Create a basic Discord bot in F#

I have been using Discord a lot lately, mainly because I needed a space to meet for role-playing games remotely during the Black Plague. One nice perk of Discord is its support for bots. In particular, I used a bot called Groovy, which allowed streaming music from various sources like YouTube during games, and was great to set the tone for epic moments in a campaign. Unfortunately, Groovy wasn’t complying with the YouTube terms of service, and fell to the ban hammer. No more epic music for my epic D&D encounters :(

As the proverb goes, “necessity is the mother of invention”. If there is no bot I can readily use, how difficult could it be to create my own replacement, in F#?

In this post, I will go over the basics of creating a Discord bot in F#, using the DSharpPlus library. Later on, I will follow up with a post focusing on streaming music.

The bot we will write here will be pretty basic: we will add a fancier version of hello world, with a command inspire that we can trigger from Discord:

/inspire @bruenor

.. which will cast Bardic Inspiration on @bruenor, a user on our server, responding with a message

Bardic Inspiration! @bruenor, add 3 (1d6) to your next ability check, attack, or saving throw.

Graph Layout with Spring Embedders in F#

I have been obsessing over the problem of graphs layouts lately. To provide a bit of context, the starting point for that obsession was role-playing games. When running an adventure, you often need to quickly find various pieces of information, and how they are connected, for instance “Who is the leader of the Lampblacks”, or “What are notable locations in the Six Towers district”. This type of information clearly forms a graph. It would be nice to be able to navigate that information quickly, to figure out how various entities are connected.

This is how I got interested in building up a knowledge base for a game I am running (the wonderful Blades in the Dark), and displaying the information as a graph.

Before diving into the code, as a teaser, here is how the result looks like at the moment:

Or you can try it live here.

I can search for entries, select them, and as I do, the relationships between them is added to the graph, automatically highlighting existing connections.

Graph Layout with Spring Embedders

The part I found interesting was the automatic graph layout. The goal here is to take a graph, a set of nodes (or vertices) which may or may not have edges connecting them, and display them in a manner that is hopefully informative and pleasing to the eye.

As it turns out, this is not an entirely trivial problem.

Santa's Mailbox

This post is part of the F# Advent Calendar 2019. Check out other posts in this series, under the #fsadvent hashtag, and… happy holidays everybody :)

It is that time of the year again for Santa, Inc. - a time of celebration for most, but for Mister Claus, a time of intense and stressful activity. Every year, keeping up with all these letters coming from kids everywhere, and assigning them to the Elves crew, is a problem. Mister Claus is a diligent CEO, and keeps up with current trends in technology. Perhaps this F# thing he keeps hearing about might help him handle all these letters?

Setting up the Problem

Instead of cute handwritten kids letters, we will take a much less cute, but conceptually similar problem. Imagine that, at regular intervals, we receive a batch of work items (the letters), which we need to process. We will represent each item as a Job, storing its batch number and number within the batch, and a Value, representing the job that needs doing:

type Job = { 
    Batch: int
    Number: int
    Value: int 
    }

Give me Monsters! (Part 9)

After a long period of silence, time to get back to our series on modelling D&D using F#! In our last installment, we plugged our code into Fable Elmish, to create a crude application simulating and visualizing combat.

The main reason I didn’t write for so long was that, as I put things together, I realized there were flaws in the design. I made heavy changes during the December holidays to address some of them, but found it hard to break it down in smaller steps that would fit a blog post after the fact. I don’t see a reason why things would magically get easier if I wait longer, so I’ll bite the bullet and try to explain these changes today.

Design issues

What were the issues I ran into?

Our initial version was a direct implementation of a naive interpretation of the rules, which state that

On your turn, you can move a distance up to your speed and take one action.

This roughly translated to a model where each creature, on their turn, could issue one or more commands, updating the state (World), one command at a time:

type Command = 
    | Move of Direction
    | Action of Action
    | Done

So what was the problem with that?

Give me Monsters! (Part 8)

In the previous installment of this series, we ended up with a primitive model for turn-based battles in Dungeons & Dragons, covering some of the rules related to movement. The model we came up with represents actions taken by creatures as commands, which we use to update the state of the world. One nice thing about this model is how easy it is to test it out, in the scripting environment or otherwise. However, it would be nice to observe what is going on visually. This will be our goal for today: take our existing domain model, and plug that into Fable Elmish to visualize our rules in action.

Warning: I claim zero expertise in Fable, Elmish or not. For that matter, I would rate my skills in web stuff as “inexistent”. All this to say that the Fable related code is likely going to have some flaws - would love to hear from people who actually know what they are doing, how I could do better ;)