Feature request: Second Screen API

[Havic]

Without a bunch of preamble. I believe this game would greatly benefit from a feature I'm calling Second Screen API. Basically it's like doing a external web query against the game engine. Myself or other devs could take that structured data and display it on and in another screens and apps outside the game. So I could craft a query in something SQL, put that query into a URL, and get back a structured JSON response. I could then simple dump the data with a powershell script, I could display it on an IPad with some javascript, or use it in a more advanced interface written in Python. One example, I could create a query like: Select all wares from stations where maketdata is valid. This would return a JSON string list of all the stations I have recently visited or have in range of a satellite with how much and how many they are buying and selling of each wares. Yes I could do something like that within the game, but once I have the data I could add more filters, like show only stations within three jumps of Argon Prime.

I have played X4 up to the point I started building my first mega station only to get frustrated because I would spend all my time digging through the menus to keep track of and manage my empire just burn myself out and move on to another game before starting X4 over.

Anyway, this is the bare bones of a feature I believe X4 would greatly benefit from.

I

[StoneLegionYT]

I feel like I remember people requesting this back in the day especially in the X3 days am I crazy? Or was there even a feature or a function that was tested at one point? Maybe that was X2 it's been too long lol. I just know people were talking about the idea more back in the day just for the fact that we're starting to see some things like flight simulator offer a lot of third-party tools that would do something similar.

Honestly I'd be happy to throw egosoft money for such a feature obviously let's not how it works but it is something I've kind of always wanted kind of a basic API to access different information like for example somebody could always design an out of game map and it could be somewhat delayed but for example it shows where you are on the map maybe key information and it could be some really cool things that people could design over time even if it doesn't allow you to send data and only retrieve it it would still be really cool what people could come up with.

Early days in no man's Sky some people were making tool similar where like it would store screenshots in your experiences and it did all these cool things overall mapped all the locations you've been things like that. I think it just gives the game a whole other different level of scale and enjoyment but I'm sure it wouldn't be used by the majority of the players which would be probably why such a feature would be a back burner project maybe something a Dev would work on if they had free time and it was just something they wanted themselves. But I can't see them putting money into such an idea.


Edit: Saw this on discord:

Sepa — 9/2/2024 1:24 PM
I've seen the Python named pipes mod - as I know you DeadAir are quite a master when it comes to modding, a few more queries if I may.

For Mayhem 2 I made external Grafana dashboards, to keep track of the empire - where are the resources mostly, trends of minning/usage etc.
The way I achieved this was through G15/19 update script, by Cycrow orginaly IIRC, also used with Rainmeter and my own G19 plugin over the years. Essentially a scheduled in-game task -> log to file. Then on top of this - Telegraf scraps the file, a few magic lines in it's config and pump the data into InfluxDB, then use Grafana on top. All dockerised.

Now, 'named pipes' sounds like a way to do it in a bit better way possibly, less resource-intensive - spit the data out to pipe, pump it to influxdb directly, skip logs/telegraf. If X4 is anything like X3 where it comes to logs - the game might stutter when these are periodically created (every ware on every station etc).

Have you got any experience with the named pipes plugin?