user 0m0,016s sys 0m0,887s

In bold is what you have to type into the terminal and below what time outputs. The number to focus on is the one on the first line, real time. It takes nearly 4 seconds to copy the 355 MBs of hefty_file.mkv to another_directory/.

Now let’s try moving it:

$ time mv hefty_file.mkv another_directory/

real 0m0,004s

user 0m0,000s sys 0m0,003s

Moving is nearly instantaneous! This is counterintuitive, since it would seem that mv would have to copy the file and then delete the original. That is two things mv has to do versus cp‘s one. But, somehow, mv is 1000 times faster.

That is because the file system’s structure, with all its tree of directories, only exists for the users convenience. At the beginning of each partition there is something called a partition table that tells the operating system where to find each file on the actual physical disk. On the disk, data is not split up into directories or even files. There are tracks, sectors and clusters instead. When you “move” a file within the same partition, what the operating system does is just change the entry for that file in the partition table, but it still points to the same cluster of information on the disk.

Yes! Moving is a lie! At least within the same partition that is. If you try and move a file to a different partition or a different device, mv is still fast, but is noticeably slower than moving stuff around within the same partition. That is because this time there is actually copying and erasing of data going on.

Renaming

There are several distinct command line rename utilities around. None are fixtures like cp or mv and they can work in slightly different ways. What they all have in common is that they are used to change parts of the names of files.

In Debian and Ubuntu, the default rename utility uses regular expressions (patterns of strings of characters) to mass change files in a directory. The instruction:

rename 's/\.JPEG$/.jpg/' *

will change all the extensions of files with the extension JPEG to jpg. The file IMG001.JPEG becomes IMG001.jpg, my_pic.JPEG becomes my_pic.jpg, and so on.

Another version of rename available by default in Manjaro, a derivative of Arch, is much simpler, but arguably less powerful:

rename .JPEG .jpg *

This does the same renaming as you saw above. In this version, .JPEG is the string of characters you want to change, .jpg is what you want to change it to, and * represents all the files in the current directory.

The bottom line is that you are better off using mv if all you want to do is rename one file or directory, and that’s because mv is realiably the same in all distributions everywhere.

Learning more

Check out the both mv and cp‘s man pages to learn more. Run

man cp

or

man mv

to read about all the options these commands come with and which make them more powerful and safer to use.