.bat

I figured I'd share this here, for the people who supported me ages ago and made Guild Wars 2 a delight for me.

How would people like an RP Profile addon built as an addon for Blish HUD? I've been slowly working on one and I might have the first version of this done soon.

I'm calling it SPARK - Simple Profile and Roleplay Kit.

The name also is derived from the first legendary I crafted, Incinerator. It's precursor is Spark. I thought it was a good fit.

Here's some sneak peek images so far:

There's support for you to add multiple profiles to a single character. You then choose which one to actively broadcast when using the module for others to see.

All profiles are tied to your Account and Character Name. This wouldn't be something you manually type in and is retrieved from GW2 via Blish to prevent impersonation.

The tabs on the left allow you to edit your profile details, set your RP preferences/style, and add in a 'Currently' and 'OOC Info' sections if you want.

Here's the WIP of the profile editing section. Unfortunately, no word-wrap support on the box (Blish HUD has a pull request to add this though, so hopefully soon!), but it works decently. The 'At a Glance' allows you to set icons plus a title and description. I don't have a built-in icon picker though, so you need to find the strings yourself for now until I figure that out.

An example of the profile when viewed by someone else.

I do have privacy settings for your status and location, and I will implement a block list so if you don't want someone to see you through this addon, it wouldn't broadcast that info to them ever.

Profile viewer is currently working decently. I've built a presence module that captures some info from your profile + other things as you've configured it to broadcast and update periodically.

Since this isn't hooked up to be online yet, I'm just duplicating my profile 200 times in the UI while I build it out.

For those who don't know, I actively work on my own game these days (after 10+ years in game dev and growing tired of corporate), but I figured this was a fun little side project to build in the meantime.

I won't have anything fancy to show for a little bit probably in terms of features, I'm working right now to improve the authentication and secure everything as much as I can as the next steps.

I've gotten the minimum viable product finished for SPARK at this point, but it's very rough, and not production ready.

If there's any concerns or questions, lemme know! Happy to discuss this in further detail as I slowly build this out.

For people who want the technical details on what I'm planning or implementing (some of this already is added), see below:

The initial stuff works and feels stable but there's a lot of code that's sloppy and could be improved.

I'll make some quality of life additions as I go too, but I dunno how long that'll take.

I'm also going to focus on my own game for a bit since I've neglected it the past week or so as I've worked on this and fixated on it.

Thankfully, this project and my own game are both C# and a lot of my game architecture applied similarly to this so I could build out big portions very fast. I'm gonna have a friend review some of the code, especially the server endpoints to ensure I'm not missing something important.

Icon search now included!

Phew. This took a lot of work to figure out.

There's now a way to search for icons in the game from items, currencies, skills, traits, specializations, minis, etc.

To do this, I've made it so my webserver for SPARK will check once a day and rebuild the icon index with new entries, which takes about ~2 minutes to run through all 57,000+ entries.

I'll bundle the latest version of the icon index in the addon itself, which is compressed to 1.2MB roughly (10MB uncompressed). But whenever you load the module, it should check if your icon index is out of date, then download the new one to your PC to use instead.

What happens behind the scenes is that when you search anything, it checks the name, description, and keywords of everything in the list and if it matches it'll return the icon ID for it.

Then, Blish HUD resolves every one of those IDs and loads them in here. This might take a few seconds for some to appear, but it works pretty well so far!

The UI still needs a bunch of work and there's a few more quality of life stuff I need to do. Hoping I can have this ready for initial release within a month potentially, but I'll do some private testing with friends first.

Wondering if perhaps I should just store a local copy of the data on my own server and allow people to hammer it with searches instead of hitting the official game API a bunch

GW2 Spark Update 2 - Online Functionality!

First test with passing information to/from the server is successful. I'm just using a dummy .json file on the server and pretending to be a second user for this.

A lot of the API endpoints weren't hard to set up since I utilize endpoints to deliver patreon content into my own game (so it's never bundled in the public build), so this wasn't too bad to get working.

I'm still ironing out a few quirks with it, and need to cache a few things to make it more performant. I just wanted to make it work first before I tweak it further.

Some things to note:

If you set your status to Invisible, you immediately are removed from the online list and won't appear to anyone anymore. This is done in the module settings page. I might add a quick access menu for this.

If you block someone on the module settings (or hit block on their profile to add it in automatically), they will no longer be able to see you online or any of your profiles anymore. You also will not see any of their profiles either.

You retain a cached list of recently viewed profiles on your machine. This means if someone is offline, you can still view their profile without waiting for them to come back online. You can favourite them as well to permanently keep them in a list.

If you view a profile in the favourite/recently viewed list, it will attempt to retrieve a copy of the profile off the server if they are online, or just use the cached copy if not.

This also is the case if you are blocked. You will never know that the user is online, and it will always serve you the last cached version of the profile you saw. You'll never see any further updates if someone blocked you, as if they never come online again. I think this is the best compromise for user privacy around blocking others. Otherwise, if someone keeps track of who they favorited and sees one disappear, they'd know you blocked them. I'd rather avoid that situation.

The server itself has a block account function. If someone is being malicious, harassing others, or making profiles promoting bigotry, hate, discrimination, etc. I can ban them permanently from accessing the RP Profile service on that GW2 account entirely. All API calls use your GW2 account ID as your identity, pulled directly from the game.

If you swap to the character selection screen, you disappear from the online list since you're probably AFK or swapping characters.

Other stuff I'm looking at:

Profile Notes:

An area for users to leave notes on profiles they have bookmarked to remind themselves of past interactions or things to keep in mind, etc. Would be entirely offline, never passed to the server. Just syncs up to specific profiles when you open them if they match the account + character + profile ID (since characters can have multiple profiles).

Private Profile Section This would be a section that you can specify access to for various friends to see or if you want to share information with someone but not another. Likely just another big description box you can put whatever you want in that won't be seen except by people you specify.

Or, y'know, for people who wanna put whatever spicy RP details here and not broadcast it to the public so you can make sure you are sharing anything 18+ with consenting adults.

Like with other RP addons on other websites, I suspect people will just post all of that on their public profile regardless though, so it's kind of futile.

Lower on the priority list right now to add.

Multi-Message Chat Helper

I was thinking of adding an in-game window that can let you write out a big RP message and have it automatically post it in chat for you one by one in chunks that fit the chat limit, with whatever separators you want to style it with.

It's probably just some simple string manipulation, and I'd probably enforce some limit on it so someone can't maliciously spam chats with it. If it seems like it'll be abused, it might just be a simple way to copy/paste what you need so you have to do it manually.

I've seen a tool that sort of does this already but it's outside the game. Something in-game might be a bit easier than alt-tabbing, especially for those on a single monitor.

This is a low priority addition, not something I'm gonna focus on unless there's a huge demand since it's probably a fucking pain based on GW2 chat limits and anti-spam stuff.

Dice Rolling

I'd eventually like to add some kind of dice roll feature where you can set up a group with others who are using the tool, and if you roll a dice (can specify whatever, like 1d20, 3d10, 4d20, etc.), it rolls and submits the result to all connected people.

I don't think "a tool technically already exists" necessarily means we shouldn't potentially explore other options and alternatives. Even if it leads to the classic XKCD competing standards comic.

I tried WARP and it constantly crashed for me, was laggy, and the UI didn't work properly at all on a 4K monitor and kept having issues with the mouse position and where I'm clicking not working, or outright not registering any inputs.

From what people have told me, and my own experience when I used it, it wasn't really used much at all (when I could even have it running on my end). I also haven't seen much in terms of development updates on this published somewhere, so from the outside it looked effectively abandoned.

Do I reblog my own stuff to boost it? Are there tags I should be using?

Also re: the GW2 RP addon I'm working on, I'm gonna do my best to get something others can test in a few weeks. But don't hold me to that, my own game dev project and other things are my priority since they are what earn me a livable wage.

I also heard about some things that happened with a previous RP addon for it. Kind of curious for the full details, but I think I've got the gist of it.

For those who don't follow me elsewhere or just heard of me today, I'm a full time streamer (Partnered on Twitch for 5+ years, featured LGBT+ creator every year as well) and full time game dev, and I work on a NSFW text-adventure game with over 300,000 words of content in it so far.

Keep in mind, I'm fully self-taught for programming, I've worked on several things in the past such as Raid Addons for Wildstar a decade ago, many personal websites for my characters and art galleries, worked on Weasyl, etc. I've built many stream tools and interactive minigames over the years, plus worked on a Lethal Company mod with over 2.4 million downloads. Made a few small game prototypes in different genres, then settled on my own stuff.

Tyria Pride 2020, pics were taken by a friend.

I've recently been getting back into GW2 so people may have seen me around again. Feel free to say hi!

Not sure how active the community is here anymore as it's been numerous years for me, but yeah.

I'm still playing my thief, Rappt, as my main, even after all these years and thousands of hours, still not bored of him.

Honestly, if you really wanna see me shitposting constantly and making lame puns, you should follow me on Twitter, where I'm actually active a decent amount.

You can find my dumb twitter here: https://twitter.com/TheDotbat