reverse-engineering

How to look inside the protocol workings of the Stream Deck Plus, the flexible and versatile button box that can do almost anything.

It finally happened - after a bit more than a year of playing Halo Infinite, I’ve finally reached the end of the line. The pinnacle of experience-based rank, if you will - Hero.

A collection of photos from the event.

I finally reached the Hero rank in Halo Infinite, and as the primary dogfood-er of the OpenSpartan Workshop project I ran into issues where the Hero rank was not correctly rendered in the app. With this release, it’s now correctly shown.

A few people were reporting problems with the Windows App SDK, so I released a new version of OpenSpartan Workshop that fixes the issue.

Diving into the Halo Infinite lesser-known post-match film data.

The latest dataset for Fleetcom is now available on GitHub.

Let’s talk a bit more about the Exchange. I’ve discussed its API implementation on my blog when it first came out in retail builds of Halo Infinite, but now that I am growing the content on the OpenSpartan website, I decided to start documenting my API explorations here. After all, it’s all at home with the rest of the Halo-related tinkering that I am doing.

The latest dataset for Anvil is now available on GitHub.

If you haven’t yet noticed, there is a [brand-new release on GitHub of OpenSpartan Workshop 1.0.8. In terms of new features, this build is a bit light - it comes on the heels of the Operation Fleetcom, which introduced a new date format that I did not recognize for seasonal ranges, resulting in the application crashing. This has been fixed.

I’ve spent some time optimizing OpenSpartan Workshop (the latest release is definitely mostly a performance improvement), and so you can now enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Get a glimpse into the aggregated playlist wait times for Halo Infinite.

As part of the work on OpenSpartan Workshop I needed the capability to convert a Xbox gamertag into its immutable identifier - the Xbox user ID, also commonly known as the XUID. My plan was to add the option for someone to find all the matches where they played with a specific player.

OK, look - I am not the one to tell you that you absolutely have to track your stats for a damn video game, but I am the kind of person that finds a certain fun in that, just like I find the fun in reverse-engineering the entire Halo Infinite API. There is a certain beauty in looking at your own numbers, even if they are for some meaningless, entirely made-up progression system.

A new version of OpenSpartan Workshop is released, adding support for The Exchange, ranked tier counterfactuals, comprehensive event tracking, a faster match search, and more.