Feature Req: Read-only steam player info over UDP?

[fluffle]

Hello devs,

As well as TCP RCON, Steam/valve have a simple UDP RCON-like protocol to allow pinging the server and checking on current players, etc.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Server_queries

I was wondering if this could be added to the factorio headless server. This would allow useful and interesting information to be scraped from a server on a regular basis for monitoring purposes without giving the monitoring platform any privileged RCON access.

My suggestion would be that if --rcon-port was set but --rcon-password was not, only the UDP port would be opened, and if both were supplied both the TCP and UDP port would be opened.

Thanks for your time,
--fluffle

[ssilk]

Hmmmm. Don't take me wrong. But as non-steam player I would ask then the question, why should only steam-users have that comfort?
What is with other game-portals for example? GoG and others...

I think this is a bit difficult question and is about fairness and impossibility to support all kinds of game-portals.

I don't say this will not come, but I don't think that the solution will be steam-only (see all the other stuff they made: mod-portal, payment, forum, wiki...)

[fluffle]

Sure, I'm not a Steam player either. But the developers have already used Valve's RCON protocol to allow remote administration, and the Steam server query protocol is technically very similar (allowing a certain amount of code reuse) and has a public spec. It's relatively easy to implement a client for it, and implementations already exist in multiple languages.

I genuinely don't care whether the Steam server lists can or can't scrape info from factorio servers, I just want to be able to send a couple of UDP packets to my factorio server from an IRC bot that updates the topic of our game channel, so that players can know when other players are online easily. I really don't want that bot to have full RCON access to the server. Factorio supporting Steam server queries alongside RCON seemed like the easiest way to achieve that goal

Thanks for the reply!