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skruis

Athena - An ARMA 2nd Screen Application

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Thanks! Basically, yea, but its only required if you want to share 'ink' with each other. If you want to play separately and not care about sharing ink, the ACS is not required, currently. I'm going to be expanding on the ACS's functions though to add:

  1. Server level password (I can't believe I didn't think of this before)
  2. Map publishing and downloading (Highest Priority)
  3. Additional room controls to lock to server, mission, side, invited users (The basics are present, just not enabled)
  4. AAR storage and synchronized playback (will require a Windows game server) (This will roll out in the near future)
  5. Witness Mode ... let's just say, when you have the units and the groups, why do you need Arma?
  6. Super secret special maybe it could happen and I hope it does awesome feature that I'm overly excited about but probably wont matter!

So, the ACS will continue to offer more and more value.

 

*Edit: On re-reading, I'm concerned that you think the ACS removes the need for everyone to run the @Athena mod with Arma. That is 'not' the case if they want to see output from the missions. @Athena is required by each Athena user to receive mission content, the ACS is required to share 'ink' with each other.

 

-bus

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I've just posted a video showing off how the current client side features of the ACS work:

 

 

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Ok, what I'm hoping will be the final beta before release is now available: http://athenamod.com/download/20170127.zip

 

Still waiting on BattleEye whitelisting...gonna send them an e-mail too.

 

Changes Include:

  1. Some minor GUI cleanup
  2. I'm not sure if this bug was present in the last release or not but as part of my optimizations over the last few days (to rein in runaway threads), I introduced a small stupid little bug that after hitting start, then stop, on every subsequent click of start, it would start and then immediately stop updating. Just a small little logic bug. Again, not sure 'when' it got introduced but I think it's fairly recent. Either way, that's resolved.
  3. I have greatly stabilized the map export process. It is now much more reliable....that might have been included in the previous release.
  4. I have fixed the recording and playback system though saving the screen and opening it later doesn't work...I forgot about it tbh.
  5. I have improved the following per frame procedures:
    1. Making sure the 'following' list is updated properly without unnecessary lookups
    2. Making sure the unit 'color' updates properly based on their 'side' membership
    3. Making sure the unit 'label' gets moved to the correct group (in the ORBAT tab) if a unit switches groups mid-mission (noticed this when using ACE's team join thing)
    4. Making sure the group 'color' updates properly based on the leaders 'side' membership
    5. Clearing the group labels should all members die (Groups don't get destroyed automatically like they used to)
    6. Changed the routine for updating units and labels around so that one doesn't have to wait another frame for the other (they're interdependent)
  6. And the big feature: Athena Community Servers now allow you to upload and download maps. The ACS is central to all my 'big ideas'.
    1. Only 1 person from your unit needs to import the maps and upload them to the ACS
    2. If you're playing and you don't have the map, you can check your ACS (even while the 'you don't have this map prompt is displayed), download the map and it'll automatically launch
    3. I've tested it out from my location over wifi out my internet connection to my colo server and it works but that's hardly a significant test. Give it a whirl and let me know if there are any issues.

-bus

 

*EDIT* Received an e-mail from BattleEye @ 3:40 (Chicago Time - UTC-6), that it should be whitelisted 'shortly'.

 

*EDIT* The extension has been whitelisted but now the 'relay.exe' that my extension launches is being flagged. I've requested that it too be whitelisted. Will update with progress.

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Started with beta from  http://athenamod.com/download/20170127.zip

Ran arma 3 with admin, and no battleye.

 

Getting this error in the export data log.

1/28/2017 5:46:07 PM :: SendPackage :: Error creating/connecting to PipeServer. More info: The operation has timed out.

 

What am I missing?

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Hmm, its likely that the relay.exe is being blocked. Sometimes the downloads are flagged as unsafe by windows and theyre blocked. Can you, and I know you said BE was turned off but check the BE log in the A3 launcher (I have to cover my bases) and then go to the @athena folder, right click on the relay.exe, go to properties, go to the general tab. If theres a checkbox at the bottom that says unblock, check it, hit ok and try again.

 

bus

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No luck, nothing is stated on BE in the launcher. - added exceptions for relay in windows firewall, and running with no antivirus. I definitely agree something is blocking the relay.

 

activated debugging, and got this when I started a simple mission with 1 unit. (only thing I could gather is it is pulling unit location, but not being able to complete everything since it can't get the relay)

 

http://pastebin.com/YZP70ZX2

 

tried forcing relay to open, only opens black cmd.

 

steam - zbezz if it helps.

 

Edit: current stable version works perfectly with no hitches.. even using file sync so my laptop can use and manipulate athena while my desktop plays.

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Hey guys, another beta has been released to: http://athenamod.com/download/20170128.zip. It contains the fixes that helped zebby5000 to successfully use Athena on his computer as well as the 'keys' should your server admin wish to allow Athena on their server. @zebby5000, thanks again for spending so much time with me. I'm glad we were able to nail down the root cause of this and a couple of other issues. Like always, I very much appreciate any feedback, suggestions and bug reports so again, thank you.

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Thank you @skruis for all the help yesterday, everything works perfectly and glad we could get the kinks out. (including some fun arma time running from motors)

 

Some extra information that should be noted: (UAC at minimum, firewall still off) - windows 10

Arma 3 has to be ran as admin, otherwise it won't have the right to launch the relay. (Easiest way being to simply launch arma 3 launcher as admin in the directory)

gEKUpBT.jpg

Once you have a map loaded, Arma will initiate the Relay.

0a9N1nY.jpg

 

Also you need to unblock the file before you unzip it... as it won't show after you unziped it.

(it could potentially break files in the unzipping process)

e9PeCrW.jpg

 

Again, thank you @skruis for making such a damn good program, and for your continued support and effort.

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@zebby5000  Yea, not sure why you have to have those settings but I don't and I've only had to walk people through turning off their firewall as a debugging step (to eliminate possibilities)...only to confirm when prompted that the relay and Athena should be allowed by the firewall. My UAC is one step from maximum (which is the default). My firewall is 'on' for both Private and Public and I'm not running A3 as admin.

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Yeah the uac and firewall can stay stay on - was just stating that because of what they're set at. I've since put them back to normal, and it doesn't conflict.

 

Is there a way you can check pool for NPC and actual players for following? - I noticed if you have some friendly troops down the following list becomes quite... cluttered. and make's it rather hard if you just simply wanna search through players. Perhaps if it's able to distinguish between the 2, have a button that's toggle able to remove the ai from the follow list.

 

second question, capability to resize entire unit markers. (currently right clicking expands one) - perhaps ctrl+ right clicking resizes all?

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You mean the individual unit markers in addition to the group marker? Anything's possible. I'm going to setup a GitHub page and then add that as a feature suggestion...along with filtering out non player units which would be easy to do: they don't have 'steam id's' like players do but getting AAR out the door and tied in to the ACS is the highest priority for me after getting this version 'released'.

 

Guys, another beta: http://www.athenamod.com/download/20170129.zip. Includes some changes to how the relay works and it includes the ability to change the relay port...should you want to for whatever reason. But the relay has an outbound queue that all of the messages for delivery to Athena would be pooled in. That queue has been split up and now each client has their own pool and their own delivery thread for outbound messages. If you run Athena on multiple screens, like I do (I keep a large one up to the right for an overview of the area and I have my surface in front of me zoomed in so I can track my unit on a per player basis), you might notice a small difference...especially if one or more of the clients are on wifi. Because they used to be in the same delivery pool, the relay would send a message to one client then the same message to the next client ... in order. Whereas now they're delivered simultaneously and independently of each other. This will be important for when the flight app comes out....no eta.

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Woah. 2 maps on multiple screens? I failed in my promise to do more testing a few weekends ago due to domestic strife, but I will really try to give this a go.

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Yeah definitely Skruis, was just writing down possible things to think/put on the back burner in case you start running out of idea's or can easily implement them.

 

Negative, I mean able to adjust all group markers at once. Instead of having to go through and individually resize them. (perhaps a global slider? - custom sizes)

http://imgur.com/a/TckRO - example.

 

P.S. Loving the beta, and the updates.

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7 hours ago, Tankbuster said:

Woah. 2 maps on multiple screens? I failed in my promise to do more testing a few weekends ago due to domestic strife, but I will really try to give this a go.

 

Tank, hope everything's alright...

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4 hours ago, skruis said:

 

Tank, hope everything's alright...

 

Mrs Tank, and her pay packet much larger than mine, is under notice of redundancy. :(

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Oh geez, not much worse than having a place you work hard at treat you like employee# 1123470. I hope everything works out.

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Is there a packaged map file for Tanoa?

 

The 'follow' function doesn't seem to keep up when I respawn because the 'following' dropdown selector box gets empty on respawn.

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11 minutes ago, skruis said:

Oh geez, not much worse than having a place you work hard at treat you like employee# 1123470. I hope everything works out.

Yeah, it sucks. She's been there 20 years, but still... kids and a mortgage... scary times.

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Tank,

 

Hmmm, the follow button by default should follow the 'player' unless you've selected someone specific from the list? As far as downloading the map, there's the community tab, connect to address: acs.athenamod.com, port: 28804. Go to the maps tab, locate Tonoa, click "Download".

 

-bus

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12 hours ago, skruis said:

Tank,

 

Hmmm, the follow button by default should follow the 'player' unless you've selected someone specific from the list? As far as downloading the map, there's the community tab, connect to address: acs.athenamod.com, port: 28804. Go to the maps tab, locate Tonoa, click "Download".

 

-bus

 
 

Ah! I had selected Tankbuster from the list. I'll set it back to player and try again. I looked on here for Tanoa map but it's not there. I'll use the link provided, thank you.

 

Although I'm sure you know, performance is WAY better than it was last time I tried this. Great work. :)

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Thank you ;) Also, I remembered an old request that I think was yours...the ability to load an unsigned mod that displayed data for all sides. Still interested?

 

Re: Athena in general, Im trying to nail down an export big in large highly vegetated islands like xcam taunus. I think I have a solution but wanted to post that its a known bug. The script command that collects the tree info crashes arma when it returns too many trees at once. Should have it sorted today.

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4 minutes ago, skruis said:

Thank you ;) Also, I remembered an old request that I think was yours...the ability to load an unsigned mod that displayed data for all sides. Still interested?

 

 

 

I this where I was asking about using Athena as a mission developer tool, so we can keep track of other units on the map? That would be very cool!

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That's fantastic! I love it. It even shows the waypoints of the enemy AI.

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Hey guys, just wanted to provide a status update. I had updated the relay and the extension dll after the initial request to BattleEye so I'm waiting on them to whitelist the new new versions, not just the new versions. Once I hear back from them on that, we're in good shape. Additionally, I found a couple of bugs in the map import process.

 

The primary issue was that the scripts were crashing on large heavily forested maps like XCam's Taunus and Ziwasogo (I think that one). On maps like those, again, large -and- heavily forested, the sqf routine would crash ARMA when it tried to build a list of all of the trees on the map. So, with X39's guidance and example code (I think it was X39), the method has been changed slightly to break the map up into sections and create lists of trees in those sections one at a time instead of requesting all of the trees in one go. So, that added an unexpected delay.

 

The 2nd issue is that once I finally got Taunus exported, I noticed a lot of missing roads and now that I've dug into it a bit, there are some segments of the Taunus roads that don't believe they're connected to other segments of the roads in Taunus. I'm not sure if anyone's played around with, I think the command is, connectedRoads but when you get a reference to a road (nearestRoad), you can use connectedRoads to get a list of road segments that that particular road segment is connected to and using that, you can piece all of the little segments together to get a path. Most of the vanilla maps (including CUP) and a lot of the modded maps I've imported (so far) have been very good about connectedRoads being accurate or ... accurate enough to help me be able to reproduce the actual road but for some reason on Taunus, some of the road segments claim that they're connected to objects that aren't actual 'road' segments. When I use the nearestRoad command in the missing section, the command returns an object id that makes sense but is not the object id that the other neighboring road segments claim to be connected to. For example, consider a road: _ _ _. The road is actually a bunch of road segments _ pieced together...think of them as concrete blocks in the road and the 'road' is really just a sequence of those blocks. The first segment has an ID of 80 and might say it's connected to 41. The middle segment will say its ID is 81 but that it's not connected to anything and the last segment will say it's ID is 82 and that it too is connected to 41. From what I can tell, there is no other road segment with the ID of 41 but the 81 road segment is the actual legit road segment they should be reporting as being connected to and it, object 81 should be reporting that it is connected to 80 and 82 but that's not happening. It's very frustrating and it's a problem that I'm working through now. I might just say "f*** it', report it as a weird issue to the XCam team, hope they resolve it in the future and move on but the fact that it looks less than perfect in Athena now is bothering me and implanting some doubt that this is Tuanus specific but rather that this is a 'global' issue on every map and that it's just more noticeable on Taunus because it's got a lot of roads.

 

Well, I'll go through all of the other maps and try to export them with the code I have now before adding helper code specifically for the issues I noticed on Taunus. If they come out perfect, I'll notify the team and move on. If not, I'll bang it out as quick as possible and get this released to you.

 

-bus

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