In June 2025, Sam Altman published a blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity,” in which he made a declaration that would have sounded insane just three years prior: “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started” . To the uninitiated, this summons images of science fiction—robots walking the streets or a sudden, dramatic rupture in reality. Yet, as Altman noted, the world looks largely…
The year 2020 is upon us already. Since barely a week has passed in this new year, I think it is a good time to reflect on the previous year. If I were to summarize 2019 in a single word, it would be atypical . I honestly can’t remember a year where so many different things happened. Both regarding my personal life and the world. Since it is out of my scope to discuss the problems of the world…
I am pleased to inform that version 2.7.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. This release contains bug fixes and the addition of a pure Python implementation of cvui , i.e. cvui.py . The Python port of cvui has been conceived and developed with the aim of achieving a 1-to-1 match regarding the already existing C++ API. As a consequence, functions and…
Side projects are a great way to learn new technologies, to exercise what you already know or to just challenge yourself a bit. Usually a side project is not connected to a contract or backed by financial support, so there is no real pressure to actually finish them. As a consequence, the landscape becomes something like the following very quickly (at least for me): Source: Commitstip - side…
I am pleased to inform that version 2.5.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. As usual this release contains contributions from several awesome people, so I would like to thank all contributors that have helped improve cvui. Thank you, you rock! New features for this release include support for multiple windows , a mouse API and the addition of…
One of the first worries that hit me really hard when I became a professor was the influence I have on my students. Even if I just stand in front of my students, speechless and doing absolutely nothing, it will impact them somehow. They are there to learn not only the content listed in the syllabus but new experiences as well. When I started, I was scared to say something that would not help them,…
I started my studies in Computer Science at the Federal University of Santa Maria in 2003. I was very young and the only reason I had to study Computer Science was that I liked computers. I had no clue about what Computer Science would be, or what things I could do after graduation. I honestly had no expectations beyond improving my knowledge about computers. That is for sure a naïve mindset to…
I am pleased to inform that version 2.0.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. This post is a bit overdue since the release happened in May, but better late than never. Version 2.0.0 is packed with new features, however the API remains the same, so it is quite easy to upgrade. The inner parts of cvui have been completely overhauled, allowing better…
Managing references is a common and daily task of any academic. It consists of keeping track of papers you have read and how to cite them in the future. If you are involved in a little endeavor with a few papers to monitor, you are good to go with a folder where you store the PDF files and pull the citations from there. I am a Latex user, so I organize all my references using Bibtex . It’s an easy…
This is the second update on Scifibot , my companion app for sci-fi fans. Things are finally starting to take shape, which is great and bad at the same time. It’s great because the app is coming together and I can actually see it working. The bad part is that I reached the 90% development mark, which means I have only 10% of work to go. Right? If you have experience shipping any software that…
I love scifi movies and series. There are plently of good (and not so good) titles out there to be seen, but it is really hard to find them or keep track of interesting things. If you are like me, you probably had spent a significant amount of your time 1) finding things and 2) making notes or equivalents to remember what to watch. I would like to see a list of every scifi movie or series…
Since I started my PhD in September, 2015, I have been writing a lot of code . My research project contains its fair amount of theory, but it is significantly practical and applied science, so I need to write software to test things out. A percentage of my coding was indeed targeted at creating original software that could do something related to my research. Another significant part, however, was…
I am pleased to inform that version 1.1.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. Here is an image to show the new features: This release is backward compatible, so users of the lib should be able to upgrade by just dropping the new files into their projects. There ara few bug fixes as well as some pretty cool new features. One of the most annoying tasks…
I have been working a lot with OpenCV and C++ lately. After spending a great amount of time waiting for things to compile (so I could see my changes), I decided to improve my workflow. I decided to make changes in runtime, so I could tweak things without the need to recompile the whole project. I immediately faced a problem: how to quickly and easily create GUI with OpenCV. The OpenCV lib has…
It took a lot more than I wanted it to take, but I finally concluded the move from Wordpress to Github Pages ! Finally my personal website (this one you are reading) runs in a static fashion, without PHP, databases and all that useful-but-not-for-my-personal-website stuff. I enjoyed Wordpress from the very beginning, it has a nice set of features and helps you write and manage content. During the…
Another years has gone by. I wrote my new year’s resolutions for 2013 almost a year ago, but it still feels like yesterday. The last days of 2013 seem the perfect time to review the year and check if I collected accomplishments or lame excuses. Without further ado, down to the goals: Improve my skills as an indie game developer . I already joined OneGameAMonth and will try to release 12 games in…
It’s been three weeks since I started working on this book. During Friday the 15th I finished the summary. I came up with 19 chapters! That’s more than I previously thought, but since it’s a draft, I can cut some chapters along the way. Today I finally started writing something. Damn, it was hard ! It’s been almost 3 years since I wrote something big (my master thesis) , so I had to brush all that…
I am thrilled to say that today I’ve started writing my book about game development! Every great (and huge) journey starts with a single step, which probably is the hardest one. This book is one of my new year’s resolutions for 2013 . I’ve been planning to start this book since the beginning of the year, but university work (and some side projects, such as 1GAM ) swamped me with tasks. I knew…
Last year was amazing! It was my second year working as a professor, something really different from the life I used to have as a game developer at Decadium . I experimented much more and the overall was pretty good. I am happy with the results I got so many ideas during last year that I end up surrounded by a vortex of them. Lots of those ideas came to reality, but a huge amount is still out…
I am not a new “consumer” of open-source software (OSS). In fact several tools I work in a daily basis are open-source. The OSS idea of freedom to create, share and help others (most of the time for free) always fascinated me. I’ve been planning to jump into that open-source world for a while. And for “jump into” I mean start contributing code/ideas/energy instead of just watching things happen. I…
The very first time I heard about ChromeOS I thought it was an amazing idea. I always hated the painful process of keeping a computer running smoothly, which consists of formatting, installing OS/apps, update everything, repeat it all. When Google released their Chromebooks , I joined the waiting list, but they were not available here in Brazil. Damn it! It did not stop me from trying ChromeOS.…
A few weeks ago I told my 2nd year CS students to create a programming language and here are the results of such assignment. I am sorry for the long post, but I used any good information I collected. I have 24 students attending my classes. The assignment was supposed to be performed by pairs within 3 weeks, but I had two students that decided to go alone, so there were only 11 pairs of students.…
I teach object-oriented programming using Java to 3rd semester Computer Science students at Federal University of Fronteira Sul . During their first years, the students attend to algorithms and data structures classes, all using C. I teach algorithms too. I like to teach using assignments. During the last two semesters, my OOP/Java classes were followed by small assignments, every two weeks. Those…
My friends at Decadium just released a new game called Nokaloompas . It s a funny puzzle game that has the inverse gameplay of Cut the Rope , meaning you have to add ropes in order to achieve the level goal (carry bombs around) Play for free at Kongregate .
Flash game developers – meet my new project: AS3 Game Gears ! It is the right place to find useful tools to boost your game development. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, all you need is a place to find what you have been looking for. Enjoy!
If you are looking for something different to make you game or Flash app looks better than the rest then you must take a look at FIVe3D. It is an open source code for the conception of interactive vector-based 3D animations. It is licensed under the MIT License. One of my favorites demos is the Fluo Board .
Sometimes I find myself solving the same problems again and again on several different projects. Definitely there is no need to reinvent the wheel, you just have to use the right tools. Theses days I found a perfect help on that subject. AS3 utils is a set of useful function that solve common problems such as randomizing or summing the values of an a array. All functions were collected from…
One of the most common tasks in game development is the assets loading process. You have two options: 1) ship your game as a single 45Mb SWF file filled with sweet and compressed-to-the-bones images/sounds or 2) load all those assets separately and on demand. Sometimes the first option is your best shot, but for casual online games the second one is more suitable. Multiple loadings in AS3 can be a…
Create and develop a game is hard task, but optimize one is even harder. You can ruin a perfect game design and a beautiful artset by filling the source code with useless and/or unnecessary stuff. In order to keep things in control a performance monitor comes in handy. Mrdoob stats provides a simple info box that will help you monitor your code performance. It can tell you the following: FPS…
After Happy Farm and FarmVille attracted millions of user there is a lot of talking about isometric games. I’ve played several games featuring an isometric view then I’ve spent some thoughts around the idea of creating my own isometric game (or one for my company, developed during my inexistent free time). Looking for isometric game engines, I found three great projects: FFilmation , As3isolib and…
When I play a game, I like to see all those flying particles popping up on the screen. Casual games make heavy use of this resource, sometimes more than what is considered healthy. A particle system adds dynamism to the game and makes it feel alive. Where is the fun of blowing up an enemy base and see just a few flames as a reward? Players want to see lots of things flying around and sparkles…
The first time I saw a really convincing physics engine working on a PC game was during a Half Life 2 session. All that Havok physics created an unique game experience. Luckily the use of physics inside games has grown and now we have a wide range of tool to use, even in Flash games. QuickBox2D is one of them. It is a mini-library created to work with Box2DFlashAS3 , which is an AS3 port of the…
I see lots of open source projetcs using Worpress as a blog platform, phpBB as a forum solution and Mediawiki as a wiki. I like them all, but maintaining them separately with no integrations is a pain. It’s great when you register to a website and you can use the same fresh new account to comment on the blog, reply to a forum thread and/or contribute to a wiki page. Excluding the wiki part, there…
I like to write my code from scratch, but it does not mean I want to reinvent the wheel every single day. This is one of the reasons why I like to use engines to code games. Sometimes the project has it´s own specific features and it requires a completly customized code, but most of the time it´s all about the same things: test input, check collisions, update a bunch of elements and finally render…
These days I was looking for intranet solutions and I luckily found Open Atrium , an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. OpenAtrium is built on top of Drupal , has a nice design and a useful set of features: Blog : A classic blog for each group that has commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular…
Probably I ve spent several hours editing and arranging pictures to create a nice Powerpoint presentation. Even though the Microsoft product is a great tool, I do not like the final result. It seems unfashionable, too poor and/or simple. This is one of the reasons why I like image sliders developed using Flash. I look at them and imagine how wonderful life would be if I could easily use it and…
Sometime ago I was working on a Flash game and I had to output some information to the console. That’s a very easy task when you use trace() and the Flash IDE, but things get a little harder when you need to output text inside the browser. Looking for a tool that could help me output text, I found SWFConsole . It is a free developer tool for Flash AS3 projects that gives you output in all…
Javacript is the very first base stone concerning web 2.0. In the past, I always heard bad things about Javascript, but I guess all of them were said because Javascript was being used by the wrong people, in the wrong place and at the wrong time. A lot of sites use huge Javacript libs, each one performing nice things, such as HTTP requests, animation effects, generation of RIA content, etc.…
If you work with Flash like I do you probably have said a bunch of bad words while you were coding AS3 using the native Flash IDE AS editor. I like Adobe, I really do, Flash can do amazing things and the IDE is getting more and more powerfull, however as a AS3 project manager, the Flash IDE sucks. I could have saved tons of working hours if Flash IDE had some sort of smart code completion, or if…
Some years ago, the only thing that came to my mind when I heard the word web was very simple websites , a bunch of bytes available for browing. Google was not even born at that time and everyhing was focused on desktop applications. If your application was able to connect to the web, then it could update itself in a easy way, nothing else. The main flow was to bring every single business plan…
One of the most annoying thing I did during the development of our web projects was to keep our apps running smooth in a wide range of old browsers. Not too many years ago, there was only one “king” in the browser’s kingdom: Microsoft Internet Explorer . King is a little bit unappropriated, however on February, 2005, IE 6 was pumping the web engines with a market share of 82.79% , what is a quite…
Reviewing the code is an important task every programmer must (or should) perform. Sometimes the program you have just coded looks nice and fast, because all the tests you have performed using your well-controlled devel0pment sandbox showed no errors. Unless you are a god when programming, you may have left some little performance tweaks behind. Most of the time you can replace several method…
Welcome to my personal website! Here you can find some information about my work, about the stuff I’ve created and about the useful (and not so useful) texts I read every day. I hope you can find here something cool or, at least, something able to help you somehow. Feel free to mail me at any time for suggestions and enjoy the lack of content!