Review of three Destiny inventory management applications (Destiny)

by Funkmon , Thursday, June 25, 2015, 10:06 (3437 days ago)
edited by Funkmon, Thursday, June 25, 2015, 10:43

Here, I review the three major Destiny inventory management applications available for the desktop computer and Chromebook, plus Windows tablets. I also am not a good writer and am bad at formatting things. Also all the images are thumbnails, so you will need to click on them. I'm not going to embed 1280 width images, unless you guys want me to.

I discovered these by simply searching for “destiny” on the Chrome webstore.

There was another, but it crashed Chrome, so I didn’t use it. Bungie.net also crashed Chrome, so I didn’t use it.

I’m going to grade these programs in three categories: interface, how well it works, and features, then give an overall rank.

Packmule for Destiny

Interface:

5/10.

When I was first using these things when Bingle opened up the API to allow vault and inventory management, I preferred Packmule, because it didn’t care what character your weapon was on. This is useful if you have a set weapon you use almost every time, since it just dumps all your guns into a pile indiscriminately. I stopped using it when I got more guns.

Further into the game, I have 3 Mythoclasts, 3 Fatebringers, 2 Jewel of Osirises (I had 3, but I dumped one cause why not), and these things never move. I arrange my shotguns, snipers, and machine guns generally so I have 1 surplus field scout sniper, 1 surplus field scout machine gun, and a full auto shotgun on each dude, at least.

Now, because if I move things around it’s usually for a specific, single gun, the dump stuff in a pile method Packmule uses becomes much more useful...but since I have so many things, it just becomes difficult to use anyway.

Packmule tries to save this by having a frame on the right with filtering options, but those simultaneously don’t work right and make the thing harder to use.

Hitting an item brings up a menu on the bottom of the screen.

Here we can give the item to any of the characters, but the order’s all wonky. Who thought that was a good idea? That said, this is a much better interface for my Windows tablet. It looks like it was built for touch interface. You just have to get used to the stupid layout.

Features:

2/10.

It has a search function and filters, but the search function is limited. I like showing me my Bunglenet account, but it has completely wrong stats.

You’re questioning me as to why my avatar is Konoko? Oni was the first Bungie game I ever bought. The other ones I had only played at friends’ houses who had Macs.

It supposedly also has a phone app, but I can’t get it to load on my phone. It also doesn’t have loadouts.

How well does it work?

Not that well/10.

This happens a lot. You just get nothing on the screen. So you uncheck some filters or whatever, and then some stuff pops back up, you reenable them, and you’re missing your warlock. All right, dude, whatever.

I’ve found no reliable way to get this application to work right. Also, the title tag doesn’t work. Come on!

Overall:

Don’t use it/10.

Destiny Item Manager

Interface:

8/10.

Looking at the interface initially, it looks pretty much perfect. Things are sensibly laid out, there isn’t a huge frame with checkboxes and junk, and the categories are nicely separated. There is a postmaster thing at the bottom so you can see what kind of neat stuff you have left there. The stuff you have is sorted out by character, which is nice, and there is a nice gold outline on the fully upgraded guns. It’s very clean.

When you hover over a gun, it tells you the name and its attack rating, which is good. Clicking on it gives you the transfer options and a link to the Planet Destiny database entry for that gun.

If you don’t like clicking, you can drag and drop! Here I am dragging the blue shoot to loot scout rifle to another character.

Drag and drop works great on a normal computer, but doesn’t work on my Windows tablet. Gotta tap. The buttons are a little small but they work.

The loadouts can be applied in a simple way, by going to your character, clicking the drop down menu thing then selecting your loadouts. I have lots of loadouts.

It’s pretty elegant.

All other things basically need to be done by the search function, which includes filters.

The problem is, the search function just kinda greys everything out, so it’s easier to see what you’re looking for. It doesn’t remove them from the screen. And, you have to manually type the stuff in. That sucks.

Features:

7/10.

Drag and drop is the killer app on this one. Other than that, it includes loadouts you can customize, and nifty filters. Zero phone app integration, but the loadouts are saved in “the cloud” so you can use this on multiple computers with Chrome.

How well does it work?

Almost perfectly/10.

It lacks an autorefresh feature, so if you do any kind of management within the game, you can get errors.

Basically, that’s the only thing that goes wrong with it, really.

Overall:

Useful/10.

Tower Ghost for Destiny

Interface:

9/10.

At first glance, this one is uglier and noisier than DIM. The numbers clutter the pictures, there’s a ton of info on screen that isn’t strictly needed. This can make finding one specific thing difficult.

However, being able to tap something and use that to filter (and it actually working) as opposed to typing in the search bar makes up for it in my opinion. Plus, the extra information, like the capacity of each weapon/armor hole in your dudes is nice.

To me, the big awesome thing with the interface is the DestinyDB hover tooltip.

This allows me to see WHICH Vanquisher I might be using of my two. (I actually ascended one so I would be able to tell in the DIM extension as well). You get to see nifty perks, but it doesn’t show Field Scout ammo counts, so that sucks, but since virtually all my guns I use have field scout, it’s pretty irrelevant to me. To others, it might be annoying...but hey, it’s better than what the other guys have. It also has an emblem previewer.

Otherwise, it works much like DIM without the drag and drop. Click a thing, click your dude in the pop up, the stuff goes there.

The loadouts feature doesn’t work as intuitively. You hit loadouts, then pick the dude to give it to. It’s item centric as opposed to character centric. Doesn’t make as much sense to me.

As a bonus, this application scales to your screen, so if you’re using some kind of ancient eeepc with a VGA screen, Tower Ghost shows you a little less on screen. You can also change where the vault shows up, and exactly how you want the scaling to work in the view options.

It also has a postmaster box, plus a missions box and a bounties box, which the other two applications don’t have, at the bottom. You can’t do anything with these, but they are there.

Features:

11/10

This thing has features you didn’t know you wanted, and probably some you don’t want. You can show armor sets, or weapon sets (which made me realize I deleted a few POE guns on accident!), view character stats, do loadouts, search, and set an auto refresh. PLUS you get the neat tooltip.

The auto refresh is nice since if you screw around with your inventory while playing the game, Tower Ghost will see the change and you don’t need to refresh manually. It’s the 300 in the screenshots, which sets a 5 minute auto refresh cycle.

Clicking on your characters shows numerical stats for each one.

The sets can be chosen from a list and you can see missing items, which is how I found out about my missing POE guns. Here you can see I am missing Praetorian Foil of my VoG set because I dismantled it as a gag. You can also see that when you run filters on Tower Ghost, it actually clears the screen except for the featured guns.

A super neat feature is a share inventory function. You can basically share what you see in these screenshots with other people, so other people can fool around with your cached inventory!

https://towerghostfordestiny.com/share/?xbl/Funkmon

Take a look!

Something else going for this application is that it is available on Android and Windows phones (EDIT: and iOS), and the loadouts and settings sync. So, if my Chromebook is somewhere else, I just pop on my phone, hit my “Crota” loadout, and I don’t have to go get the computer. That’s nice!

It also has different language options for our multilingual Destiny players. German barely works, though, and it makes funny tooltip errors.

How well does it work?

Chrome:

Perfect except the languages/10.

Phone:

4/10.

Sometimes the phone application just won’t load up, or it loses your sign in data and it won’t reload the sign in page, etc. The phone sync feature is kind of eliminated in this situation. For my phone, I use something called “Little Light.” It’s very cute.

However, on the Chrome thing, I have had zero problems.

Overall:

This is what I would use if I were you/10.

Winner:

Tower Ghost!