Newsbrief: Publisher Bandai Namco has announced that CyberConnect2’s most recent release, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, has surpassed 2 million copies sold.

That milestone includes copies sold worldwide across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, and comes within the game’s first two months out in the wild.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Burbank CA or Durham NC

Insomniac Games is looking for Mid to Senior Engine Programmers to join our Core team and focus on our internal game development tool suite. If you have experience and interest in working with build systems, creative asset editors, internal UX and usability strategies, or modern procedural content techniques, we’d love to hear from you. Along with your resume, please include a cover letter or other brief description of why you’re interested in the position

Insomniac’s Core team is responsible for our industry-leading technical foundation for triple-A game development. We develop tools and technology to build and power titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Stormland, and Ratchet & Clank. As a principle, we strive to be open and generous in sharing our advancements with the game development community through conference presentations, public posting, and self-run conferences.

Responsibilities and Expectations:

• Demonstrate exceptional communication abilities, both written and verbal, for purposes of collaboration, education, and mentorship
• Design and develop new engine technology for the production of current and future games
• Design and implement efficient low-level systems to support higher-level programmers & pipelines
• Maintain and support our existing game engine technology while in use by production teams
• Rethink, refactor, and rewrite existing systems as necessary
• Contribute innovative and original ideas towards all aspects of game production and development
• Work proactively with your lead to identify technical risks and generate solutions
• Work independently to complete assigned projects with limited supervision
• Provide technical leadership and tutelage in areas of specialization
• Advise and mentor programmers both within and external to your area of expertise
• Keep current with the technological developments and advancements in the game industry
• Analyze code for performance and optimization opportunities
• Document functionality and implementation details for production and other engineers
• Other duties may be assigned

Desired Qualifications:

• Master’s degree or equivalent, or more than 7 years related experience and/or training, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
• Fluency in C++, and experience with C and assembly programming
• Strong grasp of mathematical concepts and analysis techniques as they apply to game engine programming

If this is an opportunity that you would like to pursue, please apply directly on our website. Please note that we have multiple positions open for this role. Thank you!

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The new online video game retailer Physicality Games has announced it’ll be teaming up with Akupara Games and Mastiff to release a physical version of the 2018 2D adventure-horror title Whispering Willows for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

The hard copy of the game will be available exclusively from Physicality Games when its website goes live later this month. There’ll be the choice of either a standard or deluxe edition. The standard edition comes with a physical copy of the game housed inside a special collector’s tin featuring a transparent display window.

The deluxe edition comes with a physical copy of the game, themed steelbook, original soundtrack CD, 63-page artwork, a 5″ Light-Up display stand featuring Elena’s spirit form and it’s all housed inside a transparent collector’s tin.

All collector’s tins from Physicality Games are sequentially numbered and feature themed artwork. Here’s a bit about the game:

Embark on a journey among the spirits of the dead to help Elena find her missing father. Unravel the secrets that lie hidden within the decaying walls of Willows Mansion.Help Elena use her power of astral projection to enter a ghostly-realm where she communicates with the souls of the deceased, discovers mysterious objects, solves haunting puzzles and gains access to secret pathways within the dark realm.

Will you be adding this to your collection? Leave a comment down below.

A profound understanding of Python lists is fundamental to your Python education. Today, I wondered: what’s the difference between two of the most-frequently used list methods: append() vs. extend()?

I shot a small video explaining the difference and which method is faster—you can play it as you read over this tutorial:

Here’s the short answer — append() vs extend():

• The method list.append(x) adds element x to the end of the list.
• The method list.extend(iter) adds all elements in iter to the end of the list.

The difference between append() and extend() is that the former adds only one element and the latter adds a collection of elements to the list.

You can see this in the following example:

>>> l = []

>>> l.append(1)

>>> l.append(2)

>>> l

[1, 2]

>>> l.extend([3, 4, 5])

>>> l

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

In the code, you first add integer elements 1 and 2 to the list using two calls to the append() method. (If you need a deeper understanding, check out my detailed article about the append() method on this blog.)

Then, you use the extend method to add the three elements 3, 4, and 5 in a single call of the extend() method.

Which Method is Faster — extend() or append()?

To answer this question, I’ve written a short script that tests the runtime performance of creating large lists of increasing sizes using the extend() and the append() methods.

My thesis is that the extend() method should be faster for larger list sizes because Python can append elements to a list in a batch rather than by calling the same method again and again.

I used my notebook with an Intel® Core™ i7-8565U 1.8GHz processor (with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz) and 8 GB of RAM.

Then, I created 100 lists with both methods, extend() and append(), with sizes ranging from 10,000 elements to 1,000,000 elements. As elements, I simply incremented integer numbers by one starting from 0.

Here’s the code I used to measure and plot the results: which method is faster—append() or extend()?

import time def list_by_append(n): '''Creates a list & appends n elements''' lst = [] for i in range(n): lst.append(n) return lst def list_by_extend(n): '''Creates a list & extends it with n elements''' lst = [] lst.extend(range(n)) return lst # Compare runtime of both methods

list_sizes = [i * 10000 for i in range(100)]

append_runtimes = []

extend_runtimes = [] for size in list_sizes: # Get time stamps time_0 = time.time() list_by_append(size) time_1 = time.time() list_by_extend(size) time_2 = time.time() # Calculate runtimes append_runtimes.append((size, time_1 - time_0)) extend_runtimes.append((size, time_2 - time_1)) # Plot everything

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import numpy as np append_runtimes = np.array(append_runtimes)

extend_runtimes = np.array(extend_runtimes) print(append_runtimes)

print(extend_runtimes) plt.plot(append_runtimes[:,0], append_runtimes[:,1], label='append()')

plt.plot(extend_runtimes[:,0], extend_runtimes[:,1], label='extend()') plt.xlabel('list size')

plt.ylabel('runtime (seconds)') plt.legend()

plt.savefig('append_vs_extend.jpg')

plt.show()

The code consists of three high-level parts:

• In the first part, you define two functions list_by_append(n) and list_by_extend(n) that take as input argument an integer list size n and create lists of successively increasing integer elements using the append() and extend() methods, respectively.
• In the second part, you compare the runtime of both functions using 100 different values for the list size n.
• In the third part of, you plot everything using the Python matplotlib library.

Here’s the resulting plot that compares the runtime of the two methods append() vs extend(). On the x axis, you can see the list size from 0 to 1,000,000 elements. On the y axis, you can see the runtime in seconds needed to execute the respective functions.

The resulting plot shows that both methods are extremely fast for a few tens of thousands of elements. In fact, they are so fast that the time() function of the time module cannot capture the elapsed time.

But as you increase the size of the lists to hundreds of thousands of elements, the extend() method starts to win:

For large lists with one million elements, the runtime of the extend() method is 60% faster than the runtime of the append() method.

The reason is the already mentioned batching of individual append operations.

However, the effect only plays out for very large lists. For small lists, you can choose either method. Well, for clarity of your code, it would still make sense to prefer extend() over append() if you need to add a bunch of elements rather than only a single element.

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With the massive recent releases of Blender 2.8x it is time to start looking towards the future and that is exactly what the Blender Foundation have been done.  With a pair of posts to their developer blog addressing the upcoming future of Blender.

First is the announcement of LTS versions and with Blender 3, adopting a more standard numbering convention:

The first proposal is to do one Long Term Support (LTS) release every year. This release would be supported for two years with important bug fixes and updates for new hardware, while strictly maintaining compatibility.

A good reason to do an LTS now is the focus on fixes and patches of the past months. The next release (2.83) although big, will be relatively less experimental, thus a good candidate to keep supporting for a while.

LTS versions also will help to ensure that a project that started with an LTS version can be completed with the same version in a reasonable amount of time. Nice for studios with large projects, but also for add-on maintenance.

As well as details on the new versioning:

Along with this, I also propose to accelerate a bit our release numbers this decade.

This summer we’ll do Blender 2.90 (new particle nodes), and in summer 2021 the Blender 3.0 series begins! By then we will implement a more conventional release numbering.

I suggest to do minor releases (3.0, 3.1, 3.2, … 3.7) for two-year periods, and then move to a new major release. Blender 4.0 could be there in 2023 already!

Additionally there was some discussion on the “biggest projects” over the next year, the type of features you can expect to see in the next few releases of Blender.  There was also some tentative discussions on upcoming User Interface changes from their User Interface Workshop.

Finally there is some unfortunate news about Blender founder Ton Roosendaal who is taking a bit of a break due to help issues:

Last week Monday night I was hospitalized with an acute immune system failure. It was critical and severe but quickly fixed up and diagnosed to be excellently treatable with common medicines. Because of my weak immune system I’m confined to a special over pressured area in the hospital, to prevent germs or viruses from reaching me. Basically it’s the safest place in Amsterdam now!

Last week I migrated all Blender Foundation/Institute operational tasks to Francesco Siddi. He will take over ongoing projects and communication for me until I’m back in April. I would appreciate it if everyone would respect my rest for this month. I can’t handle thousands of good health mails or personal messages now! Social media will do fine ? I know you care!

Wishing you a quick recovery Ton!  To learn more about all of the above be sure to check out the video below.

[embedded content]

Art GameDev News Blender

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© Nintendo Life

Like most games made by Nintendo, the story of Animal Crossing – Nintendo’s charming social life-sim series – begins in Japan, with a man named Katsuya Eguchi. After he nabbed a job at Nintendo in 1986 he was forced to move away from his hometown of Chiba and relocate to Kyoto, the city where Nintendo was (and still is) based. Eguchi worked on several projects hither and thither, notably as a level designer for Super Mario Bros. 3, but the move to Kyoto stuck with him even after he had settled in, and it was a primary influence upon the creation of Animal Crossing.

Eguchi elaborated on the main themes of the original game in an interview with Edge Magazine:

Animal Crossing features three themes: family, friendship, and community, but the reason I wanted to investigate them was a result of being so lonely when I arrived in Kyoto […] when I moved there I left my family and friends behind. In doing so, I realised that being close to them – being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them – was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.

Joining forces with the ever-excellent Takashi Tezuka, Eguchi began the series with Dōbutsu no Mori, a Japan-exclusive game for the N64 which roughly translates to ‘Animal Forest’ in English. The game was originally planned to be released for the 64DD, an add-on which sat under the N64 and took advantage of rewritable, whizzy, spinny discs that could hold a lot more data than a cartridge. Unfortunately, the expansion was a commercial disaster and after countless delays and other problems, Nintendo decided to slap it in a cartridge instead.

There was an issue with this however, as the game relies heavily on a real-time clock, which the 64DD offered but the N64 lacked. Therefore, Nintendo did the only sensible thing and stuck a clock inside the game cartridge. Whilst it worked for the most part, relying on such a solution meant that should the battery run out there’d be no way for the game to track the time when you weren’t playing, which is a significant issue given that that was one of the biggest features.

From N64 to GameCube

This initial release on N64 launched in Japan on the 14th April 2001, but it wasn’t long until a new and improved version called Dōbutsu no Mori+ released for GameCube in December of the same year. The fact that the GameCube actually had a clock in it made fabricating discs easier (and cheaper) than producing more cartridges for the ageing, older Nintendo 64, even if the upgraded game still looked very much like an N64 title.

The GameCube version also came with a selection of new stuff as well, much of which has remained throughout the entire series, including Tortimer, Kapp’n, the Able Sisters, and the Museum. Suffice it to say if you bought the N64 original and then saw this less than 9 months later, you’d probably feel a bit miffed. Still, it’s hard to stay mad while playing Animal Crossing.

The success of the game caught the interest of some other Nintendo employees outside Japan, and despite the mountains of dialogue and text that had to be localised, Nintendo of America set about making what most of you reading will recognise as Animal Crossing for the GameCube, with its classic tagline ‘Population: Growing!’ that still gets ignored to this day. Not only did they translate everything, but they also decided to add in other things such as new holidays. The original game was very Japan-centric when it came to annual festivals, but adding in things like Toy Day (Christmas) and Halloween (Halloween) helped to make the game more recognisable and relatable to a western audience.

Animal Crossing launched in North America less than a year following its Japanese counterpart on the 16th September 2002, although Europeans had to wait a further two years to get their first taste of animal-forest life. The game was well received, but more interestingly the Japanese portion of Nintendo were so impressed with Nintendo of America’s additions that they decided to take all the new content from the western release (plus a bit extra) and release yet another version of the game called Dōbutsu no Mori e+ a year before the European release. The game was even released on the iQue Player in China in 2006, so perhaps Europeans should count themselves they didn’t have to wait until after that launch to play.

The game was a hit, and dominance over the debt simulator genre had been established, so it was time for a proper sequel.

Ooo, baby baby it’s a Wild World

Even though the game had started small and local, Animal Crossing’s success was global, so when it came time to make a sequel Eguchi made sure to change things around for as broad a demographic as possible. Everything from fish, to bugs, to fossils, to holidays were re-designed with an international, multicultural market in mind. The platform choice was a bold move as well, as even though the GameCube had sold a respectable number of units, this new game would be shrunk down onto the tiny Nintendo DS instead.

Despite its size, the DS packed quite a punch features-wise including in-built features that the GameCube didn’t possess, like a microphone that you could use to scream at other villagers to find out where they were. Parents loved that. Animal Crossing: Wild World also had the major advantage of not having to rely on being plugged into the wall at all times, meaning you could take your village with you wherever you went. The DS also technically had Wi-Fi capabilities, so you could visit other people’s villages locally or non-locally using the patented Friend Code system and even send them charming or rude messages.

The game was a smash hit, and thanks to the overwhelming success of the DS in all its ‘third pillar’ glory, superseded the original release financially, and critically. Taking the winning formula and improving on almost every aspect in a handy portable package was a no-brainer to consumers, and the series’ relaxing gameplay appealed to the same broad demographic of players attracted to the Nintendo DS by games like Brain Training and Nintendogs; players who might never have sat down to play something on GameCube but were willing to try something new on DS.

There were a few issues however. With the introduction of the new whizz-bang internet Nintendo had the ability to distribute letters containing gifts to people fancy enough to have a connection, and they did so. One gift called ‘Red Tulips’ came with a blank letter and after placing the mysterious object in your home, not only would it be invisible, but the game still thought there was something there, so you couldn’t move through it. Whatever was there couldn’t be touched or moved, so you weren’t able to pick it back up either, meaning you now had an invisible blockade in your home. Nintendo’s response was swift, and its solution to the problem simple: don’t open the letter and just throw the item away. Genius.

Wild World was a marvel back in the day, a handheld jewel that married the charm of the series with the convenience of portability. The Wii U Virtual Console version neutered that convenience somewhat, but this entry sucked hundreds of wonderful hours from us back on DS.

Nuts to parochial backwaters: Let’s go to the city!

Portable play is all well and good, but what if you had a real hankering for that classic big screen experience on your 12-inch CRT with only one working speaker? With the 2006 launch of the Wii came a two year wait before the series returned to home consoles with Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City!. Or at least that’s what it was called in Europe. In North America it went by Animal Crossing: City Folk because Nintendo of America refuse to publish any game with more than five words in the title. To be honest, we endorse such practices and wish they were still employed; it would avoid multi-syllable embarrassments like Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the Necrodancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda or that Dragon Quest XI: The Longest Title In The History Of The World…Ever! – Definitive Edition.

If the name didn’t give it away at all, Let’s Go To The City allows you to venture outside the peaceful tranquillity of your town and, yes, go to a city. That was about the only major difference between this and Wild World, though, and the game was criticised for being too similar to its predecessor. Part of that may be because it’s based on exactly the same game engine as the DS version. You could have more villagers, your own home rather than sharing one with anyone else who had a character in the game, but much of City Folk was subject to only very minor changes.

One area touted as an improvement over Wild World was the Wii Speak peripheral released alongside this new Wii game. This was essentially a big microphone that you could place near your TV and talk to people as though they were in the room with you. That was Nintendo’s plan at least. In reality it was a largely disappointing, low-quality microphone that forced you to shout at your TV rather than just whisper delicately into a headset (not that people don’t shout into headsets). The Wii Speak only ever supported 13 games, and it’s not hard to see why.

But what about the headlining trip to the city? That must be exciting, right? Well, you could buy clothes, change your hairstyle or fashion yourself a Mii mask, talk to special characters… the city area basically freed up your town to be more focused on your villagers rather than cluttering it all up with shops. As an idea it works well enough, but it also feels strangely disconnected to your actual town, and left it feeling somewhat empty at times. It’s certainly not the bustling MMO metropolis you might have hoped for.

Consequently, Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City ends up as one of the lesser games in the series as it didn’t really push any boundaries beyond what had already been done before. That’s not to say Nintendo didn’t put work into the Wii entry (according to the game’s Iwata Asks interview it features the equivalent of 4000 pages-worth of text), but in a series of slow and steady iteration, City Folk was the slowest and steadiest of Animal Crossings. If it was your only Animal Crossing game at the time you would probably have been more than happy with what you had, though. Still, it wouldn’t be long before you could start over again.

Turning over a New Leaf

Whether or not Let’s Go to the City’s lukewarm reception was a reason or not, the next game in the series returned to a handheld, specifically the Nintendo 3DS. Animal Crossing: New Leaf took even more inspiration from around the world and squeezed it all onto a diminutive cartridge once again. The autostereoscopic 3D display of the console meant the designers had to take extra care to make sure the new perspectives didn’t reveal any behind-the-scenes graphical nastiness that we were never meant to see. The game launched in 2012 in Japan and the following year everywhere else due to another monumental localisation job.

This time around you’re not just some schmuck selling seashells and fallen fruit in an already flooded market, but instead upon arrival at your new town you’re greeted as the new mayor of this rural backwater, with the power to mould and shape the town (and its inhabitants) according to your whims. Being the mayor means you have the ability to change more of your town than ever before, and even dictate people’s bedtimes to suit your own unhealthy schedule. Despite this being such an integral part of what made New Leaf New Leaf, this idea was only decided on a year after the game had started development, as revealed in an Iwata Asks interview on the subject. In fact, it was an impending presentation to a couple of Nintendo honchos that birthed the idea of giving the player more control this time around:

Kyogoku: … we were preparing to make a presentation to Shigeru Miyamoto-san and Takashi Tezuka-san, and we started to wonder how we could possibly sum up the idea behind the new Animal Crossing in a single key word or concept.

Iwata: And this ended up being: “The player is the mayor.”

Kyogoku: Yes. The player becomes the mayor, so he or she can put up bridges and install various items and objects. This makes the whole feature similar to public works projects in the real world.

And with Tortimer booted from office the next chapter of Animal Crossing had its Unique Selling Point.

The game was very well received, and in 2016 – a full three years after its initial release – an updated version called Animal Crossing: New Leaf – Welcome amiibo landed on store shelves. As the new title suggested, this was a revised version of the game that boasted new amiibo functionality and extra modes including an expanded camp site, but those with the base game were able to simply update their original copy to include all the new features for free thanks to the mysterious magic of the internet. Shortly before this updated version released, though, we saw the very first spin-off in the series.