What’s that feeling?  Is it love?  No, it’s EXCITEMENT!  Today our Valentine is this newly released snapshot!  Don’t forget to drop feedback to Mojang about this update and join the conversation below.  What are you most excited about so far?

• Endermen can now pick up some of the new Nether blocks
• Endermen will no longer pick up Netherrack
• Gave Hoglins some actual functionality
• Added Piglins
• The Wither can now be summoned using soul soil as base
• Netherite blocks can be used as the base of a beacon and Netherite ingots can be used as the fuel for a beacon. Weird flex but ok.

ADVANCEMENTS

• Piglins and Hoglins are now required for Monster Hunter and Monsters Hunted

HOGLINS

• Hoglins are big aggressive beasts that live in crimson forests in the Nether
• They attack players on sight, so be careful, they can easily knock you off a ledge!
• Hoglins drop pork and sometimes leather, but not willingly
• You can breed Hoglins by feeding them crimson fungi, but do so at your own risk
• Hoglins get hunted by Piglins sometimes, but they don’t go down without a fight!
• Despite this, Hoglins and Piglin aren’t enemies – they are more like an ecosystem
• Baby Hoglins like to pretend they are tough – but don’t worry, they are more like angry puppies with no teeth
• Want to keep Hoglins off your back? Pro tip: Hoglins hate the smell of warped fungi!

PIGLINS

• Piglins are an aggressive civilization that live in the Nether
• They mostly hang around in crimson forests, but you might find
  some in the Nether wastes too
• They think of players as target practice and will attack on sight
• However, if you dress appropriately they will see you as a respectable figure, or tolerable at least
• Piglins are suspicious of strangers and if they see you opening a chest, or mining a block of gold,
  they will assume that you’re stealing and will treat you accordingly
• Piglins LOVE gold and get very distracted by gold items
• Gold ingots are currency to Piglins and you can throw ingots at them or right-click them with an
  ingot to barter for various goods
• Piglins sometimes get hungry and hunt Hoglins for food. Or they try at least. They results… vary.
• Piglins prefer to hunt and fight in groups, and when a fight is happening everyone wants in
• Piglins that somehow end up in the overworld become zombified fairly quickly
• Piglins are creeped out by soul fire and zombified Piglins, and will stay clear whenever possible
• Wither skeletons are a historic enemy and Piglins will attack on sight
• Baby Piglins are not as dangerous, but they can be mischievous so watch your back
• … and they like to play with baby Hoglins

• MC-65951 – Armor stands fall through fences
• MC-75328 – /clear doesn’t clear items in the inventory crafting grid
• MC-79944 – Various statistics overflow at 32-bit integer limit
• MC-89043 – Slime blocks moved by pistons often fail to bounce up the player
• MC-93813 – Snow golems throwing snowballs play arrow shooting sound
• MC-94094 – Snow golems don’t drop their pumpkin when sheared
• MC-94730 – Endermen become passive when teleporting randomly during day while being aggressive
• MC-132967 – Mushrooms show as green dots on map
• MC-133088 – Missing translation string death.attack.magic.player
• MC-135034 – Burning mobs are extinguished by snow in cold biomes, but not in snowy biomes
• MC-148067 – Snow Golems Damaged by Snowfall in Mountain/Cold Biomes
• MC-155977 – Enchanting a book makes the book lose its name
• MC-160053 – Enderman keeps following the player after becoming neutral/passive
• MC-166245 – No sound for shearing snow golems
• MC-167561 – All players can make a dog stand up or sit down
• MC-167692 – Infested blocks don’t spawn silverfish when blown up
• MC-170816 – Debug Pie freezes in place when closing F3 menu and stays there
• MC-170846 – Stacked walls create pillars when they should not, depending on the order of placement
• MC-170848 – Hoglin and zombie pigman spawn eggs look identical
• MC-170849 – Hoglin’s hitbox is way too small
• MC-170852 – Breaking a warped or crimson doors drops two items in Survival mode
• MC-170862 – Soul “Lights” do not update walls
• MC-170869 – Soul fire lantern animation missing
• MC-170881 – Fire doesn’t burn items
• MC-170886 – Alt+F3 debug graph no longer functions
• MC-170899 – Netherite cannot power beacons
• MC-170939 – Walls don’t create pillars with string / tripwire above
• MC-170951 – Cannot teleport entities outside of the world
• MC-171023 – Walls don’t stack properly in some directions when placed next to blocks
• MC-171211 – Observers no longer detect a piston base starting to retract
• MC-171333 – Killing a hoglin does not grant the ‘Monster Hunter’/‘Monsters Hunted’ advancements
• MC-172025 – Several misrotated blocks at snowy_medium_house_2

Be sure to go to the Installations tab on your Minecraft launcher to opt-in for Snapshots.  Be aware that snapshots can corrupt your worlds so create a back up just in case anything were to happen.

Cross-platform server jar:

To celebrate Sonic the Hedgehog in 2020, Sega is sharing special news on the 20th of each month. In March, it has an “announcement or two” prepared for a Sonic panel at SXSW 2020, and now in the latest update it’s announced, ‘Sonic Station Live!’ – the first of its monthly broadcast series.

This event will take place next week on 20th February at 6:00 pm JST, and you’ll be able to tune into the live stream on YouTube. According to a tweet by Sega Official, there’ll be introductions to everything related to Sonic the Hedgehog, along with coverage of the games and merchandise.

Could Sega have a surprise or two up its sleeve? Tell us what you’re expecting in the comments below.

After a false call by Netflix Nordic last November, earlier this week the third season of the animated adaptation of Castlevania was officially dated. It’s arriving next month, on 5th March, and will reportedly be comprised of a total of 10 episodes.

If the release date alone wasn’t enough, Netflix has now shared its first trailer of season three. As you might recall, the previous season ended with Alucard killing his father. Unfortunately, though, the human race is still under threat from Dracula’s forces of evil.

Trevor Belmont, his morning star, and the speaker Sypha Belnades make a return in this new season alongside Alucard, as they reunite once again in an attempt to stop Hell from breaking loose. View the full trailer above and tell us what you think of it in the comments below.

House House’s game with the horrible goose won top honors at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas Thursday night, with games like Control, Death Stranding and others earning recognition.

The full list of winners is below:

Game of the Year

Untitled Goose Game

Publisher: Panic

Developer: House House

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction

Control

Publisher: 505 Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Outstanding Achievement in Game Design

Baba Is You

Publisher: Hempuli Oy

Developer: Hempuli Oy

Portable Game of the Year

Sayonara Wild Hearts

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Simogo

Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game

Untitled Goose Game

Publisher: Panic

Developer: House House

Immersive Reality Game of the Year

Pistol Whip

Publisher: Cloudhead Games

Developer: Cloudhead Games

Immersive Reality Technical Achievement

Blood & Truth

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: SIE London Studio

Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay

Apex Legends

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Respawn Entertainment

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Publisher: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Developer: Nintendo Co., Ltd., Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd. and Koei Tecmo Games Co., Ltd.

Sports Game of the Year

FIFA 2020

Publisher: EA Sports

Developer: EA Vancouver

Role-Playing Game of the Year

The Outer Worlds

Publisher: Private Division

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Racing Game of the Year

Mario Kart Tour

Publisher: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Developer: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Fighting Game of the Year

Mortal Kombat 11

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Developer: NetherRealm Studios

Family Game of the Year

Super Mario Maker 2

Publisher: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Developer: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Adventure Game of the Year

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Respawn Entertainment

Action Game of the Year

Control

Publisher: 505 Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Outstanding Technical Achievement

Death Stranding

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Kojima Productions Co., Ltd.

Outstanding Achievement in Story

Disco Elysium

Publisher: ZA/UM

Developer: ZA/UM

Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design

Death Stranding

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Kojima Productions Co., Ltd.

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition

Control

Publisher: 505 Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Outstanding Achievement in Character

Untitled Goose Game

Publisher: Panic

Developer: House House

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

Control

Publisher: 505 Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Publisher: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Developer: Next Level Games

Just two and a half months after the release of Blender 2.81, Blender 2.82 is now available.  While nowhere near as massive an update as Blender 2.80, there are still a number of improvements to be found in Blender 2.82 including:

• New Mantaflow powered gas and liquid physics simulation engine
• Improved cloth simulations with support for internal air pressure and internal springs
• UDIM tiled texturing support (learn more here and here)
• PIXAR USD format export support
• Cycles improvements including new nodes, faster rendering on Windows and more
• AI DeNoiser support on RTX hardware powered by NVidia OptiX for faster cycles renders
• Preview pass support in EEVEE renderer including ambient occlusion, mist, combined, normal and more
• Transparent materials now blend properly with volumetrics
• Sculpting improvements including new multi-plane scrape brush and slide relax brush as well as pose brush improvements
• Grease pencil improvements including new polyline tool and multi stroke modifier
• Plus several other new features and improvements

For complete details on what’s new in Blender 2.82 be sure to check out the complete release notes available here.  You can also learn more and see several of the new features in action in the video below.

GameDev News Blender

---

<!–

–>

A regular expression is a decades-old concept in computer science. Invented in the 1950s by famous mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene, the decades of evolution brought a huge variety of operations. Collecting all operations and writing up a comprehensive list would result in a very thick and unreadable book by itself.

Fortunately, you don’t have to learn all regular expressions before you can start using them in your practical code projects. Next, you’ll get a quick and dirty overview of the most important regex operations and how to use them in Python. In follow-up chapters, you’ll then study them in detail — with many practical applications and code puzzles.

Here are the most important regex operators:

• . The wild-card operator (‘dot’) matches any character in a string except the newline character ‘\n’. For example, the regex ‘…’ matches all words with three characters such as ‘abc’, ‘cat’, and ‘dog’.  
• * The zero-or-more asterisk operator matches an arbitrary number of occurrences (including zero occurrences) of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat*’ matches the strings ‘ca’, ‘cat’, ‘catt’, ‘cattt’, and ‘catttttttt’. 
• ? The zero-or-one operator matches (as the name suggests) either zero or one occurrences of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat?’ matches both strings ‘ca’ and ‘cat’ — but not ‘catt’, ‘cattt’, and ‘catttttttt’. 
• + The at-least-one operator matches one or more occurrences of the immediately preceding regex. For example, the regex ‘cat+’ does not match the string ‘ca’ but matches all strings with at least one trailing character ‘t’ such as ‘cat’, ‘catt’, and ‘cattt’. 
• ^ The start-of-string operator matches the beginning of a string. For example, the regex ‘^p’ would match the strings ‘python’ and ‘programming’ but not ‘lisp’ and ‘spying’ where the character ‘p’ does not occur at the start of the string.
• $ The end-of-string operator matches the end of a string. For example, the regex ‘py$’ would match the strings ‘main.py’ and ‘pypy’ but not the strings ‘python’ and ‘pypi’. 
• A|B The OR operator matches either the regex A or the regex B. Note that the intuition is quite different from the standard interpretation of the or operator that can also satisfy both conditions. For example, the regex ‘(hello)|(hi)’ matches strings ‘hello world’ and ‘hi python’. It wouldn’t make sense to try to match both of them at the same time.
• AB  The AND operator matches first the regex A and second the regex B, in this sequence. We’ve already seen it trivially in the regex ‘ca’ that matches first regex ‘c’ and second regex ‘a’. 

Note that I gave the above operators some more meaningful names (in bold) so that you can immediately grasp the purpose of each regex. For example, the ‘^’ operator is usually denoted as the ‘caret’ operator. Those names are not descriptive so I came up with more kindergarten-like words such as the “start-of-string” operator.

Let’s dive into some examples!

Examples

import re text = ''' Ha! let me see her: out, alas! he's cold: Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. ''' print(re.findall('.a!', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of an arbitrary character that is

followed by the character sequence 'a!'.

['Ha!'] ''' print(re.findall('is.*and', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'is',

followed by an arbitrary number of characters

and the word 'and'.

['is settled, and'] ''' print(re.findall('her:?', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',

followed by zero or one occurrences of the colon ':'.

['her:', 'her', 'her'] ''' print(re.findall('her:+', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',

followed by one or more occurrences of the colon ':'.

['her:'] ''' print(re.findall('^Ha.*', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences where the string starts with

the character sequence 'Ha', followed by an arbitrary

number of characters except for the new-line character. Can you figure out why Python doesn't find any?

[] ''' print(re.findall('\n$', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences where the new-line character '\n'

occurs at the end of the string.

['\n'] ''' print(re.findall('(Life|Death)', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of either the word 'Life' or the

word 'Death'.

['Life', 'Death'] '''

In these examples, you’ve already seen the special symbol \n which denotes the new-line character in Python (and most other languages). There are many special characters, specifically designed for regular expressions.

Where to Go From Here?

If you want to master regular expressions once and for all, I’d recommend that you read the massive regular expression tutorial on the Finxter blog — for free!

https://blog.finxter.com/python-regex/