Internet/Tech literate people continuously talk about privacy. The majority of people, however, do not care. This is hard to digest for the first group of people, but it is the truth and we should start considering this fact to make things better in the future.

Why I’m talking about this? Because, in the last weeks, I’ve found an extremely easy way to spy any Telegram group. It is not a dark market secret (in fact it is perfectly documented in the Telegram Bot API), but works perfectly because nobody cares. While every internet and privacy activist is talking about how Google, Facebook and Yahoo are spying on our email, telegram bots that are actually logging all the messages in all the groups in plain text. They are bot, by unknown programmers, without ToS, without anything, reading all your messages and potentially storing them who knows where.

So, I will explain to you how to build a Telegram SpyBot. Hopefully you can use it to teach some privacy lesson to your friends.

I think the time is ready to talk about Procedural Contents Generation (PCG) in the post No Man’s Sky era. I’m talking about “era” for a good reason: No Man’s Sky huge failure will definitely mark an era in the history of PCG, and not for a good reason. Players’ perception on PCG has been severely hurt by how badly NMS delivered its contents. Probably, this will be the end of PCG as a marketing buzz-word.

These days were a bit busy. I want to break the silence with an interesting link to a video. This is an interesting and fun to watch talk coming from the last PyCon. It talks about “practical statistics”, that is, how you can try to produce (or validate) a model when you can not compute the analytic model of a phenomenon. Many of the technique he describes can be used to any language, so it is suitable even if you do not program in Python. Anyway, look that, it is worth it. Moreover, this is just an excuse to suggest you to look around all the other videos from PyCon. They are well made and there are some interesting talk that should be watched.

When you design a game, one of the most important aspect to take into account is the number of players. Games can be designed for a single player, two players, four players or thousands of player (like in MMOs) and this decision has a huge impact in the technical and design requirements.

But it is not just choosing a number. The “number of players” parameter cannot be arbitrarily moved at will. The more we increase the value, the more the designing task becomes harder and harder. Look around you. We have thousands of single-player games, we can find a huge amount of games for 2 to 4 players, we have party games that can go to 10 players or team sport games such as rugby and football that can be played up to 20 or 30 players, but after this amount of players, how many good games there are?

As you probably know, last week I was at the DiGRA-FDG conference in Dundee, Scotland. The conference ended last week, but I have the urge to add something to a really interesting presentation I’ve attended during the first day at the workshop on Procedural Contents Generation.

Before FDG, I was reading a small book on how the Chinese language has evolved during the centuries. It is extremely interesting. Especially if we look at the clear and wonderful evolution from pictures on paleolithic wood artifacts to the modern Mandarin Language. This triggered in me the idea to explore the literature on teleological algorithms for the procedural generation of languages (if you don’t know, the teleological algorithms in PCG are the ones that try to generate a “thing” by simulating the physical and evolutionary processes through which the “thing” is generated in the Real World™).

I’m back! During the last week, I had a beautiful experience as a volunteer at the Nucl.ai 2016 conference, one of the nicest Game AI related conferences in Europe.

I like this conference. It has a very informal atmosphere and both speakers and attendees are incredibly friendly and very willing in giving advice. You can go there like a complete no-one (for instance, like me) and you can speak and have a beer with Lead AI programmer in Triple-A games, in top notch industries like Google, Blizzard or Epic as if they are your friends.

Elixir and Clojure are two uprising and fun functional languages. As you know, I talked about both of them in the article on the most promising languages of 2016, and, in fact, they are the only real functional languages I mentioned in there.

At the time, I didn’t really explore these two languages in deep, and in fact, I think I was a bit too hard on Clojure. During this half year, I had the opportunity to go deeper in Clojure and my opinion on the languages increased accordingly. Moreover, Clojure 1.8 came out just a month later with some nice improvements and the upcoming Clojure 1.9 (with the introduction of the `clojure.spec`) seems to push the bar even further. So, yeah, I was wrong on a big point: Clojure is advancing quite fast.

Yesterday I converted a Binary Heap data structure in TypeScript. The original code is here, in the Eloquent JavaScript online book by Marijn Haverbeke.

In short, a Binary Heap is a common data structure for a priority queue. We want to put inside the queue many values (or an object) and you want to extract the smallest value (or the object with the smallest score) in the most efficient way.

This JS implementation the Eloquent Javascript book is pretty common, so I decided “to typify it”.  The result is in the following Gist:

As you may know, I am in the middle of developing a demo for some Smart Pathfinding, and I’m using Phaser and TypeScript for it. Unfortunately, as soon as I started coding a couple of days ago, I quickly found a problem. How can I do pixel-perfect scaling of the game?

The tileset I’m using is very small (16x16 pixels tiles) and I needed to scale them at least 3 times to make them visible on a big screen. However, searching for “phaser.io” and “scaling” returns a lot of not useful results.

In the last period, I’m really enjoying TypeScript. It is typed, can be used in a functional way without effort, it like a C# for the Web, in short, I love it. For this reason, I started converting some old Phaser.io demo in TypeScript, for fun.

So, why I’m writing here? To solve two main problems. First, the TypeScript guide in the Phaser.io web page is really outdated. Second, there are a lot of “template” project fo Phaser.io you can download. These templates are really state-of-the-art level: they use Gulp, Grunt, NPM and another million of tools.