Made an avatars api for Steam, PSN, and Xbox (Epic doesn’t support profile pictures and I have no clue what goes on in Nintendo-land, even Tracker doesn’t show theirs). It’s on Cloudflare Workers instead of my pi since it’s basically just api integration.

I totally overcomplicated finding out how to get Steam profile pictures. Like, it’s insane how easy it actually is. A few weeks ago, I got an old version of Steam Rocket League and decompiled it, trying to look for where it fetched avatars from. After some experimentation and debugging, I learned that when Psyonix builds Rocket League, they give it something that implements OnlineSubsystem for whatever the target platform is. So, Steam gets the Steamworks OnlineSubsystem, Epic gets the EOSOnlineSubsystem, and so forth. And the game doesn’t need to know implementation details, just that it implements OnlineSubsystem, I think the term for that is dynamic dispatch in programming languages.

Anyways, once I learned that Rocket League doesn’t do any avatar handling itself, I looked at the Steamworks SDK. Basically, it routes the avatar request through the open Steam client. So after some experimentation, I got it to fetch profile pictures with C++ and the Spacewars test game. But, that obviously wouldn’t work on a server, since the Steam client can’t really run on a Worker.

So, I tried to use the Steam Web API. I got an API key, but when I tried, it said I was forbidden. According to the documentation, the GetPlayerSummaries endpoint was at partner.steam-api.com, which was only for publishers.

About a week later, so yesterday, I had the genius idea to use api.steampowered.com (the public API domain) instead of partner.steam-api.com. Just swapping them out. And it worked. So, I now had a way to get Steam avatar urls.

Xbox and PSN were actually really easy. Xbox has an undocumented API at https://peoplehub-public.xboxlive.com/people/gt(GAMERTAG) which returns json containing the avatar uri, and I used the psn-api package with a new PlayStation account to get PSN profile pictures.

Then, I just put all of them in a Worker. So, rlbuddy will be able to show avatars soon enough!