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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: code

I wanted to make a QR code to go along with a gift card I’m giving to someone. The search space for how to do that is a wasteland of SEO and sketchy generators, but – turns out – there’s a MacOS/iOS shortcut already available in the Shortcuts gallery. HOWEVER: Searching for just “QR” doesn’t find it; search for “QR code” instead, and you’re good to go.

The last couple of weekends I’ve been slowly working on some improvements to Armorer, my Destiny 2 loadout finder build in Shiny.

Screenshot showing an application that allows a user to specify several parameters for a Destiny 2 loadout: Class, exotic armor, and several stat criteria including minimum stat total, power level, and primary ability stat values.

Notable enhancements for this release include:

  • Huge revision of the backend method for stat calculation, making it more flexible and accurate
  • Highlighting of masterwork items in display
  • Proper forwarding of selected ability fragments to DIM for loadout building (this was harder than I thought it would be)

There are some bugs to address and optimization to perform, of course. But, with these improvements, the tool is finally just about as functional as I have long wanted it to be! I think it’s really pretty good, and I’m pleased and proud to have made something sophisticated and useful. I hope some more Destiny 2 players will try it out and let me know how it works for you.

I had some really nice hours this weekend working on my Destiny 2 loadout finder project, Armorer. All my current work is on the backend, and will result eventually in a lot more flexibility in armor piece stat calculation, and – I hope – faster performance. This big Shiny application is complex enough that I can see the rest of the work to do right in front of me, and I know that completing all the revisions is still a pretty substantial piece of work!

I’m publishing a project I’ve been tinkering with for a while and finally decided to make “good enough” to share! D2Rstats is a set of Quarto notebooks that fetch, store and make fun and useful data out of your Destiny 2 postgame carnage reports, such as this all-time weapon treetop. If you’re comfortable enough with R, it can be a jumping off point to exploring your own game data further. It’s been a lot of fun to refine this, and I’ve learned a ton along the way.

A treemap showing my Destiny 2 total weapon usage. My largest single category is Auto Rifles, and most used single weapon is Bygones.

You can find all my Destiny 2 related projects over at deardestiny.blog.

I’ve learned just enough about go conditionals and comparisons within Hugo templates to revise my lil blog’s “now” page list of “posts on this day” to “posts on and around this day.” Solid.

The launch of the new Destiny 2 expansion, Nightfall, adds a new subclass – Strand – and restructures the mod system that affects player stats gained from armor. I’m happy to report that it only took me a couple of hours to revise my Shiny tool to find optimal armor loadouts using the new mods and subclass fragments! I had to hunt a little through some old code, and next time it should be a simple and easy update due to having fixed how I work with the manifest.

Somewhere along the way I ended up with two versions of my tag for R-related posts (#r and #R), and Hugo didn’t handle the lowercase one. A couple of quick sed lines did the trick to convert both to a more friendly version that Hugo handles just fine. I’m saving them here for future reference in case I ever want to bulk-change a Hugo tag again:

  • sed -i 's/^ \- r$/ \- rstats/' *.md
  • sed -i 's/^ \- R$/ \- rstats/' *.md

An animated gif showing a set of growing bars measuring Destiny 2 weapon usage

I’ve had a really nice hobby R coding weekend, learning to use {gganimate} to make plots like this. I’ve been re-tooling all my old piles of fish scripts that I’ve used to gather my Destiny data from the game’s API. Now I have a useful pair of quarto notebooks that retrieve data using parallel processing and produce this kind of output. I’m super enthused by what I’ve learned!