Athena - An ARMA 2nd Screen Application

[skruis 180]

I think I've nailed it down. At least, I've tested it with Western Latin 1 (1252) and it's worked properly. We'll see how it works for other languages.

[Joocebocks 0]

So our unit has started using the Athena AAR tool recently and it's been great and insightful for us. Thank you for the time you've put in and we look forward to using your mod going forward.

 

Now, I called myself looking for feature requests for this and even another post for the AAR tool but even your steam description of the mod links back here so I apologize if I'm suggesting something that's already been brought up.

 

Are there any plans in the future for the following:

 

• Kill "feed"  - even it's as simple as X killed Y
  • I believe I have seen another AAR application that drew a red line between the a shooter and their target when they were killed. It was just a quick indication of who killed what.
  • Indicating the weapon that was used and the range of the shot would be nice to have as well
• Player equipment tracking - it would be nice to be able to see how much ammo and equipment is left on infantry and vehicles
• The option to record in a real time pace - I don't think we'd have a problem downloading a much larger recording if that was the end result. I understand that there are likely a number of factors to the file size and potential performance concerns for real time recording, but recording better than 1 "frame" per second would be really helpful it it was possible
• Indication when a player or AI is firing or throwing
• Continue to indicate vehicle positions while they are empty

Thanks again for your time and if you would like to see feedback and suggestions for the AAR component elsewhere, please let me know and we'll use that instead.

[skruis 180]

@Joocebocks Sorry for the delay in responding. I've been busy with a home improvement project. That's great to hear! I've seen subscriptions for the AAR tool increase but I never really got any feedback so it's nice to hear from someone that's using it.

 

1. Kill Feed - Yes. The actual 'death' list will simply be a list consisting of the time of death, killed by and perhaps the weapon used.

2. Player Equipment - Type of weapon, perhaps. I already have the weapon classes. Not sure if I have the descriptive names but I don't think I'll show the ammo quantity. That might be going a little too far into the 'too detailed' category for the 'realists'.

3. Real time - I haven't actually tried this but if you set the capture interval to 0 in the logger, it 'should' capture in real time. Additionally, you can set it to 0.25, 0.5, etc. to capture 4 per second, 2 per second and so on.

4. Fire Indication - I have a plan for adding this

5. Vehicle positions - That could get quite nutty. Perhaps I'll add logic to track vehicles that had, at one time, been occupied.

[Joocebocks 0]

7 hours ago, skruis said:

@Joocebocks Sorry for the delay in responding. I've been busy with a home improvement project. That's great to hear! I've seen subscriptions for the AAR tool increase but I never really got any feedback so it's nice to hear from someone that's using it.

 

1. Kill Feed - Yes. The actual 'death' list will simply be a list consisting of the time of death, killed by and perhaps the weapon used.

2. Player Equipment - Type of weapon, perhaps. I already have the weapon classes. Not sure if I have the descriptive names but I don't think I'll show the ammo quantity. That might be going a little too far into the 'too detailed' category for the 'realists'.

3. Real time - I haven't actually tried this but if you set the capture interval to 0 in the logger, it 'should' capture in real time. Additionally, you can set it to 0.25, 0.5, etc. to capture 4 per second, 2 per second and so on.

4. Fire Indication - I have a plan for adding this

5. Vehicle positions - That could get quite nutty. Perhaps I'll add logic to track vehicles that had, at one time, been occupied.

 

@skruis Hey no problem. Thanks for responding.

 

One of the first things I tried after testing was setting the interval to .5 to see if there was a difference. I didn't really see one but I'll try out 0 this evening and let you know how it goes.

 

It's good to hear that those suggestions are planned in one way or another as well!

As far as the ammo indication goes, I understand what you mean. My thought process behind it was to get a better idea of situations in an AAR. It could help paint a picture of a fire team or support element's situation - I also kind of thought of it as a rough way to do fire indication. If a unit is losing ammo over the course of a few frames, we know they've been engaging something. By extension, health could be treated the same way I guess, but you complicate that if you were to add something like the ACE3 medical system in - this more or less falls in the same bucket and your response to ammo would apply here too, but it's a nice "maybe one day" kind of idea.

 

Another question - since you mentioned you already have the weapon classes, do you only intend to support vanilla + DLC in that regard or will you be dynamically pulling weapon class names/display names so that mod weapons are picked up as well?

 

Thanks again!

[skruis 180]

@Joocebocks Let me know if that interval doesn't work and I'll investigate for you. Actually, now that I think about it, on playback, Athena will still try to play it back at 1 fps. So you'd have to increase the playback speed to 4x in order to play 4fps. I'll have to come up with a solution to that.

 

Ammo/health tracking: it's definitely something I could do but I'm not sure how detailed I want Athena to get exactly. Some users might think that kind of detail goes too far so that's something I have to be aware of.

 

Modded weapon classes: there's some stuff that's difficult to parse programmatically. For example, a lot of the modded rifles will cause the unit to appear as RGL instead of R because the script interprets weapons with 2 'muzzles' and for some reason, a lot of modded rifles do ... even if they aren't GL's. I've been trying to come up with a solution for some of this stuff and I think I'm going to end up creating some sort of interface that allows users to categorize weapons, vehicles, units, etc. Obviously, Athena will ship with some by default but users will have to categorize them on their own for the lesser known mods....or for mod updates that change class names.

[Joocebocks 0]

@skruis I actually just finished testing the 0 interval recording and it did not work well - or at least it didn't achieve the desired effect. Despite playing back at 4x speed, playback took longer. Since everything in game is happening at the same speed, but the software used more frames to capture it, it basically turns in to a slow-mo effect.

 

We'll keep using the 1 second interval until you get a chance to look into it. If at any point you would like additional testing done outside your own, just let me know.

[skruis 180]

@Joocebocks Yep, I've figured out a solution and will include it in the next release.

[Tankbuster 1733]

Quick question... I wanted to record something using Nvidia Shadowplay last night, but for reasons unknown, it wasn't running when I would have expected that it would be.

Occasionally, I've noticed the Shadowplay stuff appearing on the Athena window.

I was wondering if you were aware of any Shadowplay/Athena issues, before I settle down to an evening of troubleshooting?

[skruis 180]

@Tankbuster None that I know of. You may want to close the Athena that auto opens and open one manually because I noticed that the Steam overlay (the FPS counter) appears over my Athena window if it's opened automatically (which it is by default now). So, either stopping that from happening or closing/reopening might help? Let me know.

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yes, the FPS overlay appears in the Athena window, I see that as well. I'll keep fiddling with it.

[skruis 180]

Hey guys, just wanted to share a quick video demonstrating a couple of upcoming features: 

 

[skruis 180]

Ok, I think we talked about this a looooooong time ago but I've revisited the Hot Keys again. I've dropped the Windows centric 'global hot key' support in Athena and re-engineered it to listen for the User XX actions in the ARMA "Custom Controls" menu. So, if you want to use Hot Keys in Athena, you can bind a key combination to a User Action in ARMA's Custom Controls and then specify the User Action number in the Athena "Hot Keys" window. So, there's a couple nice things about this change:

1. The key combinations are now all centralized in ARMA so you don't have to compare between Athena and ARMA anymore
2. The "Hot Key" activation is handled through ARMA and then distributed through the relay so a "Hot Key" pressed on your ARMA PC can now control Athena running on your 2nd PC. Let's say you're like me and you run Athena on 2 devices (I have a large monitor for a detailed zoomed in view and I use my Surface for my 'region view'). You can have two different User Actions for Follow, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan Left, Pan Right, Pan Up, Pan Down and configure each Athena to map to the relevant User Actions. That way, you can use the Hot Keys from one keyboard to independently control Athena on two different devices.

And two bad things:

1. Athena users will now permanently be limited to 20 hot keys at any given time and Athena may have to compete with other mods using those User Actions.
2. You can no longer 'Start' using a Hot Key...because Athena has to be in 'Start' mode already in order to receive the Hot Keys from ARMA via the mod/relay.

Here's what you see in ARMA:

   

 

Here's what you see in Athena:

[pirkleawesome 8]

Is there anyway to change the default location (Documents folder) of where Athena saves map info, recordings, etc?

[skruis 180]

Not currently. Mind if I ask why you'd want to do that?

[pirkleawesome 8]

Just to keep everything in the same location (Running Athena AAR as well so the Temp/Archive files for that are not in the documents folder).

[skruis 180]

Hey guys! I'm continuing to make progress. There have been some random changes and some somewhat larger ones but something that I've wanted to work on and introduce was a way for Athena to better support non-vanilla weapons and vehicles. The problem with each specifically is that the logic I used to determine whether or not a weapon was GL capable or if it was a machine gun was by checking the muzzle count and/or checking the player unit class. It wasn't very effective and when it came to mods, it was useless. RHS in particular has multiple muzzles (one of which being 'safe') for a lot of their weapons so everyone with an RHS weapon appears to be a RGL in Athena. As far as vehicles go, parachutes appeared as helicopters because they're essentially a subclass of helicopters and of course, it was somewhat difficult to accurately determine what was a car versus a truck, an apc from a tank and so on. To that end, I've added a 'dictionary' system for those two types that give the user, should they so choose, the ability to accommodate specific weapons and/or vehicles should they want to.

 

 

For vehicles, there are quite a bit. I think between vanilla, RHS and CUP, there are 3000+ now keep in mind, some of these are placeholders or base objects that aren't actually available in game but there are still quite a bit. To help manage things, I added an initial step of acquiring the 'sub categories' from the editor. So you click "Request Categories" and it grabs all of them (CfgEditorSubcategories). You look through the list and flag the ones you want as 'Collectable' by placing the check in the 'Collect' checkbox. You can then also specify the 'Default' icon for the category.

 

Once the category filtering is complete, you can click 'Request Vehicles' and it will grab all of the vehicles (CfgVehicles) that match the Categories you flagged as 'Collectable'. Those vehicles, when added to the dictionary, will be configured to use the default icon for the category that the vehicle was linked to. After the vehicles are imported, you can customize the icon per vehicle. For example, there is a 'truck' icon and the trucks are included in the 'car' category and 'parachutes' are included in the 'helicopters' category but the default icon would be accurate for most vehicles in that category ... but you can change them for the particular vehicles that are different. So there's a bit of customization available if you want to get nit picky.

 

Once you've made all changes, you click the "Save" button in the top left.

 

 

Ok, so for weapons, you can flag the weapons as either being a GL, MG, both or neither. Categorizing the weapons affects the 'icon' that is displayed for the unit. In the 'development' version:

1. Units with 'engineer' in their class names have the engineer icon
2. Units with 'medikits' use the 'medic' icon
3. Units carrying MG's have the 'autorifleman' icon
4. Units carrying any weapons in the secondary slot (AT Slot in their inventory) have the 'at' icon

5. Group leaders use the 'leader' icon

And the icon is determined in that order. An engineer with a medikit carrying AT but also the group leader will have the 'leader' icon. Additionally, the weapons will be used to determine the 'description' of the unit in the ORBAT so if the unit is carrying a GL capable weapon, the unit is listed as an RGL.

 

To wrap up, Athena will be shipped with my version of these dictionaries but you'll be able to customize (or correct them because I have no idea what vehicles are what) them according to your modset if you so choose. There will be some minor performance increases (in game) because the scripts will have to collect less information. For example, the scripts currently run through a series of 'if thens' to determine what type of vehicle is in use or it queries the weapon types and capabilities repeatedly. From now on, it will simply grab the class names of the vehicles and weapons so it's slightly more streamlined...but not in any meaningful way. Also, the dictionaries are stored as text files in the My Docs\Athena\Data directory so you can change the dictionary values (with Athena closed) via a text editor or easily exchange them with other members in your unit.

 

Making progress.

 

-bus

[looter 10]

Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there a way to display the in-game "Intel" on enemy positions like the in-game map does? It's the main reason I check my map so often, and if Athena were able to display that information as well I'd have good reason to avoid the in-game map all together.

[skruis 180]

@looter It does not unfortunately. I'm a little leery of attempting to implement that because if I'm ever 'wrong', it makes it easier to paint Athena as a 'cheat' tool although, perhaps eventually, I'll enable it for single player only.

[looter 10]

2 minutes ago, skruis said:

@looter It does not unfortunately. I'm a little leery of attempting to implement that because if I'm ever 'wrong', it makes it easier to paint Athena as a 'cheat' tool although, perhaps eventually, I'll enable it for single player only.

 

I think the best solution would be to make it a server config option that's enforced for connected clients, not to mention real arma cheats do alot more than displaying staggered intel for enemy positions. Another option is to only enable it if the server is running within the correct difficulty setting that enables it for the normal in-game map.

[skruis 180]

I already have the 'cheat' finger pointed at me so I'm a bit sensitive to it. Re: server config option, absolutely.

[DarthAyokas 0]

First of all, you did an impressive job on the athema mod , you have no idea how long i searched for something like this  I use it in combination with a MS Surface...

I have a question and since 23 pages of this post is really much I hope somebody can help me with it:

 

The Athena Desktop Version got the tab "Community" and it refers to the community server. The steam workshop page says: "Very soon, there will be a publicly available "Athena Community Server" to which I plan to upload many maps" - are there new information on this, or is it up to date? I'd love to try it =)

 

Thanks for your effort and great work, keep it up =)

 

Edit: Or do you mean with "Community Server" the Server-Application of Athena? I haven't dived so deep into the ecosystem of athena...

Edited February 1, 2018 by DarthAyokas

[DarthAyokas 0]

32 minutes ago, DarthAyokas said:

The steam workshop page says: "Very soon, there will be a publicly available "Athena Community Server" to which I plan to upload many maps" - are there new information on this, or is it up to date? I'd love to try it =)

 

Okay, never mind, I found the corresponding server in the athena files of the mod (acs subfolder). Excuse my blindess

[Elliot Beckett 10]

Howdy all, 

 

Just a quick question about the ACS program, I am really interested in running a version of it on a server of mine, however, I am encountering an issue. 

 

I have downloaded the mod from Armaholic, opened up the ACS folder and run the .exe, the ports have all been unblocked in the firewall (28804, TCP) but I still can't connect. 

 

In the log file for the ACS, it keeps showing:

 

5/6/2018 7:56:55 PM: Listener.AcceptCallback, Connection failed during connection acceptance.
5/6/2018 8:11:10 PM: Listener.AcceptCallback, Connection failed during connection acceptance.

 

On the Athena program on my pc, it gets stuck at Connecting, Authenticating.. and sits there until I exit the acs.exe on the server. 

 

Some important notes:

The server is running Windows Server edition 2016 (Not sure if its an issue) 

It is a remote server, hosted in America and I am in Australia so there is a ping issue etc. 

Athena works fine on my desktop and updates fine when I am playing on the server, markers move around and populate correctly etc

We are running additional mods, though I doubt they will affect things. 

I have tried running ACS.exe as an admin and in compatibility mode for Windows 8, I still have the same issues.

I have loaded the full Athena mod on the server launch parameters and still have the same issues

 

I have had a hunt around and couldn't find an answer so if anyone has any tips then I'd appreciate it. 

 

Thanks

Elliot

[greecelightning5 12]

I've noticed some communities saying they have been using this. As a whole how has it performed? Has it killed the fps for everyone or has it really been unnoticed? What kind of benefits have yall as a community seen from using it?

[devilspawn 24]

Fantastic mod 10/10 :D

I tried running Athena on the same box but notice a massive drop in fps, manage to get this working on my ipad :D 

 

Good Job :P