Eugeni's blog

I just finished quake4, and I am playing (again) doom3 on Linux right now. It feels great – so if anyone wants to say that there are no games on Linux, I could just show the list of some of the games I played this year and found quite impressive:

• Nexuiz
• OpenArena
• Doom3
• Quake4
• World of Goo (this one actually managed to keep me awake until 5am for a few days)
• Caster
• Cube
• …

and, besides those, we still have wine which plays most of the games just fine (except some of the bleeding edge ones, and the ones which are hurt by the the-f**ing-hating-mouse-rotation-bug like call of duty 4).

But.. even with all that progress, I miss the good old games. Of course, Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 1/2/3/4, Dead Space and all other thousands of recently released games look pretty amazing, but I feel that most of modern games are not even close to the old ones. I still remember being awake for 24+ hours playing Baldur’s Gate, and loosing some of the faculty exams because of the Baldur’s Gate 2. And I’ll probably never forget how scary it was to play Doom on a 386 in a dark room. Nor wolfenstein 3d on a 286 for the first time. And, speaking about game story, few games came close to Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1/2, Final Fantasy VII (a.k.a. how-you-felt-when-Ariel-died??)/VIII..

But, speaking of 3d-shooters. The best so far (at least, for me) are: Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke3D/Blood/Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam 1/1.5/2, Half-Life, Prey, Quake1/2/4, …. Most (all?) of those games are based on the same concepts we have seen in early 90ths. I could mention Halo/Gears of War, which introduced some changes in the gameplay, but not that much to say that it was a break-through. You still keep walking around, grabbing new weapons (and dropping less useful ones, like in Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Halo/…), killing stronger and more stronger enemies, and that’s it. Occasionally there are some innovations, like portals and gravity (Prey) or maybe some sort of character development (Daikatana, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament) or time/physics manipulations (Half-Life 2) and environment interaction (Doom 3, Unreal Tournament), but nothing ground-breaking.

So far, I am feeling like the progress stopped in the way the games are developed. We have new physics, graphics, sounds, polygons and so on, but few games are introducing something truly new. On the other hand, maybe we have reached the point when everything is already implemented, and the games just have to focus on the state-of-the-art graphics only, and forget about all other items..

So, if you read so far, what do you think about that? Are there any modern games which are truly outstanding (and run on Linux – either natively or using wine)? I promise to test all the suggestion and post my impressions on this blog.

To celebrate the end-of-the-week, here comes another PlanetMandriva post!

TomoyoGui received some attention this week, and it slowly becomes more and more functional. The performance of huge tomoyo policy parsing was greatly improved (on my running system it has about 3MB in form of a text file), and the dependencies among sub-domains are now calculated.

The gui was improved to simplify the listing of domains, and now it allows you to do a quick search for desired application, and select all sub-domains of a process by double-clicking it. We are now also fully compatible with tomoyo’s ccs-savepolicy and ccs-loadpolicy formats.

Also, I am slowly progressing towards the idea of a application-based profiles (like in AppArmor – may it rest in peace! ). While tomoyo does not supports that in an easy form (everything is a huge text file), I had some ideas on how to make it work. So in some not-so-far future it will be implemented and described here.

So, as an image says more than a thousand words, some screenshots:

Initial view of tomoyo with some helpful and user-friendly text

Just a double-click away from selecting ACPID subdomains

Peeking into what a domain is allowed to do

Multiple selection of unrelated domains

Besides that, msec also received a few updates – now supporting the SECURE_TMP variable and improved diff_check procedure.

And in other news – the best football team in the world with the best football player in the world scored yet another victory in Brazilian championship . If you missed that, you can always see the goals again thanks to youtube!

As promised in the previous post, here come some first insight into the GUI for Tomoyo Linux, which will be present in Mandriva 2010.

Initial view

Active security domains

As far as I know, this is the first GUI for Tomoyo out there (except the TomoyoGUI Eclipse Plugin, but it seems to be quite eclipse-bound and abandoned. Its page is in Japanese, but the all-mighty google translator helped me to take a peek into it). But, of course, I might be wrong – so please let me know if you know of any other GUI for Tomoyo Linux.

Obviously there are still a lot of things to do:

• add support for auditing/tomoyo security log into msec
• add support for reloading profile on-the-fly
• saving/loading/changing settings on the fly
• support complex statements
• everything else

so keep an eye on this blog for more news.

Regards, Dr. Eugeni

Defender o doutorado com camisa de Corinthians a tarde no dia que o Corinthians é campeão brasileiro a noite – não tem preço!!

Dr. Eugeni

Well, the title says it all . Yep, it is true – after 5 years, 3 journal publications, 7 conference publications and 1 book chapter, I am finally a PhD .

Update: a short description about the nature of the thesis is here