What is the Armory and why did I create it?

A few years ago I was the head of PR for Atlas Defense Industries and to create content for us to post we would organize photoshoots. Sometimes I would need the participants to wear specific sets of armor or have specific weapon loadouts.

The problem with this was that I would either have to manually scout the locations where to buy the gear which would take a lot of time (even back then) or leave people to do it themselves which is not fair.

At this point I started looking into data mining and at the time it was possible to data mine the shop inventories from the game files. And thus the Armory was born, or rather what would eventually become the Armory.

It started as a console application that would allow me to query a JSON file if you can believe that.
It would output a list of where to buy the items I requested and I would paste that into my photoshoot sign ups.

Now this was nice but not very user friendly, even for me. And also others wanted access to the data. So I decided to learn React so I could make a website that could display this data online. Which also involved creating an API and many other things. But this small tool started off the effort that would eventually become the Armory as you know it today.

Armory used to be a data display tool only. But starting with Star Citizen 3.20 the shop inventory data could no longer be data mined so I had to build a submissions framework. Which allows me to process images, prices and loot reports from users.