Newsbrief: Ubisoft’s freshly unveiled next Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, won’t be up for purchase on Steam at launch, instead opting to bring its PC release to only the Epic Games Store and its own Uplay platform.

Though a high-profile game opting to skip a day-one Steam launch is noteworthy, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla doing so isn’t entirely surprising at this point. Ubisoft itself forged a relationship with Epic Games back in the early days of the Epic Games Store right around the time The Division 2 was wrapped up in a similar exclusivity announcement. This latest development looks to be a continuation of that previous arrangement.

Rather than delay an upcoming content drop altogether, the Guild Wars 2 team has made the call to launch the next episode of its Icebrood Saga arc without any voice acting for the time being.

It’s a decision that, like many, comes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the virus. While the development team itself is able to work remotely to maintain the online game and create new Guild Wars 2 content, voice actors involved with the project aren’t yet able to safely make the trek to the recording studio.

“Because the recording studio staff and voice actors who help bring Guild Wars 2 to life are also abiding by shelter-in-place guidance to keep the virus from spreading, we’ve chosen to release the upcoming third episode of The Icebrood Saga without voice acting,” writes the Guild Wars 2 team.

“This was a difficult decision to make, but we want to keep releasing content updates for the community to enjoy on a regular schedule. When it’s safe, we’ll create a high-quality studio recording so we can update the episode with voiced lines.”

Other studios have ran into similar problems in recent months, with some like Square Enix opting to instead delay content do to complications with voice acting, external QA, and many of the other moving parts involved in shipping new content.

In March, we heard how this year’s EVO Championship series in North America would be “moving forward” with its plans. Now, like every other gaming event at this point, it’s been cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The announcement was made on the official EVO Twitter account. As previously promised, all arena tickets and hotel room reservations will be refunded. To make up for this, an online event will take its place this summer. More information about this will be revealed soon.

EVO locked in its games line-up for this year at the start of February. Apart from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the other fighters included were Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r], Dragon Ball FighterZ, Samurai Shodown, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Soul Calibur VI, Granblue Fantasy Versus and Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

We’ll let you know when details about the new online event are released.

Short answer: You can remove all empty lists from a list of lists by using the list comprehension statement [x for x in list if x] to filter the list.

In the following, you’ll learn about the two methods using list comprehension and the filter() function to remove all empty lists from a list of lists.

But before that, feel free to play with the code yourself:

Method 1: List Comprehension

How can you remove all empty lists from a list of lists? Say, you’ve got a list of lists

[[1, 2, 3], [1, 2], [], [], [], [1, 2, 3, 4], [], []]

and you want all empty lists removed to obtain the list of lists

[[1, 2, 3], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3, 4]].

Solution: Use list comprehension [x for x in list if x] to filter the list and remove all lists that are empty.

lst = [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2], [], [], [], [1, 2, 3, 4], [], []]

print([x for x in lst if x])

# [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2], [1, 2, 3, 4]]

The condition if x evaluates to False only if the list x is empty. In all other cases, it evaluates to True and the element is included in the new list.

You can visualize the execution flow here by clicking the “Next” button:

Method 2: filter()

An alternative is to use the filter() function to remove all empty lists from a list of lists:

lst = [[1, 2, 3], [1, 2], [], [], [], [1, 2, 3, 4], [], []]

print(list(filter(lambda x: x, lst)))

The filter() function takes two arguments:

• the filter decision function to check for each element whether it should be included in the filtered iterable (it returns a Boolean value), and
• the iterable to be filtered.

As filter decision function, you use the identity function that just passes the list through. Why does this work? Because only an empty list will be evaluated to False. All other lists will be evaluated to True (and, thus, pass the filtering test).

Related articles:

• How to filter a list in Python?
• Filter vs List Comprehension (Speed)
• List Comprehension
• Lists of Lists

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

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The long running open source C++ framework Ogre just released Ogre 2.1 Baldur.  Performance optimizations, a new compositor and shading system and more top the list of features.

Highlight features from the release announcement:

• Hlms (High Level Material System) to generate shaders automatically. Replaces RTSS and manual shaders
• PBS – Physically Based Shading
• New Compositor. More flexible, faster and powerful
• Refactored Ogre 1.x to increase performance by several factors; using cache friendly techniques (Data Oriented Design), SIMD instructions, AZDO (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead), auto instancing, and multithreading
• Windows Vista/7/8/10 support, macOS via Metal and OpenGL, iOS via Metal, Linux via OpenGL
• Many new features: Area lights, Parallax Corrected Cubemaps, Forward Clustered lights, HDR, Exponential Shadowmaps and more

Ogre is open source under the MIT license and available here on GitHub.  Learn more about Ogre and the 2.1 release in the video below.

GameDev News CPP 3D

Super Evil Megacorp has just announced Catalyst Black, an upcoming hero shooter that features a wide variety of inspirations, including its own Vainglory. It takes the top-down gameplay of Vainglory, mixes it with the hero shooting mechanics of Overwatch, and sprinkles the loot and loadouts from Destiny 2 to create possibly the ultimate mobile game.

The closest comparison to Catalyst Black right now is Supercell’s Brawl Stars, which is a more traditional hero shooter that plays like a MOBA. Catalyst Black will massively expand on this format thanks to the sheer amount of control you can have over your playable character. You can equip primary and secondary weapons, and active and passive abilities.

You can also equip your character with a mask, which basically functions as its ultimate ability. Masks let you basically become the avatar of a god, changing your appearance and providing you with powerful new abilities whenever you activate it. There are a bunch of different masks to choose from, and you can tweak the active and passive abilities for each of them too.

It’s entirely possible to create your own playstyle using the loadout system, which is a welcome change to similar shooter Brawl Stars, where your hero choice determines how you play. You can fight from the safety of distance or get stuck right in with a shotgun. It’s entirely up to you.

In terms of modes, we don’t know anything concrete yet, but we do know that there will be a bunch of them, and they’re designed for 10-20 players to compete against each other in teams. What’s perhaps most interesting, is that you can drop in, and out, of matches at any time, allowing you to play no matter how much time you have on your hands.

We’re not sure exactly when we’ll get our hands on Catalyst Black, as it’s only in pre-alpha right now. We do know that it’s designed to be cross-platform though, and if it follows the same path as Vainglory, it will launch across iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. In its introductory trailer, Super Evil Megacorp mentioned that it will support touch, controllers, and keyboard and mouse.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more about Catalyst Black. If you’re intrigued, you can visit the official site, or follow the game on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.