Farming Simulator Mod & Web Integration

Description

I worked on a developer team as a volunteer for a farming simulator (PC game) community. The name of the community was FarmersOnly.Club. I worked with the game engine modification in Lua and helped build the integration with the NextJS app for the web dashboard. We made it to where you could interact with the game directly from the web.

Problem

The leaders of the community wanted to extend the gameplay of farming simulator by building their own "game" outside of the game. They needed an out of the game bank system, land ownership, and vehicle transfers from server to server. They also wanted a way to control this outside of the game.

Solution

We implemented the game modification in a proprietary manner that I can't disclose here. Let's just say the game engine didn't allow system I/O and we had to get creative to export/import game data. A team member implemented the ability to control the game from a discord bot. I stepped in and helped with the web integration by starting a next js project and building from there.

Story

I learned a lot about Lua in this project. The game engine was sparsely documented and the version of the game we were working on was just released with a new engine rebuild, so the documentation that we had was limited. There was a lot of trial/error and reverse engineering by printing lots of data from the game engine. I wrote tools to help me print game data. The web integration was fun for me because I learned a lot about a larger project and grew as a developer. We used websockets and Pabbly to integrate real time notifications from actions taken on the web interface. I experienced working on a team with individuals with different skill sets and backgrounds. This project allowed to imagine the effectiveness of a well rounded software team.

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