Tough day at the office? When it comes to getting adrenaline coursing and your pulse racing, there are plenty of video games that fit the bill. Whether battling to recover your humanity in Dark Souls, making it to the final two in a round of Fortnite or going up against a rock-hard retro classic, there are more than enough Switch games to get you red-faced and riled up.

But what if you’re looking to soothe the soul rather than cleave it from a corpse? What if you’re combating stress with some old fashioned R and R? What are the most relaxing games on Switch? Fortunately, the huge library of games on the console has you covered, so if you’re looking for Switch games to help you chill, you’ve come to the right place. Below we’ve assembled a selection of relaxing Switch games to ease your hypertension with a diverting balm that will calm even the most tumultuous of minds.

So if you’ve come home with that vein in your temples bulging, fetch yourself a calming beverage, find a comfy chair and settle down with our picks of the most relaxing Switch games…

Publisher: 505 Games / Developer: 505 Games

Release Date: 29th Nov 2018 (USA) / 29th Nov 2018 (UK/EU)

If underwater sections in video games instantly get your pulse racing, Abzu is the antidote to the stress of an air meter. This game offers a gentle underwater adventure as you explore the ocean depths at your leisure. The marine delights of Abzu’s seascapes are a treat for the eyes accompanied by a gorgeous orchestral soundtrack, with fabulous 3D sound if you’re playing with headphones. From the art director of Journey, this is a serene experience that should be your first port of call if you’re looking to get away from it all.

Publisher: Devolver Digital / Developer: Nomada Studio

Release Date: 13th Dec 2018 (USA) / 13th Dec 2018 (UK/EU)

A 2D platformer from Nomada Studio, you journey through a crumbling, monochrome, metaphorical land in GRIS, gradually spreading watercolours as you go on a wonderfully short and sweet adventure. With light puzzling, generous platforming and a dusting of collectibles, this is a touching journey of a young girl running through an incredibly delicate and beautiful world. With an art style that owes much to Ervind Earle, it’s an unmissable experience and perfect if you’re after a Switch game to calm your nerves.

Publisher: Grey Box / Developer: Tequila Works

Release Date: 14th Nov 2017 (USA) / 17th Nov 2017 (UK/EU)

When it first released on Switch, lonely 3D adventure RiME wasn’t in great shape performance-wise. It suffered from appalling frame rate hiccups which affected the masterful adventure beneath and made the Switch port difficult to recommend if you had access to the game on any other platform.

However, patches arrived and addressed the most egregious performance issues, and while the frame rate certainly still chugs here and there, the improvements allow the magical game world and environmental puzzles beneath to shine brighter than before, to the extent that RiME on Switch is a much easier recommendation now. If you’re a frame rate purist for whom a solid 30fps is the absolute minimum, you’ll still want to hunt this down elsewhere. If you can stomach the odd drop and see this on sale, though, we’d recommend picking it up if you’re in the market for a calming, beautifully desolate 3D adventure.

Publisher: Team 17 / Developer: Villa Gorilla

Release Date: 29th May 2018 (USA) / 29th May 2018 (UK/EU)

Who would have thought pinball and Metroidvania could blend so beautifully? You control Yoku, a beetle postmaster making deliveries around the mystical island of Mokumana. Your beetle buddy is tethered to a ball which flings him around the huge 2D island when launched by the many sets of bumpers and flippers under your control and dotted across the landscape. A novel adventure that combines a colourful game world with a soothing soundtrack, Yoku’s Island Express is a lovely little game which we can’t recommend enough.

Please note that some links on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click them and make a purchase we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Please read our FTC Disclosure for more information.

Publisher: The Voxel Agents / Developer: The Voxel Agents

Release Date: 20th Sep 2018 (USA) / 20th Sep 2018 (UK/EU)

The Gardens Between presents intricate puzzles solved by rewinding and directing time, and the game is wrapped up in a beautifully charming aesthetic which belies the complexity beneath. A relaxing soundtrack accompanies this unusual puzzler which will gently massage your grey matter as you make your way to the top of various islands and through a bittersweet, wordless narrative courtesy of Australian indie studio The Voxel Agents. The Gardens Between is a rejuvenating balm for your ol’ brainbox and comes recommended.

Publisher: ConcernedApe / Developer: ConcernedApe

Release Date: 5th Oct 2017 (USA) / 5th Oct 2017 (UK/EU)

Until the arrival of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the best digital life sim on Switch has to be Stardew Valley. This farm management title channels the classic gameplay of Harvest Moon into a huge retro-inspired experience that will devour your days if you let it. It takes a while to get into, and you definitely get out what you put in, but Stardew Valley has almost limitless layers to uncover and if you’re ready to invest a significant portion of your free time into a charming, calming game experience, there are few better options on Switch right now.

In 2012, EA and Bioware released Mass Effect 3 on the Wii U. Now, the series is finally making its return to a Nintendo system. Instead of a game release, though, a Mass Effect-themed Mash-Up Pack for Mojang’s hit title Minecraft has been released (again), this time on the Minecraft Marketplace.

This one is similar to previous packs – adding in new themed locations (such as the Mars Base Camp), and a total of 36 new skins from the original trilogy series. You can play as Shepard, Liara, the Illusive Man, Garrus and even Krogans. This mash-up pack also includes custom-made textures, Mass Effect-style menus, and an appropriately-themed soundtrack, based on the third entry in the series.

Here’s a bit extra from the Minecraft website:

I’m Commander Shephard and this my favorite mash-up pack on the Citadel

Will you be revisiting the Mass Effect trilogy series in Minecraft? Leave a comment down below.

This tutorial explains everything you need to know about matching groups in Python’s re package for regular expressions. You may have also read the term “capture groups” which points to the same concept.

As you read through the tutorial, you can also watch the tutorial video where I explain everything in a simple way:

So let’s start with the basics:

Matching Group ()

What’s a matching group?

Like you use parentheses to structure mathematical expressions, (2 + 2) * 2 versus 2 + (2 * 2), you use parentheses to structure regular expressions. An example regex that does this is 'a(b|c)'. The whole content enclosed in the opening and closing parentheses is called matching group (or capture group). You can have multiple matching groups in a single regex. And you can even have hierarchical matching groups, for example 'a(b|(cd))'.

One big advantage of a matching group is that it captures the matched substring. You can retrieve it in other parts of the regular expression—or after analyzing the result of the whole regex matching.

Let’s have a short example for the most basic use of a matching group—to structure the regex.

Say you create regex b?(a.)* with the matching group (a.) that matches all patterns starting with zero or one occurrence of character 'b' and an arbitrary number of two-character-sequences starting with the character 'a'. Hence, the strings 'bacacaca', 'aaaa', '' (the empty string), and 'Xababababab' all match your regex.

The use of the parentheses for structuring the regular expression is intuitive and should come naturally to you because the same rules apply as for arithmetic operations. However, there’s a more advanced use of regex groups: retrieval.

You can retrieve the matched content of each matching group. So the next question naturally arises:

How to Get the First Matching Group?

There are two scenarios when you want to access the content of your matching groups:

1. Access the matching group in the regex pattern to reuse partially matched text from one group somewhere else.
2. Access the matching group after the whole match operation to analyze the matched text in your Python code.

In the first case, you simply get the first matching group with the \number special sequence. For example, to get the first matching group, you’d use the \1 special sequence. Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> re.search(r'(j.n) is \1','jon is jon')

<re.Match object; span=(0, 10), match='jon is jon'>

You’ll use this feature a lot because it gives you much more expression power: for example, you can search for a name in a text-based on a given pattern and then process specifically this name in the rest of the text (and not all other names that would also fit the pattern).

Note that the numbering of the groups start with \1 and not with \0—a rare exception to the rule that in programming, all numbering starts with 0.

In the second case, you want to know the contents of the first group after the whole match. How do you do that?

The answer is also simple: use the m.group(0) method on the matching object m. Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> m = re.search(r'(j.n)','jon is jon')

>>> m.group(1) 'jon'

The numbering works consistently with the previously introduced regex group numbering: start with identifier 1 to access the contents of the first group.

How to Get All Other Matching Groups?

Again, there are two different intentions when asking this question:

1. Access the matching group in the regex pattern to reuse partially matched text from one group somewhere else.
2. Access the matching group after the whole match operation to analyze the matched text in your Python code.

In the first case, you use the special sequence \2 to access the second matching group, \3 to access the third matching group, and \99 to access the ninety-ninth matching group.

Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> re.search(r'(j..) (j..)\s+\2', 'jon jim jim')

<re.Match object; span=(0, 11), match='jon jim jim'>

>>> re.search(r'(j..) (j..)\s+\2', 'jon jim jon')

>>> 

As you can see, the special sequence \2 refers to the matching contents of the second group 'jim'.

In the second case, you can simply increase the identifier too to access the other matching groups in your Python code:

>>> import re

>>> m = re.search(r'(j..) (j..)\s+\2', 'jon jim jim')

>>> m.group(0) 'jon jim jim'

>>> m.group(1) 'jon'

>>> m.group(2) 'jim'

This code also shows an interesting feature: if you use the identifier 0 as an argument to the m.group(0) method, the regex module will give you the contents of the whole match. You can think of it as the first group being the whole match.

Named Groups: (?P<name>…) and (?P=name)

Accessing the captured group using the notation \number is not always convenient and sometimes not even possible (for example if you have more than 99 groups in your regex). A major disadvantage of regular expressions is that they tend to be hard to read. It’s therefore important to know about the different tweaks to improve readability.

One such optimization is a named group. It’s really just that: a matching group that captures part of the match but with one twist: it has a name. Now, you can use this name to access the captured group at a later point in your regular expression pattern. This can improve readability of the regular expression.

import re

pattern = '(?P<quote>["\']).*(?P=quote)'

text = 'She said "hi"'

print(re.search(pattern, text))

# <re.Match object; span=(9, 13), match='"hi"'>

The code searches for substrings that are enclosed in either single or double quotes. You first match the opening quote by using the regex ["\']. You escape the single quote, \' so that the Python regex engine does not assume (wrongly) that the single quote indicates the end of the string. You then use the same group to match the closing quote of the same character (either a single or double quote).

Non-Capturing Groups (?:…)

In the previous examples, you’ve seen how to match and capture groups with the parentheses (...). You’ve learned that each match of this basic group operator is captured so that you can retrieve it later in the regex with the special commands \1, \2, …, \99 or after the match on the matched object m with the method m.group(1), m.group(2), and so on.

But what if you don’t need that? What if you just need to keep your regex pattern in order—but you don’t want to capture the contents of a matching group?

The simple solution is the non-capturing group operation (?: ... ). You can use it just like the capturing group operation ( ... ). Here’s an example:

>>>import re

>>> re.search('(?:python|java) is great', 'python is great. java is great.')

<re.Match object; span=(0, 15), match='python is great'>

The non-capturing group exists with the sole purpose to structure the regex. You cannot use its content later:

>>> m = re.search('(?:python|java) is great', 'python is great. java is great.')

>>> m.group(1)

Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#28>", line 1, in <module> m.group(1)

IndexError: no such group

>>> 

If you try to access the contents of the non-capturing group, the regex engine will throw an IndexError: no such group.

Of course, there’s a straightforward alternative to non-capturing groups. You can simply use the normal (capturing) group but don’t access its contents. Only rarely will the performance penalty of capturing a group that’s not needed have any meaningful impact on your overall application.

Positive Lookahead (?=…)

The concept of lookahead is a very powerful one and any advanced coder should know it. A friend recently told me that he had written a complicated regex that ignores the order of occurrences of two words in a given text. It’s a challenging problem and without the concept of lookahead, the resulting code will be complicated and hard to understand. However, the concept of lookahead makes this problem simple to write and read.

But first things first: how does the lookahead assertion work?

In normal regular expression processing, the regex is matched from left to right. The regex engine “consumes” partially matching substrings. The consumed substring cannot be matched by any other part of the regex.

Figure: A simple example of lookahead. The regular expression engine matches (“consumes”) the string partially. Then it checks whether the remaining pattern could be matched without actually matching it.

Think of the lookahead assertion as a non-consuming pattern match. The regex engine goes from the left to the right—searching for the pattern. At each point, it has one “current” position to check if this position is the first position of the remaining match. In other words, the regex engine tries to “consume” the next character as a (partial) match of the pattern.

The advantage of the lookahead expression is that it doesn’t consume anything. It just “looks ahead” starting from the current position whether what follows would theoretically match the lookahead pattern. If it doesn’t, the regex engine cannot move on. Next, it “backtracks”—which is just a fancy way of saying: it goes back to a previous decision and tries to match something else.

Positive Lookahead Example: How to Match Two Words in Arbitrary Order?

What if you want to search a given text for pattern A AND pattern B—but in no particular order? If both patterns appear anywhere in the string, the whole string should be returned as a match.

Now, this is a bit more complicated because any regular expression pattern is ordered from left to right. A simple solution is to use the lookahead assertion (?.*A) to check whether regex A appears anywhere in the string. (Note we assume a single line string as the .* pattern doesn’t match the newline character by default.)

Let’s first have a look at the minimal solution to check for two patterns anywhere in the string (say, patterns ‘hi’ AND ‘you’).

>>> import re

>>> pattern = '(?=.*hi)(?=.*you)'

>>> re.findall(pattern, 'hi how are yo?')

[]

>>> re.findall(pattern, 'hi how are you?')

['']

In the first example, both words do not appear. In the second example, they do.

Let’s go back to the expression (?=.*hi)(?=.*you) to match strings that contain both ‘hi’ and ‘you’. Why does it work?

The reason is that the lookahead expressions don’t consume anything. You first search for an arbitrary number of characters .*, followed by the word hi. But because the regex engine hasn’t consumed anything, it’s still in the same position at the beginning of the string. So, you can repeat the same for the word you.

Note that this method doesn’t care about the order of the two words:

>>> import re

>>> pattern = '(?=.*hi)(?=.*you)'

>>> re.findall(pattern, 'hi how are you?')

['']

>>> re.findall(pattern, 'you are how? hi!')

['']

No matter which word “hi” or “you” appears first in the text, the regex engine finds both.

You may ask: why’s the output the empty string? The reason is that the regex engine hasn’t consumed any character. It just checked the lookaheads. So the easy fix is to consume all characters as follows:

>>> import re

>>> pattern = '(?=.*hi)(?=.*you).*'

>>> re.findall(pattern, 'you fly high')

['you fly high']

Now, the whole string is a match because after checking the lookahead with ‘(?=.*hi)(?=.*you)’, you also consume the whole string ‘.*’.

Negative Lookahead (?!…)

The negative lookahead works just like the positive lookahead—only it checks that the given regex pattern does not occur going forward from a certain position.

Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> re.search('(?!.*hi.*)', 'hi say hi?')

<re.Match object; span=(8, 8), match=''>

The negative lookahead pattern (?!.*hi.*) ensures that, going forward in the string, there’s no occurrence of the substring 'hi'. The first position where this holds is position 8 (right after the second 'h'). Like the positive lookahead, the negative lookahead does not consume any character so the result is the empty string (which is a valid match of the pattern).

You can even combine multiple negative lookaheads like this:

>>> re.search('(?!.*hi.*)(?!\?).', 'hi say hi?')

<re.Match object; span=(8, 9), match='i'>

You search for a position where neither ‘hi’ is in the lookahead, nor does the question mark character follow immediately. This time, we consume an arbitrary character so the resulting match is the character 'i'.

Group Flags (?aiLmsux:…) and (?aiLmsux)

You can control the regex engine with the flags argument of the re.findall(), re.search(), or re.match() methods. For example, if you don’t care about capitalization of your matched substring, you can pass the re.IGNORECASE flag to the regex methods:

>>> re.findall('PYTHON', 'python is great', flags=re.IGNORECASE)

['python']

But using a global flag for the whole regex is not always optimal. What if you want to ignore the capitalization only for a certain subregex?

You can do this with the group flags: a, i, L, m, s, u, and x. Each group flag has its own meaning:

For example, if you want to switch off the differentiation of capitalization, you’ll use the i flag as follows:

>>> re.findall('(?i:PYTHON)', 'python is great')

['python']

You can also switch off the capitalization for the whole regex with the “global group flag” (?i) as follows:

>>> re.findall('(?i)PYTHON', 'python is great')

['python']

Where to Go From Here?

Summary: You’ve learned about matching groups to structure the regex and capture parts of the matching result. You can then retrieve the captured groups with the \number syntax within the regex pattern itself and with the m.group(i) syntax in the Python code at a later stage.

To learn the Python basics, check out my free Python email academy with many advanced courses—including a regex video tutorial in your INBOX.

Join 20,000+ ambitious coders for free!

Hot on the heels of Godot’s recent Epic winfall, ArmorPaint has become the latest recipient of the Epic MegaGrant program, first announced during the Unreal keynote at GDC 2019.  ArmorPaint is an open source PBR-based texture painting application, similar in function to Substance Painter.

Details of the megagrant were announced on Twitter:

You can learn more about ArmorPaint in our recent hands-on video.  ArmorPaint is open source and is free, but you need to build the binaries yourself.  For instructions on how to build ArmorPaint from source check out our guide available here.  For more details on the ArmorPaint Epic MegaGrant be sure to check out our video below.

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By AppleInsider Staff
Tuesday, February 25, 2020, 07:53 pm PT (10:53 pm ET)

Streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora generated $8.8 billion to account for 79% of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2019, according to new data from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Source: RIAA

In its full-year 2019 revenue report for U.S. recorded music, the RIAA says streaming revenues were up 20% from 2018, a marked rise largely attributed to growth in paid streaming services. The overall industry grew 13% to hit $11.1 billion in retail value.

According to the report, revenues derived from subscriptions hit $6.8 billion last year, up 25% year-over-year. That sum equates to 61% of total recorded music revenues in the U.S., the group notes. Impressively, subscriptions accounted for 93% of streaming sector growth, with for-pay services adding an average of one million new accounts per month to top 60 million subscriptions in 2019.

RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier in a blog post on Tuesday said, “Music isn’t transitioning to digital’ – it is leading a digital-first business.”

“Today’s report reflects the prospect of a future in which creators have a path forward,” Glazier said. “But it also reveals how much farther we must go to assure a healthy music community in which all music is valued and creators are fairly compensated. We still have not realized the full value of music on all digital services.”

Over the past ten years, streaming revenue has grown from a minuscule 5% slice of the overall pie to overtake both traditional physical media and digital downloads initially popularized by iTunes. In 2009, physical media accounted for 59% of all industry revenue followed by digital’s 34% share, figures that slid to a respective 10% and 8% of the whole in 2019.

Downloads have dropped precipitously as streaming usurps per-track and per-album purchases. According to the RIAA, digital fell 18% between 2018 and 2019, with last year being the first since 2006 in which downloads brought in less than a billion dollars, reports Variety. For reference, streaming revenues first surpassed sales of digital downloads in 2015.

After revolutionizing the music distribution industry with iTunes and iPod, Apple debuted its own streaming service, Apple Music, in 2015. The product challenges market incumbent Spotify, which boasted 124 million paid subscribers as of February. Apple last released public Apple Music statistics in June 2019, when the service accumulated 60 million subscribers.

Update: The sale has now gone live in North America, too! Details have been added below.

If you’ve been on the fence about grabbing any of the DOOM series games available on Nintendo Switch, now is absolutely the time to do so.

All games in the series currently available on the system have been heavily reduced for a limited time. We’ve got all the prices and details you need below:

It would also seem that the upcoming release of DOOM 64 will only cost £3.99. These prices really are too good to miss.

The 2016 game is on sale until 1st March, while the older titles are on sale until 2nd March. Make sure to snap these up before then.

Thanks to step_over for the tip!

Calibrate your engines, krogans and kroganettes, the Mass Effect Mash-up pack is coming to Minecraft! Roam around the Mars Base Camp as Commander Shephard, Liara or 34 other classic characters, and shape the fate of the entire galaxy!
↣ https://t.co/rMxnnEntge ↢ pic.twitter.com/gAuydLIJmR

— Minecraft (@Minecraft) February 25, 2020