The Final Shape

Important Patreon notice

I want to remind everyone that I've been focusing my efforts on minimising waste. One of the methods I've been employing is by offering an integrated alternative to Patreon. You can read more about it in the post I made 6 months ago.

It's of paramount importance to me that I ensure no one who gives me their hard-earned dollars feels disappointed or regretful that they've done so. If you have any concerns, new or old, about how I'm handling this transition, please tell me so I can help make it better!

~

Apparently, The Witness's final shape involved severely hamstringing some of Braytech's most popular features. Let's talk about some of the things which completely broke and some of the new things coming to Braytech with this excellent expansion!

Expansion

This expansion was a little different–or should I say, more like expansions of old–in that it brought significant changes to some Destiny fundamentals from activity difficulties to activity modifier icon design.

Some of these changes caused specific parts of Braytech to break, including Weeklies, the default landing view for all users. Awfully unlucky. I've been building Braytech for a few years now and have spent a lot of time hardening the app against Bungie boo-boos by writing resilient code which assumes the worst about what it's receiving from the Bungie API. I got caught off-guard. Things you wouldn't expect to change like the hash (a number) for the activity modifier for unstoppable champions. 🫠

Things really blur together while racing to get changes out while also playing the game... It becomes difficult to distinguish in my mind, between fixes and new features, but that's what the change log is for, I guess!

Moving Home

My family–as long as I've been around–has always rented and the only reason we've ever moved home is because the owner wanted to sell the property. Renting is terrifically difficult for many reasons but if I were to make a recommendation it would be that perhaps moving sooner rather than later may be a healthy opportunity for change and growth... And to help avoid emotional dependance on a house you can't ever call forever.

Dramatic as heck, I know. Needless to say, the last time I moved home, I was devastated. This time around, I've handled it much better, and was in a better position to support myself and my family thanks to Braytech's supporters. We forgot that it's expected that you pay 2 weeks rent ahead of moving in so that you've always got a weeks' buffer. There's so many hidden costs which bleed you. It would not have been possible to move without Braytech's supporters (I could have been homeless).

It's been tremendously challenging to get Braytech up to speed while also moving boxes about and deep cleaning the previous home. It's a unique experience.

Giveaways

This past month, I've had the pleasure of hosting two small giveaways through Braytech's twitter. While trying to obtain a product key as a content creator, I somehow ended up with 300% the required product keys. This allowed me to give the keys away via tweets. I enjoyed having some control over how I validated the winners such as how recently they'd played the game and if they owned the content or not. Funnily enough, the API enabled me to do this. Handy!

Maps

One of Braytech's best and biggest features, Maps will receive a content update once Bungie updates the relevant parts of the API. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that just gets pushed back repeatedly. At the time of writing, the June 25 reset is expected to bring the required additions. You can review the discussion firsthand if you're into it.

What are we waiting for? Well, there's a few boring steps to adding items to Braytech's maps:

• The API returns a list of items identified by hashes and whether or not they've been collected

• For all checklists except lost sectors, there's no correlation between the item and its location in-game

• To create a correlation, I need to collect the items one by one to see which item returned by the API changes from false to true

• While doing this, I take a screenshot, and mark its location on the map

I've found that waiting until I have the API checklist data before starting this process is the most efficient method to employ. As a player, this has a very sad consequence: I can't collect anything until I'm able to do this work because the items disappear and my ability to correlate the unique numbers with the in-game item becomes impossible without creating a secondary profile, buying a license for the content, and progressing that profile accordingly.

In lieu of these additions, I've been refactoring large swaths of Maps (again) to make them even better and easier to maintain. In addition to this tech debt repayment, I've been working on adding some other maps for activities such as dungeons. More about that in a later update though.

Xûr

The ephemeral storekeep and envoy of The Nine has made some changes to how they do business. As a result, https://wherexur.com required many updates and an iOS app store update is also in the works. I don't want to focus on Xûr at the moment though as I consider it to be more of a side project to Braytech. It's up and running again and that's good enough for now.

Coming Up

I've been pretty sick + trying to readjust to new living arrangements + severely distracted by moving, but I'm finally finding a new routine. It took me so long to write and complete this post, to summarise the last few weeks... But we've arrived.

As I can't focus my raw, undiluted energy into a map for The Pale Heart yet, I'm thinking about other things, and right now I can't stop thinking about Pathfinders so they're probably next!

Anyway, I'm dating this cabal. Please do not address them directly unless given permission by me prior. That's all.