tagged creating a desktop overlay to view players on a Minecraft server with conky#prevsinglenexttop
Currently, I'm hosting a Minecraft server weekly on Tuesdays. Sometimes I even play.
It's Vanilla with a proximity voice chat mod (walk near people to hear them). Proximity voice chat is endlessly fun (see Barotrauma, Factorio, et cetera…)
Today, I wanted to have an overlay (think Discord voice chat overlay, or when you pop-out a video in Firefox, or when you use chat heads on mobile) which showed me who was online on the server.
Querying the Minecraft server status
After seeing an "enable status" option in the server's server.properties file, and searching up what it meant (it allows services to "query the status of the server), I'd used https://mcsrvstat.us/ before to check the status of the server, which shows you the player list in a browser.
But a local overlay would need a local way to query the server status. So I did some web searching, found a Python script which wasn't great (and written for Python 2), then a self-hostable server status API, which led me to mcstatus, a Python API (with command line tool) for fetching server status.
I installed and tested it with
$ cd ~/temp/minecraft/
$ python3 -m venv env
$ ./env/bin/python -m mcstatus $SERVER_IP json
{"online": true, "kind": "Java", "status": {"players": {"online": 7, "max": 69, "sample": [{"name": "Boldwolf5491", "id": "289qfhj8-a8f2-298g-19ga-897ahwf8uwa8"}, {"name": "……………
Neat!
How to make an overlay on Linux
Next, a way of having an overlay. Searching for "linux x simple text overlay" led me to xmessage, which can show simple windows, but they're more like confirmation windows, not like long-lasting status windows (i.e., it's hard to update the text).
I was also led to discover conky, which – if nothing else – has a great name. It's designed to be a "system monitor", i.e., a thing wot shows you your CPU temperature, uptime, RAM usage, et cetera. The configuration is also written in Lua, which is super neat! I still want to get more into Lua.
Using conky
By modifying the default configuration (in /etc/conky/conky.conf) like so:
diff --git a/etc/conky/conky.conf b/.config/conky/conky.conf
index 44053d5..cc319e1 100644
--- a/etc/conky/conky.conf
+++ b/.config/conky/conky.conf
@@ -37,8 +37,9 @@ conky.config = {
out_to_stderr = false,
out_to_x = true,
own_window = true,
+ own_window_title = 'Minecraft',
own_window_class = 'Conky',
- own_window_type = 'desktop',
+ own_window_type = 'normal', -- or desktop
show_graph_range = false,
show_graph_scale = false,
stippled_borders = 0,
@@ -48,25 +49,9 @@ conky.config = {
use_xft = true,
}
conky.text = [[
-${color grey}Info:$color ${scroll 32 Conky $conky_version - $sysname $nodename $kernel $machine}
-$hr
-${color grey}Uptime:$color $uptime
-${color grey}Frequency (in MHz):$color $freq
-${color grey}Frequency (in GHz):$color $freq_g
-${color grey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
-${color grey}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
-${color grey}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
-${color grey}Processes:$color $processes ${color grey}Running:$color $running_processes
-$hr
-${color grey}File systems:
- / $color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
-${color grey}Networking:
-Up:$color ${upspeed} ${color grey} - Down:$color ${downspeed}
-$hr
-${color grey}Name PID CPU% MEM%
-${color lightgrey} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
-${color lightgrey} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
-${color lightgrey} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
-${color lightgrey} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}
+${execpi 5 ~/temp/minecraft/check.sh}
]]
…when we run conky it opens a small window which contains the output of the script ~/temp/minecraft/check.sh (the 5 after execpi means it runs every 5 seconds). If this script was just echo "hi!" then that conky window looks a bit like:
———————+x
| |
| hi! |
|_______|
I use Pop!_OS, which uses Gnome/X for all the windows. With that (by default), I can right click the top bar of a window and click "Always on Top", which effectively makes the little window into an overlay, as it always displays on top of other windows, with the added bonus that I can easily drag it around.
Writing a script for conky to use
Now, I can change the script to use the above Minecraft server status JSON information to output something which conky can use as an input, like:
#!/bin/bash
#~/temp/minecraft/check.sh
json=$(~/temp/minecraft/env/bin/python -m mcstatus $SERVER_IP json)
online=$(echo "${json}" | jq -r '.status.players.online')
players=$(echo "${json}" | jq -r '.status.players.sample[] | .name')
echo '${color aaaa99}'"${online} players online"'${color}'
echo "---"
echo "${players}" \
| sort \
| awk '
BEGIN{
for(n=0;n<256;n++)ord[sprintf("%c",n)]=n
}{
r=0; g=0; b=0;
split($0, arr, "")
for (i in arr) {c=arr[i]; n=ord[c]; r+=n*11; g+=n*15; b+=n*21}
printf "${color %X%X%X}%s\n",
r%128+128, g%128+128, b%128+128, $0
}
'
The fancy awk is just to make each player be a different colour, and to randomly generate the colours from the ASCII values of the player's username.
The final output
The final output looks like:
——————————————————+x | 8 players online | | --- | | Kick_Flip_Barry | | Blue_Outburst | | Kboy8082 | | lele2102 | | Compostmelon101 | | Nobody808 | | Kaithefrog | | BrinnanTheThird | |__________________|
…which I can drag anywhere on my screen. When people join or leave the server, I can see a flash of change out of the corner of my eye.
Conclusions
Is this useful? Should I – instead – just have been playing the game? Do I use too many en-dashes? The world only knows.
Maybe I'll use conky for something else in future… I like to wonder what it could do…