Posted by: xSicKxBot - 03-01-2020, 11:31 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Shovel Knight Artist Is "Sure" That A Direct Sequel Will Happen Eventually
The original Shovel Knight saga from Yacht Club Games wrapped up in 2019 with Shovel Knight: King of Cards, the game's final expansion. Two spin-offs have been planned, with Shovel Knight Dig and Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon both in the works, but fans might be curious about whether a direct sequel will ever follow.
Shovel Knight 2 has not been announced or confirmed, but a member of the game's development team believes it will happen. Speaking to Dualshockers, Yacht Club Games artist Sandy Gordon says that we have definitely not "seen the end of Shovel Knight."
Asked whether this means there will be a sequel, he says that he is "sure that’ll happen at some point: it’s something we talk about a lot.”
Polish developers Thing Trunk are on a mission. An ambitious mission to re-imagine classic games from the Golden Age of PC gaming. The plan is that the Return2Games series will consist of a total of seven games, that, as well as giving a nostalgia kick to veterans, will also attract a whole new audience. Book of Demons is the first in the series, with its hack and slash gameplay being a tribute to Diablo. The Return2Games series is set in the Paperverse, a charming land of pop-up-book landscapes and paper-thin characters. These characters are nicely illustrated, with the limited animation and OTT voiceovers evoking the atmosphere of a children’s puppet show. The inspiration may be Diablo but the style and gameplay are far more light-hearted and forgiving.
The quest begins in a desolate town, where the only inhabitants foolhardy enough to hang around are a healer, a barmaid, a sage and a fortune teller. Everyone else seems to have, quite sensibly, scarpered to escape the wrath of the Archdemon. Everyone, that is, apart from our hero, who has taken it upon himself to save the day. You can exchange gossip with these characters, and if you cross their palms with silver, they can be persuaded to help you in various ways. After leaving the village, the only option is to explore the basement of the town’s Cathedral. You will soon discover that the gossip is true and that a Gordon Ramsay style demon lurks in the maze of corridors, preparing meals of human flesh for his master (at least Veganuary is behind us). Moving ever downwards, the next stop is the catacombs, where an army of the dead has been resurrected by the Antipope. The final port of call is Hell itself for a showdown with the Archdemon.
The tutorial has been thoughtfully constructed, using waypoints to guide you through a level. Each point of interest opens an explanation window, complete with illustrative examples. It is not a hard game to fathom, but this well-crafted introduction gives you every confidence in the designers, making you eager to get hacking and slashing. Navigation is made simple by the inclusion of a mini-map and footprints that enable easy retracing of your path. A checklist of valuable items and their vicinity ensures that no plunder is left unplundered. One type of treasure that is especially useful are item cards. These are often found on bookshelves and can be placed into any free slots.
You will soon have more cards than slots but, luckily, you can pay the Sage to open extra slots. There are three types of cards; items, spells and artefacts. Items such as healing potions will have limited doses, but they can be refilled by the fortune teller. Spells require mana to cast and artefacts provide passive background benefits, such as a lucky rabbit foot (unless you are the rabbit) that provides some protection from critical strikes. You will have to pay the sage to identify some cards and the fortune teller can also use runes to increase a card’s level. Even during combat, you can still juggle cards between slots, which provides some extra flexibility.
Initially, the only choice is to play as a sword-wielding warrior but, later, you can unlock a rogue who comes armed with a bow and a spellcasting wizard, who, rather incongruously, has a strong resemblance to Mr T. The procedurally generated isometric dungeons take an on-rails approach with a simple tap moving your hero of choice through the mostly linear corridors. Your character will stop at junctions, a quick tap will also bring him to a halt. A tap will also attack enemies, open chests, examine features and do pretty much everything else that you could wish to do. Once an enemy is selected, your character will continue to attack automatically but you also have the option to speed up the assault by tapping and holding. Some enemies are heavily armoured or cast spells; you will need to focus your initial attacks on destroying these attributes before you can begin to inflict damage.
Despite its accessibility, Book of Demons can still offer a stiff challenge. There are three difficulty settings and the deeper dungeon levels will assail you with enemies and spells to the extent that the screen begins to resemble a bullet hell shooter. When things get too chaotic the temptation is to tap wildly and hope for the best, but it is usually best to take a little more care. Some monsters will carry shields or get really angry if you attack them too rapidly. Others will explode in clouds of poison or drop from above, stunning you for a short time. Don’t be misled by the rather silly names of the bosses either, they can also be formidable adversaries, with their own special abilities. Most have several stages, sometimes they will be linked to other enemies that have to be defeated first or they will have their own invulnerable spheres of influence. It certainly adds a bit more depth to the central mechanic.
That said, things never become frustratingly difficult. There are plenty of opportunities to visit the numerous fountains that restore health and mana. Even death need not be final. Reach the point of your demise, marked by a tombstone, and all your processions can be reacquired. The developers really have strived to make the game as approachable as possible. Their flexiscope system even enables players to tailor the length of the game, whilst still ensuring a rewarding mix of challenges and booty, whatever your time constraints.
There is much more to Book of Demons than initial impressions suggest. It can feel a little repetitive and automated at times, but thoughtful design decisions help to maintain interest. With three significantly different characters, each with their own signature cards and three levels of difficulty the game certainly warrants replaying even after completing your first eight-hour run through.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-27-2020, 04:44 PM - Forum: Windows
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Get your Minecraft Festival tickets starting March 6
You know that feeling just before the guests arrive at your epic house party? You’ve spent hours polishing the place, changing outfits half a dozen times (“does this cape go with my mood and my complexion?”) cutting perfectly cube-shaped pieces of cake, and digging through your floordrobe for the first time in years (“look, there are wooden blocks down here!”) It’s almost time, and you engage the doorbell in a death-stare contest in the hopes it won’t chime until everything is perfect.
Well, that’s basically us right now, but on a slightly larger scale and extended timeline! It’s only February, and we’re already working around the clock to prepare for Minecraft Festival at the end of September. Perhaps that sounds overzealous, but remember – our version of a house party will be a fully-fledged Minecraft experience with thousands of guests, featuring interactive exhibits, inclusive gameplay, fiercely competitive tournaments, intense live entertainment, exclusive merchandise, creativity-sparking panels and the opportunity to meet your favorite content creator or Mojang developer. Aaand it will go on for three days. So we do have a few things on our mind!
Over the frantic pounding of hammers, scribbling of pens and explosions of Creepers going on here, let me tell you about a few things we have planned for you. Minecraft Festival is a party where you are the guest of honor! It’s a celebration of the epic adventure we’ve all shared for the past 10 years, and a sneak peek at the journey ahead. Mojang will bring all Minecraft games (many playable!), and exhibitors from around the world plan to show what they have been working on.
Oh, and remember MINECON Live? The globally available live show featuring all the biggest Minecraft news? We’ve even squeezed that into Minecraft Festival! This portion of the event is now called Minecraft Live and is still the place for epic announcements, nail-biting excitement and deep-dives into the past, present and future of Minecraft. We’ll stream it live, directly from Minecraft Festival. And who knows, some lucky Festival attendees may even get a seat in the studio audience!
Are we forgetting something? Creepers? No, mentioned those. Canapes? Nope, not that kind of party. Capes! Ah, yes, capes! Every attendee will get an exclusive Minecraft Festival cape, compatible with both Java and Bedrock.
“Everyone is welcome!” says Lydia Winters, Chief Brand Officer at Mojang. “We think of Minecraft Festival as a place to meet, hang out with, and learn from like-minded players – all in an interactive space full of surprising experiences and opportunities for discovery.”
Well, that sounds exciting, but let’s get specific! First, jot down the dates September 25-27 in your calendar or on some other reasonably flat surface, because that’s when we’ll be at Orange County Convention Center in sunny Florida. There will be exciting goings-on throughout the three days, so make it a long weekend if you can! If not, there will also be the opportunity to swing by for a single day. Here is a breakdown of the various ticket options available:
Victory Heat Rally Developer Is Aiming For Switch Release
“Neo Super Scaler” racer Victory Heat Rally hits Kickstarter this week, and developer Sky Devil Palm has stated that it could be coming to Switch.
Inspired by Sega’s classic “Super Scaler” titles like Out Run and Power Drift, Victory Heat Rally sports a lovely pixel-based artwork and a pumping soundtrack, and reminds us of the good old days of ’80s, before polygons took over. Ah, nostalgia.
You can sign up on the game’s website to be notified when more information is available. A demo is launching on PC on Friday 28th – will you be giving it a try? Let us know with a comment.
Rigid Force Redux Will Make The Wait For R-Type Final 2 A Little Bit Easier
R-Type Final 2 might be on the horizon, but we’ve got a while to wait yet – which makes the announcement of Rigid Force Redux all the more appealing.
Developed by com8com1 and published by Headup Games, Rigid Force Redux is inspired by Irem’s coin-op classic, as well as the likes of Konami’s Gradius and Square’s Einhander.
It will “challenge players to battle furious waves of sci-fi-themed enemies while powering up their ship with Force Shards and Energy Orbs” and is coming to both the Switch and Xbox One this summer.
com8com1’s Head of Development, Marcel Rebenstorf, has previously worked at Ubisoft Blue Byte on titles such as ANNO and Might and Magic Heroes Online, and has spent the past few years working on this new title.
Check out the trailer and let us know if you’re excited about playing this title on your Switch.
Rainbow Six Siege Update--Test Server Patch Notes Make A Major Change To Ying
Rainbow Six Siege is testing out a major change for one of its operators with the latest test server patch. Ying, an operator introduced back in Year 2, is ditching her frag grenades in favor of a claymore.
The notes for this patch on Reddit explain the rationale behind this decision: "We still feel we want to emphasize her teamwork, and are making a few adjustments while she's on the TS to gather some more data." There's no guarantee that this change will make its way over into the game proper, but if it tests well, it just might.
Significant reworks that change weapons are rare in Rainbow Six Siege, although recently the developers announced that Tachanka would be ditching the turret in favor of a grenade launcher. Obviously Ubisoft is doing something right, because the game is more popular than ever.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-27-2020, 05:36 AM - Forum: Python
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Regex Special Characters – Examples in Python Re
Regular expressions are a strange animal. Many students find them difficult to understand – do you?
I realized that a major reason for this is simply that they don’t understand the special regex characters. To put it differently: understand the special characters and everything else in the regex space will come much easier to you.
Regular expressions are built from characters. There are two types of characters: literal characters and special characters.
Literal Characters
Let’s start with the absolute first thing you need to know with regular expressions: a regular expression (short: regex) searches for a given pattern in a given string.
What’s a pattern? In its most basic form, a pattern can be a literal character. So the literal characters 'a', 'b', and 'c' are all valid regex patterns.
For example, you can search for the regex pattern 'a' in the string 'hello world' but it won’t find a match. You can also search for the pattern 'a' in the string 'hello woman' and there is a match: the second last character in the string.
Based on the simple insight that a literal character is a valid regex pattern, you’ll find that a combination of literal characters is also a valid regex pattern. For example, the regex pattern 'an' matches the last two characters in the string 'hello woman'.
Summary: Regular expressions are built from characters. An important class of characters are the literal characters. In principle, you can use all Unicode literal characters in your regex pattern.
Special Characters
However, the power of regular expressions come from their abstraction capability. Instead of writing the character set[abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz], you’d write [a-z] or even \w. The latter is a special regex character—and pros know them by heart. In fact, regex experts seldomly match literal characters. In most cases, they use more advanced constructs or special characters for various reasons such as brevity, expressiveness, or generality.
So what are the special characters you can use in your regex patterns?
Let’s have a look at the following table that contains all special characters in Python’s re package for regular expression processing.
Special Character
Meaning
\n
The newline symbol is not a special symbol particular to regex only, it’s actually one of the most widely-used, standard characters. However, you’ll see the newline character so often that I just couldn’t write this list without including it. For example, the regex 'hello\nworld' matches a string where the string 'hello' is placed in one line and the string 'world' is placed into the second line.
\t
The tabular character is, like the newline character, not a “regex-specific” symbol. It just encodes the tabular space ' ' which is different to a sequence of whitespaces (even if it doesn’t look different over here). For example, the regex 'hello\n\tworld' matches the string that consists of 'hello' in the first line and ' world' in the second line (with a leading tab character).
\s
The whitespace character is, in contrast to the newline character, a special symbol of the regex libraries. You’ll find it in many other programming languages, too. The problem is that you often don’t know which type of whitespace is used: tabular characters, simple whitespaces, or even newlines. The whitespace character '\s' simply matches any of them. For example, the regex '\s*hello\s+world' matches the string ' \t \n hello \n \n \t world', as well as 'hello world'.
\S
The whitespace-negation character matches everything that does not match \s.
\w
The word character regex simplifies text processing significantly. It represents the class of all characters used in typical words (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and '_'). This simplifies the writing of complex regular expressions significantly. For example, the regex '\w+' matches the strings 'hello', 'bye', 'Python', and 'Python_is_great'.
\W
The word-character-negation. It matches any character that is not a word character.
\b
The word boundary is also a special symbol used in many regex tools. You can use it to match, as the name suggests, the boundary between the a word character (\w) and a non-word (\W) character. But note that it matches only the empty string! You may ask: why does it exist if it doesn’t match any character? The reason is that it doesn’t “consume” the character right in front or right after a word. This way, you can search for whole words (or parts of words) and return only the word but not the delimiting characters that separate the word, e.g., from other words.
\d
The digit character matches all numeric symbols between 0 and 9. You can use it to match integers with an arbitrary number of digits: the regex '\d+' matches integer numbers '10', '1000', '942', and '99999999999'.
\D
Matches any non-digit character. This is the inverse of \d and it’s equivalent to [^0-9].
But these are not all characters you can use in a regular expression.
There are also meta characters for the regex engine that allow you to do much more powerful stuff.
A good example is the asterisk operator that matches “zero or more” occurrences of the preceding regex. For example, the pattern .*txt matches an arbitrary number of arbitrary characters followed by the suffix 'txt'. This pattern has two special regex meta characters: the dot . and the asterisk operator *. You’ll now learn about those meta characters:
Regex Meta Characters
Feel free to watch the short video about the most important regex meta characters:
Next, you’ll get a quick and dirty overview of the most important regex operations and how to use them in Python.
Here are the most important regex operators:
Meta Character
Meaning
.
The wild-card operator (dot) matches any character in a string except the newline character '\n'. For example, the regex '...' matches all words with three characters such as 'abc', 'cat', and 'dog'.
*
The zero-or-more asterisk operator matches an arbitrary number of occurrences (including zero occurrences) of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat*’ matches the strings 'ca', 'cat', 'catt', 'cattt', and 'catttttttt'.
?
The zero-or-one operator matches (as the name suggests) either zero or one occurrences of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat?’ matches both strings ‘ca’ and ‘cat’ — but not ‘catt’, ‘cattt’, and ‘catttttttt’.
+
The at-least-one operator matches one or more occurrences of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat+’ does not match the string ‘ca’ but matches all strings with at least one trailing character ‘t’ such as ‘cat’, ‘catt’, and ‘cattt’.
^
The start-of-string operator matches the beginning of a string. For example, the regex ‘^p’ would match the strings ‘python’ and ‘programming’ but not ‘lisp’ and ‘spying’ where the character ‘p’ does not occur at the start of the string.
$
The end-of-string operator matches the end of a string. For example, the regex ‘py$’ would match the strings ‘main.py’ and ‘pypy’ but not the strings ‘python’ and ‘pypi’.
A|B
The OR operator matches either the regex A or the regex B. Note that the intuition is quite different from the standard interpretation of the or operator that can also satisfy both conditions. For example, the regex ‘(hello)|(hi)’ matches strings ‘hello world’ and ‘hi python’. It wouldn’t make sense to try to match both of them at the same time.
AB
The AND operator matches first the regex A and second the regex B, in this sequence. We’ve already seen it trivially in the regex ‘ca’ that matches first regex ‘c’ and second regex ‘a’.
Note that I gave the above operators some more meaningful names (in bold) so that you can immediately grasp the purpose of each regex. For example, the ‘^’ operator is usually denoted as the ‘caret’ operator. Those names are not descriptive so I came up with more kindergarten-like words such as the “start-of-string” operator.
Let’s dive into some examples!
Examples
import re text = ''' Ha! let me see her: out, alas! he's cold: Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. ''' print(re.findall('.a!', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences of an arbitrary character that is
followed by the character sequence 'a!'.
['Ha!'] ''' print(re.findall('is.*and', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences of the word 'is',
followed by an arbitrary number of characters
and the word 'and'.
['is settled, and'] ''' print(re.findall('her:?', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',
followed by zero or one occurrences of the colon ':'.
['her:', 'her', 'her'] ''' print(re.findall('her:+', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',
followed by one or more occurrences of the colon ':'.
['her:'] ''' print(re.findall('^Ha.*', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences where the string starts with
the character sequence 'Ha', followed by an arbitrary
number of characters except for the new-line character. Can you figure out why Python doesn't find any?
[] ''' print(re.findall('\n$', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences where the new-line character '\n'
occurs at the end of the string.
['\n'] ''' print(re.findall('(Life|Death)', text)) '''
Finds all occurrences of either the word 'Life' or the
word 'Death'.
['Life', 'Death'] '''
In these examples, you’ve already seen the special symbol \n which denotes the new-line character in Python (and most other languages). There are many special characters, specifically designed for regular expressions.
Where to Go From Here
You’ve learned all special characters of regular expressions, as well as meta characters. This will give you a strong basis for improving your regex skills.
If you want to accelerate your skills, you need a good foundation. Check out my brand-new Python book “Python One-Liners (Amazon Link)” which boosts your skills from zero to hero—in a single line of Python code!
The 140th GalaQuiz will be LIVE soon, win up to $50 in GalaCredit!
[www.indiegala.com] The GalaQuiz will take place in less than 25 minutes from this announcement Today's GalaQuiz[www.indiegala.com] hints are up. The theme will be Naruto. This is the final quiz before the leaderboard reset and rewards! The timer had a slight hiccup and it got stuck, so the quiz got delayed another half an hour than the usual time, apologies about that.
Humble are running a new bundle of interest to game developers, specifically artists, the HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: NATURAL & DIGITAL PAINTING KIT bundle. This bundle is a collection of software and addons for creating digital art as well as replicating natural media. As with all bundles this one is organized into tiers, if you buy a higher dollar value tier you get all of the tiers below it.
1$ Tier
18$ Tier
Flame Painter 4
Amberlight 2
Several particle brushes for Flame Painter 4
20$ Tier
Rebelle 3
Flame Painter Connect Photoshop Plugin
Several Papers for Rebelle 3
More Brushes for Flame Painter 4
Rebelle is a natural media painting application, Flame Painter 4 is a particle system brush based painting application (that can be plugged into Photoshop), Amberlight is extremely interest but hard to describe, while Inspirit is basically just a toy.
As with all Humble bundles, you can decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, humble, charity and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link. You can learn more about the bundle and see the four main applications in action in the video below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-27-2020, 05:24 AM - Forum: Windows
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Microsoft scholarship program fosters collaboration with academia
Cecily Morrison wants to build technology that enables people to live their lives the way they want and accomplish things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
“I am passionate about demonstrating in the real how AI can fundamentally change people’s lives,” says Morrison, who is collaborating on the work with Oussama Metatla of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
Microsoft researchers are developing visual agent technology like the above system, which is designed to help people who are blind or have low vision find and identify people in their vicinity, as part of Project Tokyo. Principal Researcher Cecily Morrison will be collaborating with a PhD supervisor from the University of Bristol to build on that work through the Microsoft Research PhD Scholarship Programme in EMEA.
The value of collaboration
As part of the program selection process, Cambridge researchers invite a PhD supervisor at an EMEA institution to collaborate. Often, they have a preexisting relationship with the supervisor or an interest in working with them. Together, the pair writes and submits a proposal. Proposals are reviewed and selected by Microsoft researchers in a two-stage review process. The researchers and supervisors of the selected proposals then choose a PhD student to work on the project.
The collaborative nature of the program supports all parties involved in important ways. The program, for example, gives researchers a chance to conduct more exploratory research than they might normally be able to undertake in their day to day and to draw on the unique perspectives and knowledge of and students. PhD supervisors and students—encouraged to attend meetings at Cambridge’s lab, where they get to experience firsthand the breadth and depth of research at Microsoft—are introduced to such professional opportunities as visiting researcher positions for faculty and internships for students.
The program also allows for resource sharing. PhD supervisors and students can benefit from Microsoft technology and computational power such as cloud services while academia offers facilities and equipment researchers don’t have access to.
“I see this as a way to do longer-term research than we can do in Microsoft Research, but that couldn’t be done in academia because they don’t have access to the technology,” says Morrison.
“Being able to co-supervise brilliant young researchers is rewarding in many ways: being able to foster new research, mentor talent, develop new ideas, and learn new techniques,” she says. “It’s invaluable as a seasoned scientist.”
Dunn and Martello’s project, “The Pluripotency Program in Human Embryonic Stem Cells,” builds on the pair’s work in stem cell research. They’ll focus on how personalized stem cells are generated, a greater understanding of which could help inform new medical diagnostics and treatments.
Over the next several months, selected researchers and PhD supervisors will be recruiting students for their projects. For more information or to apply, visit the program home page. Positions will be posted as they become available.
EMEA PhD Award
As a complement to the EMEA PhD Scholarship Programme, Microsoft Research is excited to announce the Microsoft Research EMEA PhD Award, a new research grant for PhD students in computing-related fields who are in their third year or beyond at universities in EMEA.
Award recipients will receive the following:
$15,000 to put toward their doctoral thesis work for the upcoming academic year
an invitation, including travel and accommodations, to attend the two-day Microsoft Research PhD Summit workshop in North America, where they will present their work and be mentored by Microsoft researchers
an offer to intern at the Cambridge lab
Applications are due by 11:59 UTC on April 1. To find out more, including how to apply, visit the EMEA PhD Award home page.
in GalaCredit!
