Athena - An ARMA 2nd Screen Application

[Rheal Dugas 1]

First of all, This has got to be the MOST USEFUL Mod made for Arma. You should get some sort of Medal for this.

Thank you so much for taking your time in developing this.

I am sure that once you have completed this the Arma Community will vote that as Mod #1,

if they don't then they should all be Court Marshalled and Shot.  :lol:

 

 Question: Are you or will you still be actively working on this Mod?

 

Comments. After I loaded this Mod my Controls changed. I am no longer able to fly a helo with the

mouse and a few others controls have changed also.

Has anyone else had this problem and is this caused by the AthenaMod?

[skruis 180]

Rheal,

 

I've had to take a second break from Athena due to my wife's illnes. I expect to be working again on it soon. As far as winning a medal, I doubt that's going to happen :-) The parts of the community that are aware that Athena exists are mostly anti-second screen. With regards to the controls, Athena in no way affects your key bindings. I'm not sure what's happening with your controls ... unless there's some odd error with switching between the ARMA and Athena windows mid-game.

 

-skruis

[warbirdguy1 14]

Is there any news on how to use this mod currently?  Unfortunately I am plagued with EMFtoPNG.exe not linking and the inability to see the .emf file in my C drive.  I am looking forward to your progress!  I have a cockpit set up and think it would be awesome to have the map up on one of my MFDs!

[skruis 180]

Warbird, EMFtoPNG.exe not linking? If you're playing Single Player, try the beta of the new version. The link is posted above. It's faster w/ integrated map export/import.

[alejandrorm 0]

Hi, can someone provide me the map NZiwasogo for @athena im playing that map right now if someone can provide me that map :)

[KunBojowy 0]

Just wanted to provide an update: the map import functionality is ready for use. I'm sure once I release this upcoming version, you'll find something that could use improvement or is (hopefully not) completely broken but I just wanted to let you know that that part is ready.

So, I've been playing with the AiA TP lately and one of the maps is Zargabad. Via the export topography 'cheat' (http://killzonekid.com/arma-scripting-tutorials-how-to-export-topography/), I was able to have Zargabad exported, converted to a PNG and then imported into Athena in less than 15 minutes. As far as the topography export method goes, a key thing to remember is that terrain exported via this method does not include the location names (city names), hill numbers, icons (windmill, buoy, tower, etc.) and other various data that would be available on the ingame/editor maps. For the current Altis and Stratis maps, I took screenshots of the maps in the editor and stitched them together. It took hours and hours per map to get it pixel perfect so keep that in mind. The fortunate thing I guess is that if someone creates a good copy of any particular map is that they 'can' share it with others for them to import into their Athena installs. If you use the terrain export method, keep in mind that the exported image (after converting to PNG) is NOT pixel perfect. For example, Zargabad is 8192*8192. The exported image came out to something like 8193x8195. I had to use Paint.net to trim the image to get an image that matched the ingame 8192*8192 space. Again, this is something that, if the images are shared, only has to be done once but I wanted to make you aware of it in case you export terrain for maps that I haven't and as a side note, I will be making my clipped export images available for download from athenamod.com as I make them.

Also, I had previously mentioned that the image size limit is around 14k*14k. That is incorrect. That was a limitation imposed on a single object in .Net due to the way it manages memory. It is possible to use a larger image as the 'source' for the import. One thing to keep in mind though is that even though I'm breaking the image up in to 100 pieces, that depending on how much of the map is viewable via Athena via your zoom level, that will dictate how much or how little memory is used. If you load my Altis image and zoom all the way out, it will, fully zoomed out on a 1920x1200 monitor, take up around 450MB of memory on average. If you're constantly panning, forcing it to load in and out chunks, it will take up more so, yes, high res images are supported but balance that against your desired memory usage. Another thing to keep in mind is oversized images are essentially useless. In order to maintain accuracy, Athena will scale the images to match the map dimensions. So if you have a 50k*50k source image for Zargabad, that 50k*50k image is going to get resized, on the fly, to fit a 8192*8192 surface. You'll simply be eating up CPU cycles by causing Athena to scale the chunked images on the fly as they're loaded, unloaded and then reloaded.

So the process for importing a map is such: You go to File->Import Map. You specify the map name (it should match the ingame map name), the source image and the map dimensions. It'll then carve up the source image (it preserves the original) and stores the chunks in My Docs\Athena\Maps\Map Name. Once that's done, you can call up the map manually or if Athena is in 'start' mode, it will pull up the map as soon as you start a mission that takes place on that map. At this time, there isn't any logic to handle multiple instances of the same imported map so don't go importing Zargabad a billion times. If you dislike the current Zargabad map and want to re-import, delete the My Docs\Athena\Maps\Zargabad folder and then import Zargabad again. On my PC, w/ a 1TB 850 EVO SSD, Zargabad imported in less than a minute.

An interesting thought that I had after realizing the difference between the ingame map and the exported map images is that there's now a possibility to have a seriously customized map image. What I mean by that is, and I can't fully realize a situation in which this would be desirable (but that's why you're here), is that imagine you are in command of a large op and you have several subordinate PL's, SL's and TL's under your command and you've somehow persuaded all of them to buy a 2nd monitor (everyone should have a 2nd monitor anyway - its so much more efficient) and run Athena. The "BIG OP" is coming up and as part of your large ultra serious super involved plan, you break up sections of an area into various zones named Whiskey, Xray, Bus and Barley (Sorry, I don't know the right names). You could theoretically export the game map, mark it up in Paint.net, Photoshop or whatever image editing software you like, place different colored highlights over sections of the map to denote the various zones, and then distribute that map to your subordinates for them to import into Athena. Yes, a lot of that, actually, all of that can be done in the game editor which is why I'm struggling to justify a reason but it's just a bit of an example to somehow spur the imagination.

In that same vein, I'd also like to say that Athena's primary goal is to take whatever is in the ingame map and copy it to a 2nd screen interface. We're not 'there' yet and that is always going to be a work in progress but I'm also not going to limit Athena to what's 'only' in the ingame map. My overall goal for Athena is to allow you to define markers in Athena and have them propagate back into the game and to eventually allow Athena to Athena data sharing. What I mean by that is ... I have a Surface Pro 3. That SP3 has a pen which I can use to ink. What I really want is to 'ink' the map and share my 'on the fly' notes with other players running Athena in the same mission. To literally draw a proposed plan on the game map and share that. To me, that would be awesome even for my own use but if Athena proves popular, I think it'll be a killer feature (for those users that can actually use it).

Anyways, I'm going to implement the 6 digit grid stuff on the mouse cursor and the target unit and I'll release the next version.

Thanks,

Bus

 

 

@skruis: could you send the map you made for Zargabad?

[fathersarge 46]

Rheal,

 

I've had to take a second break from Athena due to my wife's illnes. I expect to be working again on it soon. As far as winning a medal, I doubt that's going to happen :-) The parts of the community that are aware that Athena exists are mostly anti-second screen. With regards to the controls, Athena in no way affects your key bindings. I'm not sure what's happening with your controls ... unless there's some odd error with switching between the ARMA and Athena windows mid-game.

 

-skruis

 

The super milsim types can't be trusted anyways skruis, we pilots will always love and adore you for this

[terox 316]

is this still actively been worked on ?

If not, any chance of releasing the source code ?

[skruis 180]

Still being worked on. Had to take a break due to wife's illness. I'll be back on it in January.

[jaaxxxxon 140]

On 11/8/2016 at 5:44 AM, fathersarge said:

 

The super milsim types can't be trusted anyways skruis, we pilots will always love and adore you for this

Wh-wh-what about the milsim pilots?

Skruis, you do you man! I hope the old lady is feeling better but regardless there's no need to rush :)

[skruis 180]

Well Jaax, you've got to get the milsim boots on the ground on board for next level coordination with Athena ;-) She's feeling much better. Done with Chemo, about to come back from a well earned vacation and I'm looking forward to getting back to Athena. I've been sitting on some major changes (a beta was released earlier in this thread) and I'm eager to release them.

[Tankbuster 1747]

Excellent news. Best wishes for the missus. :)

[Gruman 123]

Hey Skruis.

First of all, I love this project. Feels great and will be a huge gamechanger as soon as I have it working correctly :).

 

Quick question. I like to use my Surface Pro 4 to view the Map plus draw on it. How would I set this up?

 

Will you publish the Tanoa Map anytime soon or should we just import it ourselfs? :)

 

Thanks.

[skruis 180]

In 1.0.0.26, in the config file for the mod, there's a spot where you can designate where to 'save' the output files. In the application, you can tell it where to pick up the files from. You can use this with shared drives w/ mixed results. In the upcoming version (I'm working on it again atm!) and or the beta (which is listed in earlier posts in this thread), the mod has been changed to use sockets which is much more efficient. The already available beta and the upcoming version will import maps you don't have auto-magically!

[Gruman 123]

Got it allready working with the config file change :) Works great.

 

Good work :) Looking forward.

[Gruman 123]

Hey Skruis.

 

Used Athena yesterday for the first time in an MP Mission with our team.

I used the Beta version you posted earlier in the topic (I think dated back in June 2016).

 

Game was running on my game rig, while I had my SP4 connected via WiFi.

 

Overall impression was amazing. Really great tool and was a pleasure to use.

Some Issues:

• Every 10-15 min I had a disconnect, which left my screen blank. WiFI was stable and great connection. Will try again with my Surface Dock and connected Ethernet cable.
• Map Import was a bit unstable... I needed arround 10 tries until I finaly was able to import Tanoa successfully. Game said script ran successfully, but Athena Desktop was still at receiving mesh data... Friend had the same issue, but I just gave him my successfull build. Would be nice if Tanoa would be on the webpage just for future ease of use :)
• Drawing of a friend (basicly just tons of lines he just drawing randomly to test it out) weren't deleted on my screen after he ereased them. Clear Map fixed it.

If I may, some feature wishes (as a SP4 user)

• Multi-Touch support (Zoom -> Finger Pinching, Moving arround with two or more fingers even in Ink mode)
• Shortcut to enable inking. Would love to use the button on the Surface Pen to switch between dragging the map and inking mode
• Could we get a scale option for buttons? SP4 Resolution is pretty high and all the buttons are quiet hard to hit when you flying at the same time :)
• Any chance to make CTab markers visible on Athena as well?

 

Again, thank you so much.

If you need testing with your beta versions, I'm happy to test them out with my unit.

 

Best regards

[skruis 180]

Originally, this was a Windows 8 application w/ Multi-Touch, Ink, etc. all built in but I got some push back on the Windows 8 requirement and I ported it to the old Windows 7/Windows Vista era WPF/Silverlight ink canvas and 'touch support' is hacked in somewhat. I still want to move it to the UWP framework as that'll provide the 'best' experience IMHO but if no one was able to play it, what was the point? but w/ Windows 10's adoption increasing amongst Steam users, the time to move back to the UWP is probably fast approaching. I love the idea of Athena running on an Xbox One at a LAN party or groups getting together to do an AAR via Athena on a big screen and that kind of thing is easier if it's a UWP app so, yes, that's all on the radar -but- the part that's ruffling my feathers the most about the new beta is the rendering performance. My goal is for it to scroll smoothly, perfectly smoothly and I'm in the middle of implementing a new technique. Once I get that done, I'm going to start bug hunting and nailing down the stuff you're talking about.

 

Out of curiosity, how was the performance of your ARMA experience affected while using the new beta? It definitely drops the framerate a bit but do you think it was too noticeable? Was it worth the dropped frames? And the update speed in Athena, it 'was' pretty close to real time, right? What kind of mission were you playing? How many AI? How many human players?

[Gruman 123]

Oh, smoother scrolling... That would be handy. I just disabled following function and zommed out to keep an overview about everything :)

[skruis 180]

I edited my previous response but I don't think you saw this part:

 

Out of curiosity, how was the performance of your ARMA experience affected while using the new beta? It definitely drops the framerate a bit but do you think it was too noticeable? Was it worth the dropped frames? And the update speed in Athena, it 'was' pretty close to real time, right? What kind of mission were you playing? How many AI? How many human players?

[Gruman 123]

Ah, didnt see the edit :)

 

I ran the whole evening arround 30 fps (so probably 40 frames when AFM would be disabled... Thanks BIS for NOT optimising).

But because of Tanoa, AFM, MP and my graphic settings, its a pretty normal amount. I noticed 3 bigger framedrops I never had before (down to 4 FPS for couple seconds), but I cannot say its because of Athena. Will keep you posted.

 

Update speed was OK, I guess. Following the player wasnt really an option, because it did shake to much, but zommed out it updated as I would expect from a BluFor Tracker system. 

 

Athena did react a bit sluggish when play and stopping. Allways takes a couple seconds. But then again, it was on my surface pro 4 connected via WiFi.

 

MP game with arround 30 Players with approx 100 AI.

I saw there are some debug config options available... Should I do something with them?

 

Thanks mate

[skruis 180]

Ok, well, that's a good stress test. It was 'shaking'? Do you mean w/ the auto zoom-in, zoom-out from speed? Yea, that needs refinement. What's happening now is it's unzooming then moving the focus to the player on the next 'frame' update when it should really focus on the player immediately after unzooming so you don't notice that 'shake'. I'm pretty sure the debug options generate a pretty detailed log of what's going on but the log files get pretty huge. Hold off on those for now because I'm not ready to actually bug hunt.

[Gruman 123]

IMHO, when following, it should keep the zoom I select, instead of beeing based on speed (or make it configurable?). 

 

For the Zoom buttons... Instead of the plus and minus button, a slider would also work very well. You allways see what zoom level you selected, you can easely click and/or drag (mouse and touch). 

 

Anyway, up to you. Awesome tool I will continue to use :)

 

Best regards

[skruis 180]

I planned on making that feature toggle-able and then perhaps to allow the user to specify a list of speeds/zooms so they could customize the effect. Re: the slider, not a bad idea. I'll look into that.

[skruis 180]

Status Report: I am extremely happy with the new rendering technique. So a bit of background, the original version of Athena required users to use the EXPORTNOGRID command and then to convert the EMF to a PNG and then Athena chopped it up into sections and displayed those sections (sometimes) when they popped into the users view in the application. The beta ditched all of that and instead ran a script that exported the underlying data of each tree, bush, road, building, light pole, wire, all of the land data and so on and so on. That data is then used to recreate a drawing of the map instead of using a captured image. Why is that beneficial? Because it lets me do cool sh...stuff like generate height maps or customize the look of forests and so on.. the point is, it's good to have data rather than the images but drawing all of that stuff takes up a large amount of memory. The beta that's currently available tried to control what was drawn at a given time by using what's called a Quad Tree. A Quad Tree divides itself into pieces as you add things to it in such a way that it's easy to supply a rectangle (think of your view of the map [that parts you can see at any given time] as the viewing rectangle) to the Quad Tree and have it hand back everything that falls into that view. It's a very efficient way of displaying huge amounts of objects on a canvas because you don't actually display them on a canvas at one time, you only display what the QT tells you is in the viewing rectangle. The problem with the Quad Tree, in this specific application, was that it added a good deal of overhead. I was asking it to track section of fences a meter long along with thousands of other objects from ARMA ... so the index of items was pretty huge. On top of that, I was asking for it to supply me with a list of objects within the viewing rectangle every time the view changed. So, if you right clicked and dragged the view over 1px, I queried the Quad Tree. If you right clicked and dragged 100px, I queried the quad tree as often as I could as you panned the map for those 100px. So, I asked it several times a second to search through it's catalog of thousands and thousands of objects to tell me which of those objects were available and then I had to purge the objects that fell out of view and draw the ones that came into view. It cut down on memory usage and it did exactly what I asked it to: show me only what I can see but it was sluggish because it tied up the CPU. Instead, I'm back to a tiled approach similar to that of the original version but instead of having you supply the images, I'm using the data provided via the export script to build images at runtime and display them but with a higher visual fidelity. The tiled approach works well. I break each map into 2048*2048 sections and render the objects onto each of those sections. As you pan over it, it pops up an image of that section. As you move away, it drops that image and frees up the memory. Because I'm working with fewer spaces, the querying to see which space is in view at any given time is much faster. It's very similar to what the web based AAR's are doing with their tiles but this is more fluid with a higher visual fidelity and again, this is much more flexible. The images in Athena are rendered 'now' whereas the images in the online AAR tools are rendered at the time when the map was exported. Why is the Athena approach to displaying the map better? Because we can do cool sh...stuff like Height Maps. I'm also going to allow you to specify your own color schemes: Don't like the green I use for forests, choose your own color. Don't like the tree colors, choose your own. Prefer elevation lines to be purple, that's fine. You have that kind of control when you have the data and render the map in real time but when you export an image from ARMA, you get an image, not data and you have to export it at particular zoom levels. Because I'm actually rendering my 'own' version of the ARMA map, I'm drawing geometry and then rendering the geometry into images with a quality specifically according to the current zoom level. It's much more flexible. As you zoom in or out in the online AAR's, it loads a predefined image. As you zoom in or out in Athena, it updates the rendering of the image in real time and tailors it to your zoom level so you get the highest visual fidelity without taking up too much memory. It's a pretty nifty system.

 

Additionally, to make sure that panning and zooming is ultra smooth...paving the way for 'smooth' pinch to zoom...instead of updating the map as the user pans the map or scrolls the mouse (which causes 'skipping'), the map will be re-rendered when the user stops panning and stops pinching to zoom. Because the tiles are 2048*2048, there will be some visible content around the area you're panning. When you release, the non-displayed areas will be filled in immediately. It's kind of hard to convey in words but in usage, you'll see what I mean. The actual viewing of the map and looking around feels much more natural and smooth now.

[skruis 180]

Well, who wants a beta?

 

http://athenamod.com/download/20170111.zip

 

Ok, so, this beta should only change the map rendering to the new system. Nothing apart from that has changed so you don't need to replace the @Athena folder. I included it in the zip only for the sake of completeness. The things to test would be:

 

1. How does it feel when you scroll/pan/zoom?

2. How does the map actually look?

 

The 'please wait while loading ...' window will work sporadically. I wasn't too fussed about not having it in this beta so when you select a map, expect a small delay while it loads. I think Altis takes ~30 seconds to load (on my pc - i7 4770k). Takistan was 10. Stratis was negligible.

 

Note: When you download the zip, right click on it and go to the "General" tab and place a check in "Unblock".