Developer Amicable Animal and publisher Armor Games Studios have announced that SOLAS 128, a rhythm-based puzzler, will be launching on Switch early next year.

The game is described as a ‘beam deflection’ title that has you rotating and repositioning mirrors to connect light sources. All puzzles are connected to each other – as you pass one level, you’ll unlock an adjacent one – and everything is always moving to the beat. You can see it in action in the trailer above.

There are more than 150 puzzle screens to solve in total, and there’s an integrated hint system that can offer you a helping hand should you feel the need to activate it. Here’s a feature list:

Features:
– Over 150 interlocking puzzle screens
– Designed from the ground up to be colourblind-friendly
– A seamless world to navigate – changes in one room will affect those that follow
– An original synth/chillwave soundtrack
– Hidden areas to discover, and secrets to decypher
– No text or dialogue: the visuals and music speak for themselves
– An optional integrated hint system for players seeking a nudge in the right direction.

SOLAS 128 is scheduled to arrive on Switch and PC in Q1 2021. Let us know if you’ll be adding this one to your Switch wishlist with a comment below.

Epic Games has added a huge number of free assets from acclaimed narrative adventure What Remains of Edith Finch to the Unreal Engine Marketplace.

The company has partnered with developer Giant Sparrow and publisher Annapurna Interactive to release the asset collection free-of-charge, and hopes it will help creators “expedite their own projects with freely accessible, high-quality content.”

The collection is available to download right now, and includes over 3000 stylised meshes with unique textures and materials, the Finch family home, a low-poly fantasy kingdom with townspeople, stalls, and castle building blocks, a rustic family kitchen with appliances and kitchenware, and more.

Epic explained the Edith Finch collection is the “first in a series of new, free content coming to the Unreal Engine Marketplace,” suggesting more will be added in the near future.

Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends, has denied a claim that a new playable character was inspired by a real person.

Yesterday a former college student named Stephanie posted a blog on Medium describing her relationship with a former Riot Games employee that linked her to the creation of a new champion named Seraphine. Stephanie alleged that during a brief relationship with an anonymous Riot Games employee (only referred to as “John”) in 2019, he repeatedly said that the company was working on content inspired by her.

John dropped a number of hints to Stephanie about an upcoming character skin or project related to K/DA, Riot’s alternate K-Star girl group comprising several League of Legends champions. He also used his access at the company to encourage her to visit him in Los Angeles, partly on the premise that she might “voice act” for an upcoming project.

Since ending that relationship Stephanie noticed a number of uncomfortable connections between the release of Seraphine and John’s comments. Seraphine’s rollout included included a Twitter account for a version of the character who lived in our world, making her own first visit to Los Angeles to join K/DA. Stephanie alleged that some of the art on this account resembled her own Instagram posts.

Now Riot is saying those similarities are superficial. “Seraphine was independently created by Riot Games and was not based on any individual, including Stephanie,” the company told Gamasutra in an e-mailed statement. “Additionally, the former employee Stephanie is referring to left Riot more than a year ago and was in a department and role that has no input whatsoever into the creative design process.”

“We take all claims of misappropriation seriously and immediately investigated Stephanie’s allegations after receiving a legal demand letter from her attorney last month. We confirmed that her claim of being the basis for Seraphine lacks merit, communicated this to her attorney, and invited him to further discuss the facts with us. We are still waiting for a response.”

Though Riot Games disputes that its champion design team drew inspiration from Stephanie, it lent credibility to Stephanie’s description of John’s untoward behavior. A company spokesperson wrote to Gamasutra that “the behavior she describes would have been a violation of multiple policies.”

To convert an integer i to a string with leading zeros so that it consists of 5 characters, use the format string f'{i:05d}'. The d flag in this expression defines that the result is a decimal value. The str(i).zfill(5) accomplishes the same string conversion of an integer with leading zeros.

Challenge: Given an integer number. How to convert it to a string by adding leading zeros so that the string has a fixed number of positions.

Example: For integer 42, you want to fill it up with leading zeros to the following string with 5 characters: '00042'.

In all methods, we assume that the integer has less than 5 characters.

Method 1: Format String

The first method uses the format string feature in Python 3+. They’re also called replacement fields.

# Integer value to be converted

i = 42 # Method 1: Format String

s1 = f'{i:05d}'

print(s1)

# 00042

The code f'{i:05d}' places the integer i into the newly created string. However, it tells the format language to fill the string to 5 characters with leading '0's using the decimal system. This is the most Pythonic way to accomplish this challenge.

Method 2: zfill()

Another readable and Pythonic way to fill the string with leading 0s is the string.zfill() method.

# Method 2: zfill()

s2 = str(i).zfill(5)

print(s2)

# 00042

The method takes one argument and that is the number of positions of the resulting string. Per default, it fills with 0s.

You can check out the following video tutorial from Finxter Adam:

Method 3: List Comprehension

Many Python coders don’t quite get the f-strings and the zfill() method shown in methods 2 and 3. If you don’t have time learning them, you can also use a more standard way based on string concatenation and list comprehension.

# Method 3: List Comprehension

s3 = str(i)

n = len(s3)

s3 = '0' * (5-len(s3)) + s3

print(s3)

You first convert the integer to a basic string. Then, you create the prefix of 0s you need to fill it up to n=5 characters and concatenate it to the integer’s string representation. The asterisk operator creates a string of 5-len(s3) zeros here.

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

The post Python Int to String with Leading Zeros first appeared on Finxter.

The Applied Math & Statistics Toolkit by Morgan & Claypool bundle is now live on Humble. While not directly books about game development math, they are more on math fundamentals and that is the underpinning of game development. As with all Humble Bundles it is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Essentials of Game Theory
• Matrices in Engineering Problems
• Statistics is Easy 2nd Edition

8$ Tier

• Introduction to Logic 3rd Edition
• An Introduction to Proofs with Set Theory
• Discrete Distributions in Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Analytical Performance Modeling for Computer Systems
• Probability and Statistics for STEM

15$ Tier

• An Introduction to Multivariable Mathematics
• C Programming and Numerical Analysis
• Essentials of Applied Math for Engineers and Scientists 2nd Edition
• Fast Start Advanced Calculus
• Fast Start Differential Calculus
• Fast Start Integral Calculus
• Introduction to Statistics Using R
• An Introduction to Partial Differential Equations
• An Introduction to Numerical Methods for Physical Sciences

As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your funds are allocated, between the publisher, charity, Humble and if you so choose (and thanks if you do) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

Containerization is a booming technology. As many as seventy-five percent of global organizations could be running some type of containerization technology in the near future. Since widely used technologies are more likely to be targeted by hackers, securing containers is especially important. This article will demonstrate how POSIX capabilities are used to secure Podman containers. Podman is the default container management tool in RHEL8.

Determine the Podman container’s privilege mode

Containers run in either privileged or unprivileged mode. In privileged mode, the container uid 0 is mapped to the host’s uid 0. For some use cases, unprivileged containers lack sufficient access to the resources of the host machine. Technologies and techniques including Mandatory Access Control (apparmor, SELinux), seccomp filters, dropping of capabilities, and namespaces help to secure containers regardless of their mode of operation.

To determine the privilege mode from outside the container:

$ podman inspect --format="{{.HostConfig.Privileged}}" <container id>

If the above command returns true then the container is running in privileged mode. If it returns false then the container is running in unprivileged mode.

To determine the privilege mode from inside the container:

$ ip link add dummy0 type dummy

If this command allows you to create an interface then you are running a privileged container. Otherwise you are running an unprivileged container.

Capabilities

Namespaces isolate a container’s processes from arbitrary access to the resources of its host and from access to the resources of other containers running on the same host. Processes within privileged containers, however, might still be able to do things like alter the IP routing table, trace arbitrary processes, and load kernel modules. Capabilities allow one to apply finer-grained restrictions on what resources the processes within a container can access or alter; even when the container is running in privileged mode. Capabilities also allow one to assign privileges to an unprivileged container that it would not otherwise have.

For example, to add the NET_ADMIN capability to an unprivileged container so that a network interface can be created inside of the container, you would run podman with parameters similar to the following:

[root@vm1 ~]# podman run -it --cap-add=NET_ADMIN centos

[root@b27fea33ccf1 /]# ip link add dummy0 type dummy

[root@b27fea33ccf1 /]# ip link

The above commands demonstrate a dummy0 interface being created in an unprivileged container. Without the NET_ADMIN capability, an unprivileged container would not be able to create an interface. The above commands demonstrate how to grant a capability to an unprivileged container.

Currently, there are about 39 capabilities that can be granted or denied. Privileged containers are granted many capabilities by default. It is advisable to drop unneeded capabilities from privileged containers to make them more secure.

To drop all capabilities from a container:

$ podman run -it -d --name mycontainer --cap-drop=all centos

To list a container’s capabilities:

$ podman exec -it 48f11d9fa512 capsh --print

The above command should show that no capabilities are granted to the container.

Refer to the capabilities man page for a complete list of capabilities:

$ man capabilities

Use the capsh command to list the capabilities you currently possess:

$ capsh --print

As another example, the below command demonstrates dropping the NET_RAW capability from a container. Without the NET_RAW capability, servers on the internet cannot be pinged from within the container.

$ podman run -it --name mycontainer1 --cap-drop=net_raw centos

>>> ping google.com (will output error, operation not permitted)

As a final example, if your container were to only need the SETUID and SETGID capabilities, you could achieve such a permission set by dropping all capabilities and then re-adding only those two.

$ podman run -d --cap-drop=all --cap-add=setuid --cap-add=setgid fedora sleep 5 > /dev/null; pscap | grep sleep

The pscap command shown above should show the capabilities that have been granted to the container.

I hope you enjoyed this brief exploration of how capabilities are used to secure Podman containers.

Thank You!