Note: I’ve actually had way more hours than it says, but I reinstalled windows and forgot to set up hackatime again so all that’s gone :(

mmr-api-v2 finally has an admin page, so I don’t have to ssh into my pi just to check some debug information anymore! It is kind of developer-oriented but I think it looks and works well enough for what it is for.

In the actual rlbuddy app, there are some cool new features! Facilitated by lots of refactors, of course (turns out, the matches service was bigger than the actual rocket league service, so I finally separated them). Spotify integration now has a previous button as well as a skip-to-song-in-current-playlist button. Match history was a feature that I’ve kind of ignored, so I gave it a much needed touch-up so its easier to view and browse.

A pretty cool thing is that that’s been added a rocket-league-playerid-to-epic-games-id translation endpoint. This means that you can see Switch players’ TRN profiles through their linked Epic account, since TRN doesn’t let you check based on Switch name alone.

Finally, there are some small quality of life improvements, like less deadlocks, better anthem pausing, and the open panel list persisting.

Turns out, for spotify integration, I can’t actually let other people use my spotify development mode app. It’s limited to 5 users which I have to invite by email. And to get a quota extension, I need 250,000 existing monthy active users, which I’m slightly short of (by about 249,999). So, I changed the login flow so that each user has to make their own Spotify app, and log in using the client ID from there. I didn’t change the current PKCE flow since that didn’t really need to be changed, but setup unfortunately takes a little more work now.

Also, it has transparency now.

It’s been a week since the last devlog, and lots has changed!

1. new architecture!

The code was getting pretty messy since I had kept adding new features without really doing major refactors. So, I finally took it upon myself to actually organize everything and come up with a proper architecture.

Each feature has its own module, containing services and widgets. Services have all the state, for example the Spotify service stores the current song and settings and the Rocket League module exposes a Matches service for the current match and past matches, which the match and past match widgets actually show.

Services all have update functions which get called every 10ms. There are two ways for services to talk to the rest of the app: events and state. State is straightforward, it’s usually just an Rc with a custom generic struct I made to manage whether the widget can read/write to it. Events are enums which the update method returns, and can get passed to other update methods. For example, the Stats API service doesn’t have its own widget, it only connects to the stats api and returns match events which other features can use, like Spotify using replay start/end events to play/pause music.

2. new ui!

The dashboard part isn’t as ugly as it was before, and has actual cards for every panel instead of just having horizontal lines in between. Even though it sounds pretty small, it’s actually huge for the prettiness of the app!

Along with this, the behaviour of managing panels also changed. There’s an actual close button, and instead of having one button per panel at the bottom, there’s a small picker to open/close them. Also, you can also move them up and down now

3. Automatic stats api setup

This is a pretty small feature. It lets you select the path to the rocket league executable, detects whether it’s already enabled, and turns it on if it’s disabled. It does this by just replacing a line in the stats api configuration.

4. mmr api v2 doesnt explode

There were a few bugs which would make the API disconnect randomly, but they’ve been ironed out. This also made it so the app doesn’t have to deal with failure behaviour and can just keep asking until the API responds.

rlbuddy now has a little bit of Spotify support!

Although it looks like a just few elements and a button, theres a lot going on behind the scenes. I’m not embedding an entire webview to run the web playback SDK this time, so it just uses the Web API to keep resource usage nice and low.

Since it’s a native app, it has to jump through some hurdles to authorize, using the PKCE extension version since the client secret can’t be stored securely. It uses the webbrowser crate to open the Spotify auth page, and starts a tiny little oneshot HTTP server on a raw TCPListener. The redirect is set to the HTTP server, and then as soon as it receives the request, it sends a simple HTML page and continues. From there, it receives the authorization code and can continue as normal :)

Other than that, it’s just normal REST api interaction. I did learn a ton about thread safety (I hit so many deadlocks), because unlike the stats api, for example, which just sits in a different thread and hurls events over a channel, it actually has to work with the user.

It’s also able to pause during goal replays, and that was pretty annoying to structure. Eventually, I decided to just use a channel where the stats api could send replay start/end events through the match widget. Looking back on it, the solution was extremely simple 😅

I am planning to add a bit more, like shuffle/repeat controls as well as a previous track button, but this feature turned out pretty nicely!

rlbuddy can now show Rich Presence in Discord, so now all your friends can see you destroying your opponents ;)

rlbuddy has had major ui overhauls to shift it more towards an actual overlay rather than just an app that displays ranks. there are new features like a settings menu as well as major architectural overhauls, with more coming soon!

Got it working as an actual overlay!! Right now it just displays ranks, though

I got a stable MMR/ranks api working!!

https://github.com/Kalilamodow/mmr-api-v2

Basically, it’s an http server that opens a websocket to the actual rocket league game api in the background and spoofs a real client connection. The socket only stays active for 5 seconds at a time though so I don’t kill psyonix’s servers. That way, rlbuddy can get ranks without getting blocked by tracker network!
I originally tried to do it on Cloudflare, but the workers outbound websocket didn’t work since you can’t send custom headers with them. I ended up having to use my old raspberry pi and set up a homeserver behind Cloudflare tunnels, and I’m actually planning on moving the rest of my stuff that used to be on a VPS onto the pi.