Hey zablex, thanks a lot for the interest! Displaying live trains would certainly be possible - but it would need a lot more work. At the moment I'm trying to fix it so the required servers are deployable (e.g. all the URLs are hardcoded to localhost), and also sharing a demo video. I'll try and get it to a working state.
And thanks for the offer of help! The tech I'm using is
- TypeScript to Lua to make the mod - the mod logs JSON messages to the server log
- a shell script that will scrape the Factorio game server log and upload messages to a Kafka server. This isn't ideal as it requires the Factorio server is running in a Docker container, and the shell script has elevated permissions
- a Kafka server (no special changes)
- a Kafka Streams application (Kotlin) that will process the messages (this generates PNGs of the map terrain, and other events processing)
- a websocket + map-tile Kotlin web server that will serve the PNGs and broadcast updates (using Http4k, but I want to migrate to Ktor)
- a Leaflet webmap (I'm using Kotlin+KVision, but I think I might try Jetbrain's Compose Multiplatform)
I'm least experienced with frontend development, so help there would be good. I chose Kotlin+KVision for the challenge, but it can be written in anything. It would even be possible to connect directly to the Kafka server and generate metrics (in Grafana, for example).
What would really help is persuading the Factorio devs to add a websocket broadcast server https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=57281, or UDP out (like I know the Forza games have https://github.com/geeooff/forza-data-web). That would cut out the hacky shell script. Apart from that, maybe figuring out a better way to get data out - maybe over a RCON connection? I think Clusterio does that.
