External API for monitoring/visualizing game stats

Question

As a statistics nerd,
I want to be able to access and visualize detailed statistics for my factory.

Background

Being a software developer myself, I am accustomed to monitoring my systems and visualizing practically every metric available. For thisa purpose, I often use tools like Prometheus and Grafana or similar software.

Satisfactory is heaven for any statistics nerd. Metrics like the amount of things being produced, the number of structures built and the amount of energy produced just beg for being displayed as graphs on some dashboard. For a certain target audience, to which I definitly belong, having this kind of data is almost as exciting as playing the actual game.

Implementing a visualization front-end for the game would be an enormous effort, and a not very satisfying one, too. It is to be expected that almost every player has different expectations for the dashboards, which makes implementing this kind of functionality as a part of the software itself an execise in futility.

In order to fulfill the needs of the statistics nerds while not overburdening the development team, it would be highly desirable to have some API using which the relevant data can be extracted and processed in whatever way one wants. Any kind of API that can be accessed with standard monitoring tools would be sufficient here, be it REST, JMX, SNMP or any similar protocol.

While this would be a great addition to the current software, it would be even more helpful in the dedicated server version that is hinted at in the road map. As such a server will typically be available 24/7, it would be quite easy to set up the monitoring infrastructure for experienced users. If the developers provided some kind of default setup, e.g. in the form of a Docker image, Docker Swarm configuration or Helm Chart, installation would be possible even for less skilled server admins.

Comments

I would love this! I'm currently investigating if there's a way to run the game's netcode in a docker image, and get the stats from the game's API / platform / whatever the game has that exposes this info. That way you don't need a graphics card / powerful PC to run the game, and it would only run the last factory configuration that you saved when you last logged off. (basically it would just progress time in real-time and get stats out of it). Let's make this happen! come on devs!

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Yes that would be great if you had an API for external statistics queries. I would also like to do a live map on my internet site without having to upload the savegame all the time!

Answer 1

You could use the save file, and parse the data from there when ever there is a new save. There are already solutions out there that reads the file, so all you would have to do is categorize the data, and present the results in some way. 

Though a real time API would be better