Velask, and welcome to the Cryptarchy.

Five Years

For half a decade, we have been aligning and refining our efforts of tending to our eclectic projects. Archiving, documenting, cataloguing, writing, debating, creating, translating, watching, waiting, commiserating.

With so many moving parts (and moving targets for that matter) it has been an exciting and unique challenge for all of the Cryptarchs to continue to see our objectives through. We've seen many ups and downs, yet we have maintained our unity. Whether burnout, burnup, or burndown, it's hard to say we don't keep it fire.

So here's to 1,400 of you. I'm sure I say this every year, but I can't wait to see you all grow and glow over the next year.

Watch Your Language

In some ways, this year will mark our 10th anniversary, as the first seed that fell into the vacant space that would become our garden came from a branch of the first Eliksni translations, as far back as May 20th 2015.

This past year would see this effort become a core part of Destiny 2, complete with our very own shader in Episode: Revenant. It yet remains a mystery to us how this all came to be, but like our name would suggest, we will decrypt this. Soon.

Shas'ki

• Shas (verb)
  • to defy fear
  • to be brave
• Ki (noun)
  • a powerful being
  • strength
• Shas'ki (agglutinative verb)
  • to defy fear of a powerful being
  • to be fearless
  • to stand your ground
  • to hold the line
  • to challenge your fear

This actually marks Shas'ki's second feature in Destiny 2, having first appeared alongside six other terms as part of the catalyst quest for Revision Zero during Season of the Seraph beginning in 2022.

Dreaded Words

In other language developments this past year, 2024 also saw the release of The Final Shape, along with the advent of the Dread units; a new amalgamation species officially accompanied with a constructed-language that is fully translatable. Efforts continue throughout the Destiny community, but without a hint of a cipher to cross-reference, progress is slow. 

Theories on approaches range from everything from direct relation to existing Eliksni, to Dread dialogue being encrypted copies of Witness combat dialogue, all the way to there being a practical use for Euphony, the Salvation's Edge raid exotic, as some sort of instrument in the process. 

With Dread becoming a narrative focal point during Heresy, there is a chance Bungie may yet throw us a bone. Until then, starting in March, this website will begin to host recordings and translation efforts for written, verbal, and runic languages of Destiny. Everything from Eliksni, Hive, to Dread, and potentially further beyond.

Stay tuned!

Hey, What's Update?

Okay, okay. I see the Calus-sized elephant in the room.

Last year, for our fourth anniversary, we soft-launched this website. As part of this release, I remarked that this website would see regular "live-service" updates over the year ahead, or, rather, the year past. 

This was true and false in equal measure. True in that I have been working extremely hard for this entire year developing this website. False in that none of those updates were deployed past our dev environment. 

See, turns out this stuff is a lot more complicated than the initial burst of dopamine would have you me believe. That may not be a revelation to most of you, but it was to me, multiple times, as I would learn and forget this lesson over and over.

The founding of the Cryptarchy directly led to a career as a web developer. Working at a University has given me a lot to think about. April this year will mark my second year in such a role, and I can say with certainty I have grown significantly as a developer in that time. The freedom and fear that comes from realising you're a very small fish in a very big pond is enough to make anyone speak less and listen more.

One of the most important mantras I have taken to heart was something my first manager said during backlog refinement in my first week.

"Are we looking for problems to fit a solution?"

This was mind-blowing. I had never considered this. That Occam's Razor, "what problem are we trying to solve?" I look at everything through this lens now. If you spend a year polishing an umbral engram, it's still an umbral engram.

So this past year I put my focus on learning my craft, paying close attention to what problems we in the Cryptarchy have, what problems the Destiny community have, what problems Bungie has, and what problems the world has. That last one I've been thinking about increasingly as the year has progressed, as I'm sure many of you can empathise.

So here is a shortlist of the problems I think we have across niche, micro, and macro level.

• Destiny
  • Has a documentation problem
    • Community resources are volatile at best and error-prone at worst
      • Bungie writers depend on these resources for accuracy
        • This is how we ended up with "Eramis" instead of "Viikris", or "Touch of Malice is a Weapon of Sorrow", and so on.
  • Has a lost media problem
    • The public API has been a significant boon, but many resources are missing significant chunks of data revision history, particularly as most opted to stream data rather than retain it
      • Worse still, various community-driven efforts are being sunset by their maintainers offramping from Destiny after The Final Shape
    • Bungie's implementation of a "Destiny Content Vault" has resulted in literal years worth of work and activities being impossible to experience again
  • Has a content stream problem
    • There are frequent droughts of content and activities
      • Not out of there being a lack of activities, but a lack of variety
        • The solution cannot be genAI
• Social Media
  • Has a gatekeeping problem
    • The average person shouldn't have to create an account and join a server just to see community resources and projects
  • Has a Social problem
    • If it isn't The-Site-Formally-Known-As-Twitter, it's Reddit, and if isn't Reddit, it's Discord, and if it isn't Discord, it's Instagram, and if it isn't Instagram, it's DeviantArt, and if it isn't DeviantArt, it's YouTube, and so on, so forth
      • Creatives deserve somewhere to share their work
        • That isn't going to stake claim to it as a corporate entity and threaten to absorb it into the Borg.
        • And receive and reciprocate meaningful and crowd-sourced feedback beyond "I like/dislike this"
  • Has a looking-for-problems-to-fit-a-solution problem
    • Every consideration for efficiency and respect of accessibility and diversity and green energy is being dismantled more each day
      • Every solution those in charge are pushing are designed to not only look for use-cases to suit their shiny new toys, but invent problems for them to be appealing in the first place
        • The. Solution. Can. Not. Be. Generative. Artificial. Intelligence.
• The Cryptarchy
  • Is full of qt3.14s

I know I said it would be a shortlist, but I promise this is a thin slice of the thoughts that drive every design decision. Every choice we make now will inform every consequence we face down the line.

So, this segment has been a roundabout way of saying:

Development isn't hard due to any technical problem.

Development is hard due to avoiding being a problem.

I could drill down into a gargantuan patch-notes style overview of the noodles upon noodles of Git commits and merges that has been the CTA codebase this past year, but in the interest of time, I will instead outline what I've laid the groundwork for, as it will be fairly hefty as it is!

Re: Vision

Let me break down what has been accomplished in Cryptarchy - Version 5.0.0.0, what problem each solves, and why it matters.

File Hashing

• All files uploaded to the website are strictly matched by their SHA-256 hash
  • This reduces duplication of data and will allow revisions and reference material to exist as minimal-data rows in the database
    • Imagine two Destiny items which share the same icon: with this method, each entity will reference the same source image file even if each of their URL aliases differ

Destiny Grimoire Cards

• Grimoire is no longer something anyone can experience as it was originally intended, and as such, a certain charm to reading them is missing
  • As an affectionate and nostalgic homage, I have replicated how the Grimoire cards functioned in their original implementation in the Destiny app and on the Bungie website. Have a click down two layers deep to the cards themselves and have fun!
    • This involved recreating the blank backside of the cards, and sourcing the original fonts and styling as closely as I could
    • I am admittedly a back-end web developer rather than a front-end web developer, so the styling at certain resolutions is very much still a work-in-progress

Destiny Character Catalog

• Initially soft-launched last year, this has been completely revamped with:
  • Brand new filter facets
  • A fulltext indexed phrase search
    • Complete with appropriate boosting metrics to weight terms certain fields over others
      • e.g. searching for "Crota" will return many results that mention him in descriptions, groups and so on, but ensuring that the "Name" field is weighted as a higher priority for matches less frustration for users
  • Custom Grimoire-themed graphics to reflect a character's species until appropriate Grimoire cards can be made
    • This has been extended to fully detail the information that Cryptarchs Eruke and Glamdring804 have been curating for this project
      • Clicking on any of these attributes will initiate a search with that filter applied
        • e.g. looking at Crota's card, you will see "ALIGNMENTS: Worm-Symbiote" and return a list of all characters that have ingested a Worm

Destiny 1 Data Archive

• This has been the most challenging project
  • The problem is there are no resources for early Destiny 1, and as such no way to truly compare changes wholesale over its development. I have been scouring and scouting for anyone who has old API definition manifests and archives, but all my contacts and leads have gone cold. I have two database revisions, the latest one, and one that was thankfully backed up on the Internet Archive from April 2015.
  • I have begun a painstaking process of manually wiring what little data I can find from archived websites, but it will take time to fully see this process through.
    • What has been fascinating and encouraging for why I've been interested in this, is that many old items and activities from Destiny's initial launch contain very different descriptions and references than when they shipped later.
      • Thieves' Den, for example, used to be described as being located at "Old Weldonopolis, Venus".
        • Who was Weldon? Or is it a pun for the Eliksni's welding? Either way, it's interesting!
• Every hashed entity has become a node, and every node must be a unique anchor point for revisions, and each revision is what will appear in the index
  • You can granularly filter by date to get a specific instance of data, but you can also keep every revision in the feed so you can compare and contrast the data as separate instances
    • This can be useful for circumstances where the same hash gets re-used for a completely different purpose over time
• I have produced a massive (and I mean massive) timeline of Destiny 1's development, detailing from the Tiger engine's first forking from the Blam! engine in 2008 from Halo 3, all the way through to its Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Public Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and eventual Epsilon when the game went Gold to be printed to discs, all the way up to Version 2.6.0.2 in 2017. This process required significant research into not only how Destiny was developed, but how semantic versioning works for Destiny in particular. Did you know, for example, the first number is used to indicate the anniversary of the software's support? [Year].[Major].[Minor].[Patch] is the format Bungie uses, pretty neat!
  • Anyway here's the real fun bit:
    • The dates that are timestamped from each revision are now dynamically tied to which Version of Destiny they were recovered during. The database I recovered from April 2015 is matched up with Version 1.1.1.1 (although admittedly I have misaligned the time so it will currently display Version 1.1.1.0) which can then be used to deduce what changes were targeted for this release.
      • This process eliminates any manual guess-work and time spent investigating and deliberating what's actually changed and why
      • This process also was one of the most difficult things to solve; who knew that UNIX timestamp ranges would be so convoluted?
        • Oh by the way, the planet is gonna have a real problem come 2038; we're running out of track for UNIX timestamps.
• This project will be the most volatile and in-progress part of the site we have for some time.

Account Authentication

• I have integrated two methods of authenticating Cryptarchy accounts
  • Discord, an existing Drupal module integration with Social Auth module ecosystem
  • Destiny, a custom module I developed with OAuth2 to securely allow users to create a Cryptarchy account with their Destiny accounts
    • This currently is only aimed to only read your Destiny data
• In the spirit of avoiding implementing solutions without problems, I must mention that while there are no current uses for you to register or authenticate with the Cryptarchy website, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to use any real data anyone is willing to share in order to develop more features
  • Plus, if you sign up today you get to secure bragging rights at registering early!
• If anyone is interested in helping add manual content to the site as part of the content team, let us know in the Discord server by using the "/ticket" command to speak to staff. We're bound to have a lot of opportunities to have content populated in advance of enabling user-generated content

Family Lineage

• All characters can each be designated a child character, with details defining what type of relationship they have, and what status the relationship is in
  • This is to allow a family lineage to propagate dynamically, such as for the Hive Lineage Chart project
  • It turns out, that lineage is an incredibly complex problem, and there are no out-of-the-box solutions. Most folk's use-cases are for real-world family trees, which have been solved with things such as GEDCOM, so there are few and far between options with regards to fictional characters
    • I believe I spent around 4-5 months total thinking about this problem while doing other things. Happy to say I created a functional back-end solution and am still working on the front-end styling
  • This is a manual process for now, so if anyone wants to volunteer, feel free to let me know!

Feeds

• I have set up and created so many feeds I am starting to feel like an ornithologist
• These work in the background to pull in all kinds of data on regular frequencies
  • These are also carefully designed to ensure revisions are only created if there are revisions that have been made
  • This is what the Character Catalog is being populated from, at a current rate of polling once a day
• Once the full breadth of Destiny API definition revisions are in place for Destiny 1, the same can be done with archived Destiny 2 revisions, after which I will ensure feeds are pointed to dynamically and automatically archive any changes made to nodes with each update
• What's neat is that we can ouroboros data on the website and use it to inject new information in feeds if need-be
  • e.g. pulling in regular data dumps of your Destiny activities or characters if you have authenticated
• I cannot begin to tell you how much XMLPath, JsonPath, JMESPath, and RegEx I have learned to accomplish this

Gosh. You know, I have absolutely done so much more than this in the past year, but I'm starting to feel like this is enough of an info-dump of what's been implemented for now.

Who's interested in seeing how we got here?

...The Horse You Rode In On

Back when I started the Cryptarchy Discord server (five years ago), one of the fixations I'd moved on to from Eliksni, was the concept of the meta-game.

Destiny is fun as it is, but sometimes it can be a great deal of silly fun to jump around in the Tower, or play Hide 'n' Seek while your newfound LFG buddy (Lord Shaxx's Costco Card) needs to cook dinner.

I often think about this idea of Destiny having more user-generated activities, and it's what motivated and informed my earliest wanderings of what the Cryptarchy could be for people who maybe weren't so interested in maintaining a lofty project.

So I'd like to take a trip back through time to go over some of the earliest days of the Cryptarchy Discord server with you all, how we ended up here, and maybe, if you squint between the lines, what we may circle back to later on.

Bot Maker, Bot Maker, Make Me a Bot

In 2019, I went back to college as a mature student. My first love was digital art, but I had decided it was time to figure out how to code. There were a lot of cool projects I desperately wanted someone to make, but so far (and even now!) it sadly wasn't looking like it would happen anytime soon. 

So, in 2020, with the newly founded Cryptarchy server, and a mighty need to occupy my time during lockdown alongside my studies, I tried dabbling with a few Discord Bots in order to create a rewarding and engaging companion adventure to Destiny. It was a lot of fun coming up with custom scenarios for the classic work and crime idle commands. And a whole lot more fun coming up with text-adventure scenarios to earn, use and trade quest items, which typically took the form of roles. Discord only allows 250 maximum roles, so there were hard limits to such a system without a lot of sunsetting. Go figure.

I first tried a Bot called Points, but found it limiting. I tried UnbelievaBoat and found it excellent but not quite what I was looking for, so I tried my server moderation bot Atlas for its action suite and found it made a good companion bot to UnbelievaBoat. I recall trying another huge lofty RPG Bot of sorts, and losing a fair amount of time to configuring it to suit my needs, but it was around this point I realised I should just try making something myself. Still, we had some funny times with the early experiments of creating an economy and absolutely steamrolling interest on Glimmer.

This eventually turned into more ambitious plans. I experimented with trying to recreate the gameplay of Destiny in Unity using C# and created a neat miniature approximation of a Hunter with triple jump. I thought I would make something small and interesting for those willing to engage with the economy system.

Eventually, I discovered Discord Bot Maker, and decided to pick it up. Figured I'd give myself an easy time of practicing Bot development with a GUI rather than a scary IDE. Spoilers: it wasn't all that much easier than doing it manually.

I began with some experiments with an early item index, inspired by resources like Destiny Armory Defined.

Then, later, I would become interested in how Destiny range affects damage scales, and made a small simulation that could act as a player-versus-player tool. This led to some hilarious exchanges between folks who had played the Throne World experience. Also very funny was the ability to fight Bots.

After I began to think about the limitations of this bot, and the volatility of Discord as a platform, I reconsidered continuing its development. I could not be sure that developing any bot would be a long-term investment. Fun though it was, I realised my attention was better served elsewhere.

Thus, come 2022, I began working on the Cryptarchy website.

This was a pure SQL and PHP-driven content management system (CMS for short). I had a vision in mind of how I felt content like Destiny's and projects like the Cryptarchy's could be designed. 

This work is what I sent in along with my cover letter to secure an interview for my web developer position. What's been endlessly funny to me is that I was essentially developing the beginnings of the very same sort of CMS that powers the Cryptarchy today, through Drupal. Although, I cannot say I would be as far along today if it were not for the entire community backbone that powers Drupal's CMS.

You can see above that I trimmed down the taxonomy from the severe levels of granularity you can see above to make for a MVP release for this version of the website, but this is still a great baseline target I want to return to. Being able to filter by the colour "red" and correctly seeing a load of data that matches that still sounds great but is it addressing a problem anyone actually has? Or is it just cool? 

That's the fine tightrope we must walk as we continue to build, and build responsibly.

And Many More

Well, see you next year. I'm away to sleep for the next 358 days and panic once more for the last 7.

Only (mostly) kidding. We do have a long way to go yet, and after I take a short break for the rest of February, I'll be back at it in March doing more regular updates.

And stick around in the Cryptarchy Discord server today as we'll be giving away some emblem codes throughout the day to celebrate. We've been saving these up for years thanks to kind donations from members. Figured today would make a nice occasion to share.

Love,
Sarsion