.bat

Indie game dev and streamer. I play a lot of Guild Wars 2, mainly Asura. 30s, he/him, furry.

[dotbat]

*blows the dust off of this tumblr account*

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.

There is no ETA on when I'll have this finished. It's all sort of based on when I have extra time to work on it. But I hope to have a rough working version soon for people to test out!

[born-in-ascalon]

𝘠𝘦𝘴, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵. 𝘋𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘮𝘦.

What. How do you make money in Tyria?

Alternate version (with less universal dialogue, namedropping the present characters): https://www.patreon.com/posts/158255781

Sponsored by ArenaNet as well as my kind Patrons.

[dotbat]

SPARK Auth/Security Details

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:

Authentication

SPARK will not need any login, password, or accounts to operate.

To publish or read SPARK data, the addon will use your Guild Wars 2 API key that you add into Blish HUD itself. It just needs account and character permissions to read these values. While these keys just provide read-only information, keeping these private is important. It's why you add this to Blish HUD, not my addon directly.

Your API key is also NOT sent to the SPARK server. Instead, SPARK generates a temporary GW2 subtoken from whatever key is in Blish HUD.

The SPARK server uses that subtoken to ask the official GW2 API who the account belongs to and verifies it this way (and caches for a short while so we don't spam the GW2 API each time you do something).

The reason for this is that the server doesn't trust any user-submitted data, especially the account and character fields in your profile data, because someone could edit these outside the addon to something else.

The server treats the GW2 API as the authority, which prevents someone from submitting a profile or presence update pretending to be a different account or character owned by someone else.

The golden rule for anything online is to never trust the client.

Profile / Data Validation

SPARK will ONLY accept fields that match the server's expected fields. If someone tries to add new fields or data that the server isn't expecting, it gets rejected. This also includes field lengths, accepted values/types, formatting, and so on.

Text fields are sanitized to reject unsafe control characters and oversized payloads. This helps prevent any malformed requests and bad data, or someone trying to push something malicious through the server.

The server database also uses parameterized values to prevent forms of SQL injection attacks.

These will be kept incredibly strict to prevent forms of abuse.

Privacy

SPARK profile and presence data should be treated as public *within* SPARK.

By "Presence", I mean a small profile snippet that people can hover over on the online list, which contains your name, account name, race, profession, status, and some other fields. It's like a mini-profile, essentially.

Essentially, treat your profile and information as if everyone else using SPARK can see it. Even when I (eventually) add some private fields you can share with specific accounts.

You can add private notes to profiles to track information, however. This is stored locally, and never sent to the server whatsoever.

You also can hide your current location. Taking a date to Caudecus' Manor for something spicy? This will show as 'Hidden' to all players instead.

You also can set yourself to be invisible, making it so your profile stops showing up in the online list when you're playing.

Account Blocks

Because of the strict authentication system, this means we can apply blocks across the service securely and when we process requested data.

If person A blocks person B, this means person B will forever see person A as offline, and can never retrieve their profile data anymore. If they bookmarked them or looked at them recently, they have only a local cache of the profile. This cache will never update again so long as the block exists.

Person A will also not see person B on the online list anymore on any character, hiding them until the block is removed.

The SPARK API does not provide players information on if they are blocked by someone, it simply rejects the requested information on the server's end and excludes specific information when it sends data back to someone without them knowing this.

Blocking someone will not remove your profile(s) from their recently viewed or from their bookmarked profiles. This is on purpose, as someone could keep track of this to determine if someone blocked them. It's better to just make you permanently offline to them and never give them profile updates anymore.

[tyriapride]

Tyria Pride 2026 is celebrating our 10 year anniversary on June 27 and 28! 🎉

Hello everyone! This is the most exciting Tyria Pride announcement yet! Tyria Pride has turned 10, and we're preparing for the biggest pride season ever!

Join us for tons of amazing pre-events, organized by both the Tyria Pride team internally, and the many independent organizers, from now until the main event on Saturday and Sunday, June 27 and 28 on both EU & NA!

You can also join us on Discord, or watch the events on twitch, covered by a ton of streamers!

Check out the linktree at tyriapride.com!

More info below the cut

🌈What is Tyria Pride?

Tyria Pride is a two-day in-game pride march from one corner of (core) Tyria to the other to show support both LGBTQ players and devs, and a fundraiser for Rainbow Railroad, a non-profit organisation which helps queer people escape state-sponsored persecution and violence around the world.

It's tons of fun every year, a ton of streamers join in so there are many ways to follow along even if you're not in game, music guilds hold concerts, and we have some pretty legendary giveaways! It's always blast!

For more info, check out the post on the official forums at tyriapride.com/2026

🫶 Fundraiser

Rainbow Railroad is a non-profit that helps LGBTQ+ people get to safety from countries where their lives are at risk. They've done tons of work all over the world, working tirelessly in places like Afghanistan and Ukraine! Rainbow Railroad works year-round to save lives, and we're honored to support them in this cause!

To check out the fundraiser, go to tyriapride.com/donate

✊ How to get involved?

If you'd like to get involved beyond just participating, there's tons of ways to do it! On the discord, you'll find an entire "How to Help" section!

We're always looking for artists who are interested in donating a commission as a prize for our fundraiser raffle!

Another way you can help out is by donating in-game prizes! We incentivize donations to the fundraiser by raffling off legendaries, black lion skins, and more! If you can spare donations, both in-game or out, let me know! My in-game name is Lelling.6795

You can join us on the Tyria Pride discord for more resources and information: tyriapride.com/discord

[dotbat]

Now that I've got a working prototype of my addon, I'll probably spend the next while working on some code refactors and cleaning up some messy parts of it.

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.

Gimme a few weeks and I should have this cleaned up and more polished. Then it'll be time for testing before I submit it officially.

[dotbat]

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.

So far, this addon is probably like 8 to 10MB or so in size. I don't imagine it growing too significantly large beyond this.

[dotbat]

Sifting through other people's modules right now to try and figure out how the hell to search items efficiently to find icons in-game to use for the profile fields

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

that also means having to maintain that with game updates though, ugh

[dotbat]

Can't even begin to tell you how excited the idea of this addon made both me and my partner. Best of luck to you!! I think it's an awesome idea

Thank you! It's gonna take me a while to get all the features and things as stable as I want before I can release it, plus I need to study other addons to make sure I'm following best practices. But I think I'm getting there slowly!

[dotbat]

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 think for this I'd need to implement something with websockets though, so if I do make this, it'd come much later when I'm done with the main module functionality.

[dotbat]

It's a cute idea but it already exists in the form of WARP and we probably shouldn't be fracturing an already tiny community any further...?

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.

My own project is simply to see if I can provide something for people to use, with several quality of life features bundled into it on top of what WARP might already offer, plus it's a way for me to experiment and learn new things by having a project with a set direction and objective in mind.

[dotbat]

You know what they say...

a rotating cog amasses no sporophyte.

[dotbat]

I haven't posted here in so long I barely remember what the etiquette is.

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.

So while I think I can get this RP addon out and functional, please forgive me if it has some bugs or the code's a bit of a mess. I'm just doing my best with what I know, even if it might not be the best way to do it.

[dotbat]

I miss Wildstar

[dotbat]

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.

I changed his face and hair about a year ago though so he's a bit more mousey lookin' and nerdy.

[dotbat]

Haven’t posted anything in a while.

Here’s a celebration pic of my Medic, Surgeon Zappt, finally hitting level 50 from earlier this week!

[dotbat]

also still really love my chua, gonna miss him

[dotbat]

Malgrave is a pretty cool looking area. Disregard the squid moneyshot.

[dotbat]

I'm gonna miss this game

[dotbat]

I've awakened from my slumber. Maybe.

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

I've gotten back into FFXIV recently though. Maybe I'll post some pics, idk.