EVE Online developer CCP no longer plans to hold its annual fan gathering in Reykjavik this year, citing global concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus as the reason for the cancellation.

“It is with a heavy heart that we make this decision, and we know this news will be disappointing to our wonderful community, but we feel absolutely compelled to follow the most responsible course of action and prioritize the safety and well-being of our attendees, our staff and of course the general Icelandic public,” reads a statement form the company.

“We realize that the situation a month from now could be very different, but the way events are developing both globally and in Iceland’s neighboring countries, an in-depth and serious review has made it clear that this is a necessary step to take.”

Facebook made a similar call earlier this week by canceling its F8 developer conference, while other companies have likewise made the decision to dial back their travel and event presence as the situation surrounding the coronavirus continues to evolve.

Reports of the coronavirus now known as COVID-19 started circulating in late 2019 and early 2020 as cases began to appear in Wuhan, China and later spread to other cities and countries. Currently, the World Health Organization reports that just over 82,000 cases have been reported globally. So far, 95 percent of those global cases occurred in China, though 46 countries have reported at least one case of COVID-19 according to the WHO.

In this 2016 GDC talk, Epic Games’ Jim Brown examines the psychological and biological underpinnings of how people make choices, and how you can apply these insights to your work making games.

It was an intriguing talk because Brown pulled examples from shipped games to show how and when developers use these ‘rules’ to influence and impact player behavior.

If you missed seeing it in person, good news: now you can watch it for free over 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.

Today we are looking at ShaderED, an open source MIT licensed cross platform GLSL and HLSL shader editor.  We previously covered ShaderED back in July and a fair bit has changed since that release.  ShaderED now includes a full debugger enabling your to step line by line through your shader code.  Additionally ShaderED added a plugin API and now ships with two plugins.

One plugin makes it simple to import shaders from Shadertoy to ShaderED.  The other plugin enables Godot developers to write shaders using the Godot shader language.  Currently only CanvasMaterial is supported.

You can learn more about ShaderED in the video below.

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By Wesley Hilliard
Sunday, March 01, 2020, 05:52 am PT (08:52 am ET)

The LG Innotek factory that supplies iPhone camera modules has closed in Gumi, South Korea after the first case of coronavirus was discovered in the workforce, delivering yet another blow to the Apple supply chain.

The coronavirus can be identified by its halo like ring

As the coronavirus continues its global spread, more news of industry closings and event cancellations arrive each day. Sunday morning’s closures include an LG Innotek and Samsung Electronics plant responsible for mobile device manufacture.

LG Innotek specifically affects Apple, as it is responsible for supplying the camera module for assorted models of the iPhone 11. The unannounced “iPhone 12” may also rely on LG Innotek, which does not bode well for its early production.

Reuters reports that the factory intends to re-open on Tuesday after the infected employee’s floor can be properly disinfected. There are conflicting reports about this in South Korea, however, and AppleInsider is attempting to get clarity from LG on the matter.

The 2019 coronavirus has become a global problem, and we are only just seeing the results of its spread. Apple has backup production facilities in India and Japan, but it is only a matter of time before the backups are affected if the virus continues its spread.

Coronavirus infections vs deaths (data from WHO)

The industry is feeling the effects of the virus as conferences are being cancelled, and stores and buildings being shut down.

Tim Cook is on record saying that the coronavirus is not a long term concern, as he is confident it will be contained. Apple is supplying relief to victims of the virus, and has even started sending care packages to Chinese employees.

Wishing I could just chill at the Animal Crossing booth for the rest of the show #PAXEast2020 pic.twitter.com/0wQ4vhSrZn

— Michael Higham @ PAX EAST (@michaelphigham) February 28, 2020

By Wesley Hilliard
Saturday, February 29, 2020, 10:31 am PT (01:31 pm ET)

Apple hasn’t forgotten its employees in China isolated because of the coronavirus, and is sending them care packages containing food, medical supplies, and an iPad.

Care packages include snacks, face masks, and an iPad

The care packages contain some snacks, face masks and even a new 10.2-inch iPad. Also enclosed with the items is a letter from Apple, to the employee.

Dear Colleagues in Hubei and Wenzhou,

We hope this note finds you heathy and well. Since the last communication with you, we understand that you are all staying strong in this challenging time. We understand the difficulties you are facing and would like to provide our best support to you and your families. Hubei and the city of Wuhan have been hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak, which has now claimed 2,835 lives in China.

We are sending our best wishes to you, on behalf of the entire Apple Team, together with another CareKit for you and your families. In the kit, you will find comfort items and an iPad which can be used to facilitate children’s online learning or help pass the time during the prolonged stay at home.

In addition, a series of counselling and consultation services have been prepared especially for you to help you through this time.

A post containing the letter and package contents on Chinese social network Weibo was discovered by MacRumors on Saturday morning.

Coronavirus infections vs deaths as of February 28

The 2019 coronavirus continues to sweep the globe. New cases appear everyday throughout the world, and the virus continues to be a severe issue in China. AppleInsider has covered the outbreak and its potential damage to Apple and its supply chain since January. As we near new product announcements and another iPhone product cycle, the lack of fully operational facilities in China may have put Apple behind production schedule.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is optimistic about the state of things, and that China is getting the virus under control.

This is it, the month we’ve all been waiting for. After a small delay, Animal Crossing: New Horizons will finally be made available to Switch owners worldwide on 20th March. Believe it or not, but there are other games also being released this month as well.

If lifestyle sims aren’t your thing, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series is also making a return early on in the month. This will follow on with the tactical role-playing series Langrisser. Then, on the same day as Animal Crossing, is the release of DOOM 64. Saint’s Row IV: Relected will follow this one week later. At some point, we’ll also get the new Cooking Mama game, so stay tuned for an update on that one.

Here’s the full list of games coming to the Switch next month. To see each one in action, check out Zion’s latest video above:

Murder by Numbers – March 5th

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX – March 6th

Langrisser I & II – March 10th

Half Past Fate – March 12th

A Street Cat’s Tale – March 12th

My Hero One’s Justice 2 – March 13th

DOOM 64 – March 20th

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – March 20th

One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 – March 27th

Saints Row IV: Re-Elected – March 27th

TY the Tasmanian Tiger – March 31st

Cooking Mama: Cookstar – March 2020

What new releases will you be checking out on the Switch in the month of February? Leave a comment below.

Earlier this week we posted our ranking of all the Fire Emblem games that have received an official release in the West. With a series this good our personal ranking was always going to be contentious, and judging from the comments that proved to be the case. With such a divide in public opinion, we’ve decided to put the vote to the people and get a consensus from you lovely lot.

Perhaps more than any of our other series rankings, this one proved to be a very tight pack indeed. Some readers generally agreed with our picks bar the odd tweak or demotion for a particular entry; others voiced a desire to turn the table entirely on its head! Being fans of the handheld experience when it comes to strategy games, we at Nintendo Life Towers naturally gravitated towards entries on portable hardware. As we were at pains to point out, that is absolutely not to say the GameCube and Wii entries are poor – far from it – but the sweetness of portability certainly influences our personal tastes.

Still, we’ve had our say – now it’s your turn. Below you will find the same selection of Fire Emblem games that we wrangled into our ranked list. Voting is simple: pick your top 3 favourites and hit the vote button. This will then assemble the cumulative ranking of the Fire Emblem games according to you lovely people:

It will be most intriguing to see how this community ranking compares with our personal list. As always, let’s be lovely and civil and awesome to each other and please remember that all opinions are valid! Even wrong ones.

Jokes! Let us know how you voted below.

I just wrote a regular expression in Python that matches multiple times in the text and wondered: how to count the number of matches?

Consider the example where you match an arbitrary number of word characters '[a-z]+' in a given sentence 'python is the best programming language in the world'.

You can watch my explainer video as you read over the tutorial:

How many matches are there in the string? To count the number of matches, you can use multiple methods:

1. Python re.findall()

Use the re.findall(pattern, string) method that returns a list of matching substrings. Then count the length of the returned list. Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> pattern = '[a-z]+'

>>> text = 'python is the best programming language in the world'

>>> len(re.findall(pattern, text))

9

Why is the result 9? Because there are nine matching substrings in the returned list of the re.findall() method:

>>> re.findall(pattern, text)

['python', 'is', 'the', 'best', 'programming', 'language', 'in', 'the', 'world']

This method works great if there are non-overlapping matches.

2. Python re.finditer()

You can also count the number of times a given pattern matches in a text by using the re.finditer(pattern, text) method:

Specification: re.finditer(pattern, text, flags=0)

Definition: returns an iterator that goes over all non-overlapping matches of the pattern in the text.

The flags argument allows you to customize some advanced properties of the regex engine such as whether capitalization of characters should be ignored. You can learn more about the flags argument in my detailed blog tutorial.

Example: You can use the iterator to count the number of matches. In contrast to the re.findall() method described above, this has the advantage that you can analyze the match objects themselves that carry much more information than just the matching substring.

import re

pattern = '[a-z]+'

text = 'python is the best programming language in the world'

for match in re.finditer(pattern, text): print(match) '''

<re.Match object; span=(0, 6), match='python'>

<re.Match object; span=(7, 9), match='is'>

<re.Match object; span=(10, 13), match='the'>

<re.Match object; span=(14, 18), match='best'>

<re.Match object; span=(19, 30), match='programming'>

<re.Match object; span=(31, 39), match='language'>

<re.Match object; span=(40, 42), match='in'>

<re.Match object; span=(43, 46), match='the'>

<re.Match object; span=(47, 52), match='world'> '''

If you want to count the number of matches, you can use a simple count variable:

import re

pattern = '[a-z]+'

text = 'python is the best programming language in the world' count = 0

for match in re.finditer(pattern, text): count += 1 print(count)

# 9

Or a more Pythonic solution:

import re

pattern = '[a-z]+'

text = 'python is the best programming language in the world' print(len([i for i in re.finditer(pattern, text)]))

# 9

This method works great if there are non-overlapping matches.

3. Overlapping Matches

The above two methods work great if there are no overlapping matches. If there are overlapping matches, the regex engine will just ignore them because it “consumes” the whole matching substrings and starts matching the next pattern only after the stop index of the previous match.

So if you need to find the number of overlapping matches, you need to use a different approach.

The idea is to keep track of the start position in the previous match and increment it by one after each match:

import re

pattern = '99'

text = '999 ways of writing 99 - 99999' left = 0

count = 0

while True: match = re.search(pattern, text[left:]) if not match: break count += 1 left += match.start() + 1

print(count)

# 7 

By keeping track of the start index of the previous match in the left variable, we can control where to look for the next match in the string. Note that we use Python’s slicing operation text[left:] to ignore all left characters that are already considered in previous matches. In each loop iteration, we match another pattern in the text. This works even if those matches overlap.

Where to Go From Here

You’ve learned three ways of finding the number of matches of a given pattern in a string.

If you struggle with regular expressions, check out our free 20,000 word regex tutorial on the Finxter blog! It’ll give you regex superpowers!