Explore A Futuristic Open World In Cloudpunk, Coming To Switch This Year
Merge Games and developer ION LANDS have revealed that Cloudpunk, a game originally headed for PC only, will also be heading to Nintendo Switch later this year.
The game presents players with a vibrant, futuristic open world to explore, all wrapped up in a vertical cyberpunk city. There are undergound nightclubs, gardens in the sky, and much more besides, all in a rather fetching voxel graphics art style.
Here’s some PR:
Taking inspiration from other story-based titles such as Firewatch and Kentucky Route Zero, Cloudpunk is filled with characters to meet, alongside a multitude of stories to discover as you explore the neon-streaked world which finds inspiration from real places such as Shinjuku in Tokyo, as well as Hong Kong and Seoul.
Your name is Rania. This is your first night working for Cloudpunk, the semi-legal delivery company based in Nivalis. Explore dense, vertical landscapes that reach high into the clouds and deep down through the ocean waves below, as you meet characters ranging from Androids and AI to unscrupulous humans at every level of society.
We also have a list of key features for you to check out:
KEY FEATURES – Explore an immense vertical cyberpunk city with your hover car and on foot – Unravel mysteries in a world of corporate conspiracy, hackers and rogue AI through the eyes of Rania – Meet a diverse range of characters and immerse yourself in their everyday lives – Your decisions will have a lasting impact on the inhabitants of Nivalis – Discover hidden places and items unlocking additional stories
We don’t have an exact release date for this one just yet, but hopefully we’ll hear more about its release in the coming weeks.
Like what you see? Let us know if you’ll keep tabs on the game with a comment.
Video: Monitoring and validating world design data in Assassin’s Creed Origins
In this 2018 GDC talk, Ubisoft Montreal’s Nicholas Routhier describes how the Assassin’s Creed Origins team used a system of daily automated tests and reports to monitor, validate and visually communicate the state of world game data to the world creation team.
He gave concrete examples of how this pipeline helped the ACO team efficiently highlight errors and track regressions, freeing content creators to focus on crafting a virtual Egypt.
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.
For all we know about Matt Reeves's upcoming DC film, The Batman, there's still a ton of mystery surrounding it. Yes, Robert Pattinson will be playing Bruce Wayne, Zoe Kravitz will be Selina Kyle, Collin Farrell will play The Penguin--but beyond the star-studded cast, the details have been kept extremely vague. The slow drip of information continues to trickle in and the latest is test footage for the movie. Reeves took to Twitter to share the video, giving us our first look at Pattinson in full costume, and our first glimpse at what we can expect from the brand new Bat Suit.
The Batman is expected to take a more detective-focused look into the world of the Dark Knight, pitting Bruce Wayne against not only The Penguin and Catwoman, but The Riddler (Paul Dano) tool. Joining Dano, Farrell, Pattinson, and Kravitz will be Andy Serkis as Batman's faithful butler, Alfred Pennyworth. Westworld actor Jeffery Wright has also been in talks to take the role of Commissioner Gordon.
We can't be sure where or how The Batman will connect to the rest of the DCEU, or if it will remain a completely disconnected alternate universe similar to Joker--but one thing is definitely certain: The new costume looks absolutely incredible. The Bat logo on the chest seems to be made of fragmented metal, the shoulders look heavily armored, and the cowl looks like it may have already seen some battle damage, which could indicate that we'll be joining the Caped Crusader well into his superhero journey, rather than at the very start.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-14-2020, 12:20 PM - Forum: Windows
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How Daniela Ekholm transformed her working life with AI
We all feel rusty returning to work after an absence, whether it’s maternity leave, a sabbatical or vacation. No matter the reason for being away, the return to work can be challenging.
From something as simple as remembering passwords and procedures, to meeting new colleagues, slipping back into a familiar rhythm of work takes time, and it can take a while for the cobwebs and nerves to clear.
Daniela Ekholm, like many returning employees, faced the challenge of finding her feet after returning to work. A business controller at Microsoft Finland, she bid farewell to her colleagues before going on maternity leave for 12 months.
While maternity, vacation and sick leave regulations differ from country to country, the feeling of anxiety when returning to work after a long absence is one that transcends borders. Returning to work can see a decrease in family and leisure time, while other reasons for trepidation can include a loss of confidence, or discovering that things have drastically changed in your absence.
While these feelings are natural, it’s also possible to view the return to work as an opportunity to approach things with a fresh, re-energized mindset – something that Daniela herself found out when she eventually stepped back through the doors of Microsoft’s Helsinki office.
A new colleague
Two weeks into her return, Daniela was informed that as part of Microsoft’s broader digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI) would drastically enhance her day-to-day work. The news was, understandably, a surprise.
When I came back and the AI system was introduced, I was scared about it taking over my job, but also excited. Scared because almost a quarter of my work – the data, the formulas, the calculations – would be automated, but also excited at the opportunities it could provide.
Daniela’s reaction is a common one seen in employees dealing with the introduction of new technology. AI in particular, is often stigmatized as a tool that will cause disruption, but when introduced and implemented properly, it can transform the way people work, bolstering their existing skills and abilities, as opposed to purely taking over tasks.
Prior to AI’s introduction, Daniela’s role was centered around budgets and sales forecasting. It was an intense process, that saw her and her team focused on sales forecasts, often for three straight weeks, leaving no time for anything else.
“Our work involved lots of data gathering, copy and pasting into various reports, crazy amounts of Excel formulas and so on. It was very time consuming. Now, thanks to AI, the data we need is pulled in automatically – it’s much faster. The biggest benefit was how it gave me so much extra time to spend on other things that have a business impact.”
Freed from crunching numbers and creating forecasts, Daniela could focus on other things, including training sessions to help progress her existing role. “Finally, I was able to refresh my soft skills, which helped me improve the way I communicated my findings to other colleagues. Not only that, but the extra time that AI provided also meant that I could join meetings I previously didn’t have time for, strengthening my working relationships.”
A nurturing environment
Technology like AI doesn’t always guarantee a positive change. A large part of successful integration comes down to the culture of a workplace. A company with a culture that doesn’t support workers in using technology to augment their skills, or give them room to tackle challenges in new ways, is unlikely to see major benefits from adopting new technology. The responsibility to foster the right environment falls to the leadership.
“In many ways, a leader’s day-to-day life is more protected from these major shifts than those of many employees,” says Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, in the MIT Sloan Review.
The complexity of a leader’s work makes positive augmentation rather than replacement the most likely outcome of technological innovation.
For Daniela, her manager’s support helped contribute to her smooth return: “My manager’s guidance was amazing, and there’s so much training and support available at Microsoft. Workplace culture is key, and I think Microsoft’s cultural transformation is the reason that the introduction and implementation of AI went so smoothly. It doesn’t matter how good new technology is – if you don’t have the right culture and leadership, you’re not going to be successful.”
A flexible future
Beyond technology, supporting the flexible needs of working professionals goes a long way in achieving a healthy work-life balance.
Since returning to work, Daniela has collaborated with her team – which is distributed across Europe – remotely. Using technology has given Daniela more time for personal development, as well as the flexibility to spend more time with her family.
“The members of my team are basically everywhere and that’s the great thing about the technology we have – you can live and work wherever you like, and you don’t have to move.”
Daniela is continuing her development at Microsoft, while discovering the adventures of balancing her professional and personal life: “AI is a tool that makes me better. It’s like a sparring partner, a foundation for me to improve and build upon.”
“Now that I’m a mother, I’m even more grateful for AI – I don’t have the same hectic peaks I had before. Flexible working means it’s easy for me to pick up my child from daycare too. I’m very happy and thankful for my work-life balance.”
Google Stadia Adding Five More Games, Including Panzer Dragoon Remake
The Stadia library will be expanding soon. Google has confirmed five more titles will be added to the game streaming service in the coming months, three of which will be arriving on Stadia as timed-exclusives.
First are Lost Words: Beyond the Page, Spitlings, and Stacks on Stacks (on Stacks), which will be coming to Stadia this spring and summer. While no release dates have been announced, all three titles will be released on Google's service before they appear on other platforms.
Lost Words is described as a "narrative-driven, atmospheric puzzler set inside the pages of a young girl's diary." The story was written by Tomb Raider writer Rhianna Pratchett, and the gameplay involves puzzle-solving and platforming throughout a variety of unique and imaginative worlds.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-14-2020, 08:27 AM - Forum: Python
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Python Regex Methods – A Short Overview
Python’s re module comes with a number of regular expression methods that help you achieve more with less.
Think of those methods as the framework connecting regular expressions with the Python programming language. Every programming language comes with its own way of handling regular expressions. For example, the Perl programming language has many built-in mechanisms for regular expressions—you don’t need to import a regular expression library—while the Java programming language provides regular expressions only within a library. This is also the approach of Python.
These are the most important regular expression methods of Python’s re module:
re.findall(pattern, string): Checks if the string matches the pattern and returns all occurrences of the matched pattern as a list of strings.
re.search(pattern, string): Checks if the string matches the regex pattern and returns only the first match as a match object. The match object is just that: an object that stores meta information about the match such as the matching position and the matched substring.
re.match(pattern, string): Checks if any string prefix matches the regex pattern and returns a match object.
re.fullmatch(pattern, string): Checks if the whole string matches the regex pattern and returns a match object.
re.compile(pattern): Creates a regular expression object from the pattern to speed up the matching if you want to use the regex pattern multiple times.
re.split(pattern, string): Splits the string wherever the pattern regex matches and returns a list of strings. For example, you can split a string into a list of words by using whitespace characters as separators.
re.sub(pattern, repl, string): Replaces (substitutes) the first occurrence of the regex pattern with the replacement string repl and return a new string.
Example: Let’s have a look at some examples of all the above functions:
import re text = '''
LADY CAPULET Alack the day, she's dead, she's dead, she's dead! CAPULET Ha! let me see her: out, alas! she'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. Nurse O lamentable day! ''' print(re.findall('she', text)) '''
Finds the pattern 'she' four times in the text: ['she', 'she', 'she', 'she'] ''' print(re.search('she', text)) '''
Finds the first match of 'she' in the text: <re.Match object; span=(34, 37), match='she'> The match object contains important information
such as the matched position. ''' print(re.match('she', text)) '''
Tries to match any string prefix -- but nothing found: None ''' print(re.fullmatch('she', text)) '''
Fails to match the whole string with the pattern 'she': None ''' print(re.split('\n', text)) '''
Splits the whole string on the new line delimiter '\n': ['', 'LADY CAPULET', '', " Alack the day, she's dead, she's dead, she's dead!", '', 'CAPULET', '', " Ha! let me see her: out, alas! she'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.', '', 'Nurse', '', ' O lamentable day!', ''] ''' print(re.sub('she', 'he', text)) '''
Replaces all occurrences of 'she' with 'he': LADY CAPULET Alack the day, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead! CAPULET 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. Nurse O lamentable day! '''
Now, you know the most important regular expression functions. You know how to apply regular expressions to strings. But you don’t know how to write your regex patterns in the first place. Let’s dive into regular expressions and fix this once and for all!
Where to Go From Here
You’ve learned a quick overview of the Python regular expression methods. These are the basis of all advanced regex concepts in Python.
Following a community suggestion, today's hints are (pretty much) the actual answer options (some were shortened). Your job now is working them out: what do they have in common or what not, might be the relevant part of the question. Good luck.
Nearing the end of 2019, Epic Games announced they had acquired texture provider Quixel and as part of that announcement, released 10,000+ high quality textures from the Megascans completely free for Unreal Engine users. Around the same time Epic also announced the archviz product TwinMotion would be integrated into Unreal Engine 4.24. Today, they took that one step further and released 1,000+ high quality textures from TwinMotion completely free for Unreal Engine users.
Since Epic Games acquired Twinmotion last year and made the high-quality, easy-to-use real-time visualization solution freely available to the general public, we immediately started thinking about how we could best make it interoperable with Unreal Engine. While we’re excited to reveal more on how we’ll be integrating the two workflows together in the future, we wanted to begin bridging that gap today by offering Unreal users a free material collection that’s based on Twinmotion materials. There’s a wide variety of categories here including:
Bricks
Concrete
Fabrics
Glass
Grass and dirt
Wood
Plastics
Available now on the Marketplace, we’ve ensured that these rich and powerful master materials support the latest ray-tracing advancements and have used best practices to define how the nearly 500 PBR materials were used. This work includes:
Specific optimizations for ray tracing
Advanced shading techniques, such as parallax occlusion mapping for materials needing relief, which is useful for surfaces like bricks
Ability to use an object’s UVs or to use tri-planar mapping, which can assist texture alignment by automatically aligning textures on objects that might not have been given proper UV coordinates
Ability to define real-world scale
The materials are available in a large 8GB+ download on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. You need to be running the most current version of Unreal Engine (4.24.2+ ) for the assets to work properly and expect the importation process to take a fair bit of time, as over 4000 shaders need to be built. If you want to check it out but skip the long download and importation process, you can see the new materials in action in the video below.
Create an account or log in an already existing one and permanently add the games on your account. Alternatively you can redeem them from the Epic Launcher on the games' giveaway page. You have to scroll down and select the regular "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" edition.
We are welcoming everyone to join our discord server (link below). We are more active there on finding giveaways, small or large.
Although RTS games have been one of the most popular genres on PC, there’s been a lot of difficulty bringing those experiences to mobile. Where the titans of the genre measure skill partly in clicks-per-minute, it’s tough to imagine a solid RTS experience on a touchscreen. Improbably, this experience has arrived in the form of a port of a fourteen-year-old classic.
If you’ve got an iPad and you love real-time strategy, Company of Heroes might be the game for you. It focuses tightly on World War II tactics: you control a handful of squads rather than a whole army as they attempt to take back the hedgerows of northern France in the Battle of Normandy.. There’s none of the tedious resource-gathering and base-building that you’ll find in those games more directly influenced by Warcraft. You get more requisition points by taking objectives, you reinforce and upgrade your units in the field, and the Germans provide constant resistance.
There are a lot of ways Company of Heroes makes an ideal mobile strategy game. Just by being squad-based, giving orders using fat dumb fingers rather than precision mouse clicks is made much easier. You can easily handle your squads by tapping a few icons in the squad list rather than seeking out tiny gray-brown soldiers on a gray-brown map. For the mobile version, you can use a convenient popup wheel to make specific orders
The controls can be sometimes troublesome. For basic attacks, single taps suffice. Pulling up a selection box to grab more than one unit on the map requires a double-tap with two fingers followed by a drag. Aiming a machine gun emplacement is a double tap-and-drag. Placing landmines means bringing up the wheel menu, selecting mines one layer down, tapping and dragging across the area you want the mines, and then confirming the order in a popup box. It’s not totally unintuitive, and there’s sometimes different ways to do the same thing (you can multi-select squads in the squad list as well) but it’s definitely a kludgy version of the PC original left-click/right-click/double-click/drag controls.
As a mid-aughts World War II game, Company of Heroes begins with the requisite D-Day beach level, which isn’t the best showcase for its strengths. On Omaha Beach, there’s no opportunity for flanking, combined arms, armor, or much use of tactical cover. It’s a Saving Private Ryan-inspired meat-grinder, but not an interesting challenge. Better are the following several missions, which have your paratroopers setting ambushes and overrunning fortifications. A high note occurs early on in a challenging defensive effort on a map that you have spent the last couple missions slowly conquering. A massive wave of German armor arrives that will likely see your forces inevitably pushed back to the near point of destruction before your (scripted) reinforcements arrive. It’s thrilling, and later campaign missions become even more interesting, as the game constantly adds new units and tactics to keep you on your toes.
Like many games of that era that sought to portray themselves as grim and realistic, Company of Heroes features a desaturated brown and gray palette that while accurate is not too pleasant to look at. What is impressive is the level of detail wrapped up in all that brown/gray. Buildings and walls crumble realistically. Explosions scorch the landscape. Soldiers fall with puffs of blood. Vehicles lose control, flame out, and skid off the road to blow up.
The campaign story is told through highly cinematic cutscenes obviously inspired by Band of Brothers. Dramatic in their depiction of zipping airplanes, trundling tanks, and roaring anti-aircraft guns, these scenes are less successful when zoomed in to the blurry camouflage textures covering its soldiers.
Overall, the campaign does a good job of giving your participation in the overall Battle of Normandy significance, always tying your mission objectives to the greater effort. It’s not Oscar-worthy, but it does the job of keeping you playing for just one more mission. These missions are expansive, with multiple difficult stages spread over broad and detailed maps. In one minute you’re responsible for rooting a sniper out of a difficult nest, while in the next you’re securing a base or planning a multi-pronged assault. All these little tasks add up to an experience that is more than the sum of those parts, each street of the map hard-won.
The initial purchase includes only the base game, but devs report that the Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor expansions could be made available later on. Opposing Fronts in particular would be a welcome addition, since it adds German and Russian campaigns. Company of Heroes’s Normandy setting was tired even back in 2006, part of a seemingly endless stream of media focusing on American heroism in the scorched fields of rural France. Another glaring omission is the multiplayer, which could still make it to the game later on. For a taste, Skirmish mode is available and may satisfy gamers who have finished the main campaign, or who want the option of playing as the Germans.
However, with such a great campaign, Company of Heroes is an easy recommendation for anyone with an iPad that likes real-time strategy. It’s an exciting and unique experience that’s a good fit for mobile play. Now, everyone put Dawn of War II on your vision boards!
