I’ve had a nice afternoon working on my hobby R/Shiny project, a loadout finder for the game Destiny 2. These improvements make it a lot more flexible and informative: It can now optionally include armor that would otherwise be filtered out of configurations by the minimum stat threshold, and it will show current mods used in displayed loadouts.
Since I’m talking Destiny projects lately, here’s a another open invite to Destiny-curious micro.friends who may want to try it out! The new expansion is very good and it’s a great time to jump in. Happy to be a space magic shooty guide to anybody who needs a friendly way into the game!
Making adjustments to kiddo’s Minecraft server and am continuously grateful that the answer to “how did I do that?” is almost always found in the fish shell history.
I started playing Hades yesterday and … this game is great! I know it was on a bunch of best-of lists last year, so I’m un-fashionably late to appreciate this one. It has great mechanics, deep storytelling, feuding gods and family drama. I love it.
This thread of spreadsheet-based games contains a ton of inventive and fun stuff.
The Forever Squirrels Sigil can make wonderful things happen in Inscryption.
I played a whole bunch of Inscryption, today. It’s pretty brilliant! It unfolds in really surprising ways and I had some of the same “oh!” moments figuring out successful mechanics as I had discovering things in Outer Wilds. What a fantastically crafted game.
🎮 I’m having quite a lot of fun in Forza Horizon 5, and the photo mode is great. Also, there’s an event where you drive a two-story parade float off a ramp into a canyon at 80mph. Recommended.
Spent a good chunk of today alternating between Forza Horizon 5 and learning how to add a vim layer to my keyboard with QMK. Pretty good Saturday tbh.
Destiny 2 Power leveling tool in R
The latest piece of my homebrew Destiny 2 toolset is Travelr, a power leveling tracking tool built with R and using a much simpler process than most of my prior nonsense. (Aside: I'm still using ArmoreR, but it has some key limitations that I haven't spent much time with, including a problem incorporating the authentication flow more fully into Shiny so that I could make it an app that others could use in a more friction-free way.)
The power climb is part of the game with each new Destiny season. A lot of this process is luck: A player can only get so many pinnacle drops per week and there's no guarantee that a given drop won't be in a duplicate category. But, some drops can be targeted to broad categories -- armor versus a weapon, for example -- and there is some efficiency across characters if you can strategically raise one category to increase the base level for all characters.
I was inspired by a fantastic tool written by a member of the small Destiny 2 community I'm in, that identifies categories to target (or, try to target, anyway; a lot of it is still frustrating random luck, sometimes), and decided to try building my own version. It doesn't do anything unique, but it works and it's wonderfully satisfying to step through an R markdown notebook that authorizes me to the D2 API, retrieves all my equipment statistics, calculates my maximum power level and indicates which, if any, categories should be targeted.
For example, here's a screenshot from the beginning of the season, where every single equipment type would increase my total maximum power level:
... and later in the season:
It's been great fun to have this small tool with me during the season's play. It's currently dependent on another small tool that grabs the equipment "manifest" file, and I'll be publishing the whole notebook to github when I finish incorporating that into the repository.