New server browser (sort by distance, search mods and players, etc.)

[luc]

Oh it seems like the sort by distance is indeed better idea than the sort by country, but I see you implemented both, which is nice!

Thanks

I had my doubts about how it might work for some reason but yes, sort by distance actually finds Finnish, Russian, Swedish and Norwegian servers for me first (me living in Finland). So it is probably the best way for me to find a low latency server.

Same here, from Vaasa it puts mostly Swedish and Finnish on top, which seems to make sense.

The best way to find low-latency servers would keep track of main internet trunk lines, both over land and under the sea, but that's way too much work. Easier to develop an add-on program to fill in ping times for each server (which I might do later, if there is more demand than 1 person and if I have time).

[Mendel]

Maybe add an option to show only either stable version, newest experimental or all versions. (though it seems I can pretty much do this by just putting the version number in search)

[luc]

Hmm there are two issues and one "but" with that:

- "But you can already do that", as you mentioned.

- The latest stable version changes regularly, it would have to be fetched and cached from factorio's website (or maybe the auto-update API, not sure how easy that is to figure out)... not sure that's worth the effort.

- And my main concern: where are the buttons going to go? The filter interface is quite full and cluttered already. Adding more buttons makes it hard to find what you need.

The idea is not bad , but unless more people go "oh yeah we need this" I'm going to leave it for the moment.

[Mendel]

Understood and you got a point.

[luc]

serverlist.lgms.nl/#downloadMods

New: the mod pack downloader

Instead of downloading each mod individually for every server, you can now download all the popular mods in one zip file. It collects popular mods (played by 2 or more players) per game version so that you get the mods that are popular for (and definitely work with) your game version. It is updated every hour and tracks popularity over the past 7 days.

The mod pack gets big quickly, for the latest Factorio version it's more than a gigabyte. Therefore there is an option to limit the size of the mod pack. This uses an algorithm which gets you the most bang for the buck: it divides every mod's popularity score by its size, and the ones with the highest score (most popularity per megabyte) get added first. This means that in a mod pack of 100MB, it will not add a 90MB mod if there are 50 other mods of 150KB that are nearly as popular.

Let me know what you think and how it can be made even more useful!

[noliVe]

make a mod-download-list for each server easily install mods for players.

[nevniv]

This is great, luc. Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to make this!

[luc]

make a mod-download-list for each server easily install mods for players.

Not 100% sure what you mean but I just made a link next to each server's mods to download all the mods for that server. Is that what you meant?

This is great, luc. Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to make this!

Thanks!

[ssilk]

Due to fairness I need to point to viewtopic.php?f=53&t=31589 Web Server List and Tracker for Factorio
which includes a number of similar services.

And some 2 cents:
I really like such projects and I try to support them. As one that has contributed to several free software projects (and saw, what has happened with them over time) I want to say, that the only way that this (and the other linked) projects will last longer than a year or two, there is no way around than to cooperating in the software-development. That is a big change for such a project and maybe sometimes frustrating, but the results and the gain in personal experience is, what counts in the end.

[luc]

From what I understood of that site, admins have to register their server first. So it's not an accurate list of which servers are online, it's a place to advertise your server. They also show you ads.

They do get server info from the Factorio API I guess, else it wouldn't be able to show how many players are online on a server, but from what I can tell, that's where the similarities end. Picking the top ranking game from my serverlist (6 players online and only 460km away, a good server to join), I can't even find it on their site with the search function.

[Redstylt]

No refresh anymore ?
It was very usefull website ! I was looking who is on my server without connect ^^ And how many hours played without me :p
Plz come back

[luc]

Only a few people seemed to be using it. After the Factorio people changed the API, I didn't bother updating the website.

They changed it in a way that you can only see details by querying for each server individually, which would be a lot of traffic for the Factorio server. That's a secondary reason to not bother changing it: it might get my account banned.

And in the end I stopped the cronjob for updating altogether, since it didn't add anything useful anymore (since they broke every feature that wasn't in the in-game server browser already).

If you want to bring it back up, you can always do a pull request on Github! https://github.com/lgommans/factorio-serverlist