The most pythonic way to convert a list of integers fs to a list of floats is to use the one-line fs = [float(x) for x in fs]. It iterates over all the elements in the list fs using list comprehension and converts each element of the list x to an integer value using the float (x) constructor.

This article shows you the simplest ways to convert a one-dimensional list consisting only of int to a list of float.

Problem: Given a list of ints [1, 2, 3]. How to convert it to a list of floats [1.0, 2.0, 3.0]?

The methods are not applicable to lists of lists, they contain rounding errors that are different in each method. If necessary, you can add cycles or define custom functions.

Method 1: List Comprehension

Suppose we have a list:

a = [1, 3, 2, 1, 5, -2]

Now, check the type of the list numbers:

print(type(a[0]))

# <class 'int'>

Let’s apply the built-in function float, and get a list of floats:

print([float(i) for i in a])

# [1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

Check the type of numbers in the new list:

A = [float(i) for i in a]

print(type(A[0]))

# <class ‘int’>

Thus, using the built-in float function, we can get a new list of floats in one line of code.

Method 2: Map Function

The built-in function map is well optimized and efficient, when it is called, the elements of the list are retrieved upon access. Therefore, one element is stored and processed in memory, which allows the program not to store the entire list of elements in the system memory.

Apply to the same list a the following code:

print(list(map(float, a)))

# [1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

We will not check the type of the elements of the resulting list, because when calling the ‘map’ function, we passed the ‘float’ function already described in method 1 as an argument, and wrapped the result in a list using the ‘list’ function.

Method 3: Enumerate Function

Using the built-in function ‘enumerate’, we can loop through the elements of the list and process not only the value of the element, but also its index number in the list:

for i, item in enumerate(a): a[i] = float(item)

#[1.0, 3.0, 2.0, 1.0, 5.0, -2.0]

Method 4: NumPy

Here’s a look at converting a list from an int to an array using the NumPy module. The difference between an array and a list is that all elements of an array must be of the same type, like “float” and “int”. Numeric operations with large amounts of data can be performed with arrays much faster and more efficiently than with lists.

Let’s turn our first list a into an array:

import numpy as np

N = np.array(a, float)

#[1., 3., 2., 1., 5., -2.]

We pass two arguments to the array function, the name of the list to convert to an array and the type for each element.

Сheck the type of elements:

print(type(N[0]))

#<class 'numpy.float64'>

Unlike the ‘float’ type of numbers in Python, the numpy module defines them slightly differently and is divided into several subgroups. For example, ‘float64’ is a numpy numeric data type used to store double precision real numbers, in which 1 bit is assigned to the sign, 11 bits for the exponent and 52 for the mantissa, ‘float32’ contains 1 bit for the sign, 8 bits for exponent and 23 for mantissa, ‘float16’ – 1 bit for the sign, 5 bits for exponent and 10 for mantissa. This must be taken into account when calculating with arrays.

The post How to Convert an Integer List to a Float List in Python first appeared on Finxter.

<!– –>

<!–

Calendar

View All     Submit Event

---

–>

If you enjoy reading this site, you might also want to check out these UBM Tech sites:

---

---

  

---

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

---

Our new game Blightbound features many types of foggy effects: mist, dust, smoke and more. Such effects are often made with planes and particles, allowing us to draw fog and effect textures by hand and giving us maximum artistic control. However, one issue with this is that the place where fog planes intersect with geometry creates a hard edge, which looks very fake and outdated. My solution was to implement depth fade. This is a commonly used technique for soft particles, but we use it on lots of objects, not just on particles.

In today’s blogpost I’ll explain how depth fade rendering works. I’ll also show just how widely this technique can be applied, by going through a bunch of examples from Blightbound.

First, let’s have a look at what problem we’re trying to solve here. When putting partially transparent planes in the world, the place where they intersect with other objects creates a straight cut-off line. Sometimes that’s desired, but often those transparent planes represent volumetric effects. They’re not supposed to look like flat planes, but that’s just the easiest and most efficient way of rendering them. This is fine when there are no intersections, but when there are then the hard lines where they touch other objects break the volumetric illusion.

There’s a simple solution for this that’s used in a lot of games: depth fade. The idea is to simply fade out the plane near the intersection. This produces an effect similar to how real fog works: objects that go into the fog seem to smoothly fade out. However, actually figuring out all polygon intersections takes too much performance, so we want a rendering trick instead.

This screenshot from Blightbound shows a fog plane just above the ground. In the top image it is rendered in the standard way, resulting in hard intersections with the characters, rocks and cart. At the bottom the intersections are smoothened by depth fade.

The trick to rendering with depth fade is to first render all normal geometry, excluding any transparent objects. This fills the depth buffer, so for every pixel we know what distance it has from the camera. Then when rendering the objects that need depth fade, the pixel shader looks up the distance in the depth buffer and compares that to its own distance. If these are close to each other, then we assume that we’re near an intersection and fade out this pixel. The nearer, the stronger the fade out, until the object is entirely invisible at the point of intersection.

This technique has a few neat bonus features on top of just smoothing out intersections. By simply setting the distance over which the fade occurs, we can modify the density of the mist. Also, objects don’t need to actually intersect with the fog plane to get depth fade applied. Being just beneath the fog plane also makes the effect visible. Thus depth fade is more than just a way to smoothen intersections.

The fog’s density setting determines the width of the smoothing of the intersections. At a very high density the smoothing is almost lost. At a very low density the fog almost disappears because the ground is now also considered ‘close’ to the fog plane.

While this technique is traditionally mostly used for particles, it can easily be used for all objects with transparency. Since the world of Blightbound is covered by the blight (a thick, corrupting fog) we have a lot of types of fog in our game, including many fog planes and particles, as well as smoke and special effects. Our artists can apply depth fade rendering to all of those, not just to particles.

[embedded content]
Depth fade is also great for hiding the seams of moving objects, like this fog wall.

A nice property of depth fade is that it doesn’t cost all that much performance compared to traditional alpha blending. For each pixel of a particle or fog plane that we render, it costs one extra texture look-up (in the depth buffer) and a distance calculation. Compared to more advanced volumetric techniques, like voxel ray marching, that’s a very low price. Since the performance impact of depth fade is low, our artists can use this technique on many objects, not just on the few that really, really need it.

Depth fade can also solve problems with camera facing glow planes. The glow on this torch is always oriented towards the camera, but that makes it intersect with the wall behind it under certain angles. Using depth fade, the intersection can be hidden. This animation shows alternating with and without depth fade.

When I implemented depth fade, I thought I was being pretty clever: I had only ever seen this technique used for soft particles, not for generic object rendering. However, while searching the web a bit to write this blogpost, I found out it’s actually a standard feature in the Unreal engine. For Unity I only found the option on particles, but it might exist in a more generic form there as well.

Now that we know how depth fade works, let’s have a look at a bunch of example uses from Blightbound. Special thanks to my colleague Ralph Rademakers, who made most of the levels and is thus the prime user of depth fade in Blightbound. Ralph gave me a nice list of cool spots to show:

[embedded content]
A compilation of examples from Blightbound where depth fade is used to great effect, showing both with and without depth fade.

Another application of depth fade is to hide seams of VFX with the world. In this example the smoke effect intersects with a black ground plane.

When I initially implemented depth fade in Blightbound, I thought it would mostly be used on fog planes that float just above the ground, to give the impression of heroes walking through a low hanging, milky fog. As soon as our artists got hold of this technique however they started using it on tons of other objects. This is to me one of the most fun parts of building graphics tech: seeing how much more artists can do with it than I had originally imagined!

For more blogposts on development of Blightbound, Awesomenauts, Swords & Soldiers, Cello Fortress, Proun, procedural music, my cello album and any of the other stuff I work on, check my dev blog at www.joostvandongen.com.

---

Related Jobs

---

<!–

Extra Div –>

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, media images of health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients provided some of the first glimpses into the devastating impacts of the global crisis.

Executives at Crocs not only saw those stressed, overwhelmed frontline workers, but also started getting requests from them for shoes to keep them going during the long hours. The company realized it had an opportunity to offer a little kindness and comfort to a group of loyal customers at a particularly challenging time. Crocs came up with an ambitious idea: to give away 10,000 pairs of shoes every day to people working on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic.   

Less than a week later, Crocs was ready to launch its “Free Pair for Healthcare” initiative, a 45-day event starting in late March during which the company donated more than 860,000 pairs of Crocs to workers mostly in the U.S., but also in Canada and Europe. 

Crocs’ iconic foam clogs — in black and white, in lemon and mint and leopard print — arrived on the doorsteps of grateful health care workers and frontline responders, who posted messages and photos of their Crocs, some personalized with the brand’s proprietary Jibbitz charms, on social media. 

“Thanks so much Crocs for thinking of us during this time,” Kristy Baron, a registered nurse from Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote on Facebook. “I’m a nurse working on the front lines and your caring is much appreciated.”  

Adam Michaels, Crocs’ chief digital officer, says the company created the campaign to help as many people as possible and provide comfort where it was needed most.

“It became obvious that we have a product that a group of our consumers have been buying from us for years, and that particular group had an immediate and real need,” he says. “We thought the best way to give back was to give them the footwear they needed on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.” 

Behind the scenes, the campaign was an enormous undertaking. It required building a platform that could fulfill orders, communicate with customers and handle up to 500,000 daily visitors to the site — while still maintaining enough inventory to fill orders while production was scaled back because of the pandemic. Microsoft Teams was integral to the effort, enabling employees working remotely around the U.S. to quickly share designs and documents, provide input and make decisions in real time without getting bogged down by email chains, Michaels says.  

The campaign ramp-up, he says, was “one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve had for any project, especially of that magnitude. Teams was key to that. It allowed us to iterate so much faster than traditional channels. Doing that remotely, without Microsoft Teams, in the timeframe we had, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it.”  

Teams has been a critical tool for Crocs in other ways during the pandemic. Employees in Europe hosted a sales meeting via a live Teams event, showing and talking through the Crocs line to potential retail customers. Teams was also used to design and launch two seasons of new products, an undertaking that would typically involve flying employees from around the world to Crocs’ headquarters in Niwot, Colorado.

And regular town hall meetings on Teams have allowed employees to connect with each other and hear directly from the company’s CEO, Andrew Rees, whose dog, Cooper, sometimes makes an appearance.

Mike Feliton, Crocs’ senior vice president and chief information officer overseeing technology, chose Teams for the company’s collaboration platform because it allows users to easily work together in a shared space. Crocs rolled out Teams in the summer of 2019, and when the pandemic hit — forcing Crocs to temporarily close most of its 360 stores — employees companywide immediately turned to Teams to connect and collaborate.

“We adopted the platform from our CEO down almost instantaneously,” Feliton says. “Teams has been central to our business.”

Feliton was so impressed with how Teams helped facilitate Crocs’ health care campaign that he sent an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, thanking him for the technology.

“As we were so successful with that campaign, I couldn’t do anything but reach out to Satya and thank him for that product, because I felt like he not only heard me, but everybody else in the business world that was looking for a collaboration tool that really worked, and this did,” he says.

The pandemic also prompted Crocs to intensify the digital-first strategy it embarked on about five years ago. Recognizing that more consumers were shopping online, the company closed some stores and ramped up its marketing efforts on digital channels. When COVID-19 hit, Crocs invested heavily with Microsoft Advertising and increased its focus on paid search to target customers who might not have previously bought Crocs online.

Company official say those efforts contributed to Crocs’ reported record third quarter revenue of $361.7 million, with digital sales up 35.5.%.

Crocs has shifted almost all its operations to Microsoft Azure, with help from the Azure Migration Program, and is using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to pull together data from various sources. Previously, if the company wanted to see, for example, how its clogs were selling compared with sandals in a particular region, it had to rely on analysts pulling data from multiple systems. Now, Crocs is getting detailed data reports several times a day through Power BI.

“The huge benefit is that we know what’s going on with our business essentially in real time,” Michaels says. “That allows us to make decisions and react much more quickly to impact the future. Power BI has democratized the data so our teams can make better decisions at every level.”

Crocs have been hailed as the ultimate pandemic shoe — comfortable and affordable, easy to clean and appropriately casual for legions of employees working from home. The New York Times declared that Crocs had “won 2020,” noting that while U.S. retail footwear sales are down 20 percent this year over the same period in 2019, sales of Crocs are up 48 percent. According to fashion search platform Lyst, searches for Crocs spiked 41 percent in Q3. 

Crocs are clearly having a moment, but the brand’s resurgence predates the pandemic. In 2016, British designer Christopher Kane debuted marbled-design Crocs encrusted with geode Jibbitz charms on runways at London Fashion Week. The next year, design house Balenciaga released an outrageously high platform version of Crocs Classic clogs that retailed for $850. 

Additional Crocs collaborations followed with the Grateful Dead, Justin Bieber and Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny, among others. The limited edition collaborations, which have also included a Kentucky Fried Chicken clog topped with a scented drumstick Jibbitz, often sell out within minutes.    

Michaels acknowledges that Crocs is in the enviable position of having the right product for a moment no one could have anticipated.   

“It would be much tougher to be in the dress shoe and dress apparel line of work right now,” he says, “but the more casual footwear has become more relevant to consumers now than it was even a few months ago. 

“And because of the work we’ve done in the health care space, I think our brand actually has even more momentum than it did when COVID hit,” Michaels says. “We’re very fortunate for that.”  

Top photo: Workers at Children’s Hospital Colorado wearing Crocs clogs donated by the company. (Photos courtesy of Crocs)

Santa Lucia was already working on finding ways to make sure underserved people around the world could participate in the increasingly digital economy when the pandemic hit. The initial effort grew out of recognition that a third of the new jobs created in the U.S. in the past 25 years have been in occupations that didn’t exist before, and that 1.1 billion jobs may be radically transformed by 2030. The pandemic’s impact on the global workforce magnified the situation.

“COVID-19 was like pouring gasoline on the digital transformation, along with a great loss of jobs, so we knew we had to help displaced people immediately,” Santa Lucia says.

In the U.S. alone, tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment benefits this year due to lost jobs during the pandemic, and most have been on assistance for six months or longer. The hardest hit have been people of color, those who lack college degrees, and low-wage workers who earn $50,000 or less a year, says Sonya Francis, the senior director of career navigation for Goodwill Industries International, a nonprofit that supports people in finding jobs.

“Many of these positions won’t even exist post-COVID,” Francis says. “In order to be considered employable and marketable, you have to have digital skills.”

The organization serves many who have never used a computer, so it started focusing on entry level digital skills about three years ago. This year it partnered with Microsoft to provide advanced training, testing and certifications in Atlanta and San Francisco, as well as Seattle and Tacoma in Washington.

“There’s a lot of excitement around particular Microsoft certifications because they’re enhancing employability quicker,” says Elizabeth McCombs, a project manager who works with Francis.

The pandemic proved a barrier to classes, since many Goodwill participants don’t have access to devices or the internet, McCombs says. But the organization still allows a small number of students to learn at career centers and also is offering mobile labs now, with Goodwill staffers taking devices and training to students’ homes.

“A graduate degree may be out of reach, but this training Microsoft is offering is really accessible,” says Carlos Galeana, the instructional tech trainer for Seattle Goodwill. Since the courses are online, students can complete them without having to purchase or install software, he says.

The LinkedIn modules have proven particularly helpful in giving students the fundamentals of digital literacy and showing them how it relates to all jobs and careers, whether they want to be an entrepreneur or a barista, says Eileen Aparis, vice president of job training for Seattle Goodwill. The classes give students the confidence to find jobs in administrative positions, medical fields, data science, manufacturing and more, she says.

“This opportunity with Microsoft isn’t just about being in IT or software or an app developer but to be successful in the workplace today,” Aparis says, “and the workplace of the 21^st century is all technology.”

The program also is helping people who already have a firm grasp of technology and strong job skills, but want to make sure their career holds a promising future.

Deepa Govindasamy, 36, followed her husband to Germany when his company transferred him there from India in 2018. After getting settled into her new country, Govindasamy wanted to return to her software-testing career, but she felt like something was missing as she looked for jobs. She’d studied civil engineering at university so only had on-the-job training in her chosen profession, and she knew there were things she needed to learn – especially cloud computing.

“Technology is growing and evolving so fast, I’ve seen it changing at warp speed, and the cloud is the future,” Govindasamy says. “Learning cloud computing is not a choice — it’s a must if you want to flourish in the IT industry.”

She heard about the nonprofit ReDI School of Digital Integration at a tech talk she attended late last year, and in February — just as the pandemic was taking hold in Germany — she began a Microsoft Learn software development course with classes in Java, Microsoft Azure and more. She earned her first certification in July and then started a data science program that built on it, along with soft-skills classes such as managing a LinkedIn profile for networking.

“This was how my COVID pandemic lockdown was for me, so busy with so much learning,” she laughs.

Govindasamy will be done with her training soon and plans to volunteer teach at ReDI while looking for a job, giving back to others what she’s learned herself — just as those who taught her this year had done.

“Data science will be additional knowledge I’ll be able to implement,” she says. “It’ll definitely help me out because software testing has evolved very much, and data is the heart of testing now. And now I can go a lot further in my career with these external certifications.”

ReDI School Chief Executive Officer Anne Kjaer Bathel founded the organization after a chance encounter in 2015 with a refugee in Berlin. The man was from Iraq and had a bachelor’s degree in computer science, but he didn’t have a computer in Germany and was afraid of losing ground in the fast-moving industry.

“You’ve heard the story about teaching a man to fish, well what does that story look like in a digital world?” Kjaer Bathel, herself an immigrant from Denmark, recalls pondering. “You need hardware, internet access, you need tech skills, soft skills, language, and a professional network to help open doors to the industry.”

Kjaer Bathel put up a post on her Facebook page and the next day had a couple dozen responses with people offering equipment, space, expertise and even cake, “because food always brings people together.” Now ReDI — a shortening of “ready for digital integration” — relies on 500 volunteers from the tech and startup industries to provide free training to refugees, immigrants and marginalized Germans.

“More companies are aware that to survive, they need to attract more tech talent,” Kjaer Bathel says. “And we have seen with COVID-19 that the awareness of the need for digital skills isn’t just in the tech industry but is for everything, to work remotely or do school.”

Germany is an accreditation-driven society, so ReDI’s ability to provide free certification programs through Microsoft’s skills initiative “ticks those boxes” and assures prospective employers that ReDI graduates will be able to perform, she says.

It’s also motivational for students like Idlir Islamaj.

Islamaj, 34, grew up in Albania and followed his passion for technology to a master’s degree in computer science and a job, but he didn’t see many opportunities to advance or improve — and he wasn’t making enough money to support a family. So when he read in 2018 that Germany was in need of IT experts, he and his wife decided to make the move.

It wasn’t easy to leave his seaside home and learn a new language near landlocked Munich, but Islamaj quickly found a position as a system administrator. He heard about ReDI last year and signed up for a Java course, having seen the need for it in creating different architecture. That led to an Azure certification program from Microsoft Learn that strengthened Islamaj’s knowledge of the cloud.

Now he’s a consultant for Beck et al, providing support to large global companies that use Microsoft 365 products.

“I feel really valued in what I do now, and I do my job with joy,” says Islamaj, who now makes enough to not only support his family — he and his wife had a baby last year — but to take them on vacations as well. “I see that I grow every day professionally and mentally. I see a lot of opportunities. And I’m very motivated for the next certification as well.”

Top photo: Lutendo Mabogo in front of Afrika Tikkun’s learning center in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg. (Photo by Roy Potterill)

Recently, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered got its very first patch. It fixes and adjusts certain things and even improves the overall stability of the game.

The update for the Nintendo Switch version, in particular, improves the visual performance in a number of races and sorts out some technical issues with the status of online friends.

Below are the full patch notes, courtesy of the game’s community manager via the Need for Speed subreddit. Enjoy!

Today we’re releasing Patch 1 for Need for Speed™ Hot Pursuit Remastered – here are the update notes:

Audio

• Fixed an issue that could cause audio stuttering during races and cinematics.
• When you change the VOIP / Microphone settings, it should now persist to the lobbies you join going forward.
• VOIP system is now working as intended if a headset is plugged in after joining a multiplayer lobby.
• Speech to text should now be functional for players on the same platform.
• A similar issue also affected the text to speech audio being distorted, this is now resolved.

Lobbies

• Interceptor lobbies should now be limited to two players, as intended.
• The “Change Access” menu now properly disappears after a selection is made.
• Fixed an issue where players wouldn’t transition from the lobby to the race.

Visual / UI

• Players should no longer see voice icons from other platforms. In-game voice chat is available when cross-play is turned off. When cross-play is turned on, voice chat is restricted to each platform’s party chat system. This hint is now also shown in the privacy settings.
• You should no longer be able to get stuck on the driver details menu.
• When a friend beats your time, the correct date should now be displayed in the Autolog notification.
• When busted as a racer in a Hot Pursuit multiplayer event, the player list is now only shown once on screen.
• Autolog notifications should now display in the respective language if you change the console language and local settings.
• Trophies you should receive (for Cop / Racer ranks) should now unlock correctly, even retroactively if there are any you should have received, but haven’t.
• When using custom colors, the color displayed in the “last/recent” slots should now display correctly. It did most of the time, but there were a few scenarios where it wouldn’t.
• Fixed an occlusion issue on a mountain along Boulder Road.
• The Porsche Boxster Spyder now allows you to recreate “Speed Yellow” using the custom color palette.
• Some events were missing Speedwalls, these are now present and visible on the career map.
• The “Beauty and the Beasts” summary screen now shows the bounty earned for placing 3rd.
• When losing connection and reconnecting, the player avatar is shown correctly on the Speedwall.
• Notifications that a friend beat you in an Intercept event will no longer be cut off when scrolling at the bottom of the map screen, nor should they display random question marks.
• During the Most Wanted event intro, the correct names and symbols should now be displayed above vehicles.
• You should no longer encounter a short black screen when going to submenus from the pause menu during a multiplayer race.
• The car shadow should no longer flicker in the Police Station parking lot on Cascade Terrace Road.
• When you are viewing your own profile on PS4, the game you’re currently playing is now correctly shown.
• After sending/receiving a game invite request from a friend, a confirmation notification will now show as intended.
• When you’re in a single player race, the correct game mode is now reflected in your friends list and dashboard.
• The player avatar frame now disappears after the first loading screen.
• Player avatars should now be better aligned with names in result screens.
• When cross-play is enabled, the platform identifier should now also show next to the name during a race, not only on the leaderboard.
• With cross-play enabled, all platform identifier icons have the same shade / opacity of white.
• The VOIP icon no longer overlaps player names in cross-play multiplayer race outro screens.
• Players can now be added to the friends list from the “Recent Players” tab.
• In Photo Mode, the top part of the police car sirens is no longer blacked out when the “Show Damage” toggle is set to “on”.
• Removed a redundant line from the User Agreement.
• After changing the resolution multiple times, the intro cinematic to “My Career” should still render at full screen now.
• As some if you had pointed out, there was a Rank 21 shown as next rank. This was unintended and has now been fixed – Rank 20 is the highest rank.

Localization

• Traditional Chinese: The “Jammer” text in the HUD is now in the right place when all charges have been exhausted.
• All languages: Updated the localized Technical Support files in the Support folder of the game installation.
• Spanish: Long player names should no longer be overlapping in the “autolog recommends” section.

Stability

• When the “Most Wanted” quits during an ongoing race, all players should return to the menu as expected.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the game to crash when selecting career events.
• Restarting an event multiple times should no longer cause the game to crash.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the game to crash when selecting the Autolog Recommends menu.
• When joining a friend’s lobby while in photo mode, you should no longer encounter a black screen.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a crash during an arms race session.
• Fixed two issues that could occur during the “Unreasonable Force” event.
• Resolved an issue that could lead to the game hanging when sharing your time on the wall.
• You should now be able to frictionlessly join a friend after your game has been suspended on your console for a while.

Nintendo Switch

• Online status of friends is now showing correctly in the friends list.
• Improved visual performance on Barnstormer, Awe Inspired and Under Pressure.

See you on the streets of Seacrest County!

Have you downloaded this update yet? Noticed anything else? Leave a comment down below.