What kind of software and hardware am I using?

Hello again!

I thought it might be relevant to describe the tools I will use to create my own resource-based city simulation game.

There are two constraints:

1) The first constraint is my hardware. I am currently using a mid-2011 MacBook Air with Mac OS X Lion. So I need something compatible with that.

2) I wanted to use a high-level programming language I am familiar with and figured a good deal of math would be involved, so Matlab or something similar came to mind immediately. At university, I used Matlab all the time and got reasonable proficient in it. However as a normal citizen without any fancy educational license, it was too expensive. Fortunately, there is GNU Octave, a free open-source clone of Matlab. 

This will be the programming language I'll use for this project. With GNUPlot, I should be able to make some decent graphs. More info on how to set this up on these helpful external websites: Island 94 and SourceForge. I am using Tincta, a free text editor with syntax coloring to write the Octave scripts (m-files).

This is a pretty flexible set-up. Should you wish to try something similar...Octave is also available for Windows and Linux and there are of course plenty of text editors with syntax coloring available for any OS.