Athena - An ARMA 2nd Screen Application

[skruis 180]

Another status update: got a little sidetracked when I realized just how much memory the map exports and transfers were taking up. Running Altis on my pc took around 4.5GB of RAM but exporting it caused Arma to sky rocket to just about 10GB. This is a combination of storing all of the exported information in memory while serializing it to JSON in memory before writing it all to disk. I've basically broken up the serialization into smaller pieces. There are still optimizations that can be made but I've reduced the impact to a rise of around 6GB. Unfortunately, to accomplish this, I broke up the world data breaking it out from a single json file however that will also make world exports easier to debug in the future anyways...the json files are now mostly human readable. The worlds are now exported to folder per world with a world file and a series of chunk files, all json. I tried a few different methods but this was the right balance of impact vs ease and it plays nicely with the web app with little memory impact there so, this is what I'm moving forward with for the time being.

[Tankbuster 1733]

Had a little play last night in my mission using an iPad as output. Great fun.
Nothing terrible to report, just a couple of minors;
When players are incapacitated, the game makes them setcaptive true so the enemy doesn't continue to shoot at them. This means Athena shows them as purple civilians. Maybe an option could show incapacitated players in a more useful way?
The slider switches for follow player and icons are too small and/or too close to screen edge.

[skruis 180]

1 hour ago, Tankbuster said:

Maybe an option could show incapacitated players in a more useful way?

Ill look into that. The script is grabbing the ‘side’ every few seconds so Im guessing thats how the setCaptive works behind the scenes. 

re: touchability: good feedback. Ill increase the size and spacing. 

 

[Tankbuster 1733]

Actually, this side thing - I'm going to push it up to bug level because when I'm incapacitated, awaiting revive or not yet respawned, I can see all the civs in the display because they are the same side as me.

[skruis 180]

Well, see now it gets complicated. So lets say i track your side prior to death: revive systems jank that up because some of them prevent death, right? Lets say i track it at mission start, mission designers might add some janky starts where you spawn as a civ and then have your side change or something. I could go based on faction but what traitor missions. I could check last side when health was above a certain amount but thats not foolproof either. Im open to suggestions. 

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yes, there are complications. Revive prevent death with an eventhandler and set the player to setcaptive true until they respawn or are revived.
I don't spawn players as a civ - it's not something I've thought of doing - I'm not sure why a designer would do that, probably functionality I'm unaware of.

Perhaps when showing units of the same side, use faction instead of side.
Or remember a players true side, when they are incapacited, ignore their current side and use the remembered side

Or the app stops updating while player is incap'd? That's an ugly solution!

 

[skruis 180]

I've released the mod as part of an open beta to the workshop. You can subscribe there to get the updates: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902761497. Should make testing much easier. This does not include the 'side' visibility updates. I'll release that soon.

 

Oh, also, it will, by default, open a browser window now automatically. I added this for new users. You can edit the settings file to disable it.

[Tankbuster 1733]

Does the workshop version support Tanoa? Only Altis is in the world cache. If I connect to host while in a Tanoa mission, it sits on pending for a while before erroring with "Is arma running/firewalled"

[Kristofferson777 0]

Hey, skruis, awesome mod! I was wondering if you have any plans to expand this mod to having the ability to display MFD screens? Right now I utilize Peral's A-10 mod with ITC air systems. One thing I'd love to do is display the MFDs of ITC on my left and right monitors with Arma 3 running on the center monitor. Either that or potentially displaying the MFDs of Peral's A10 on the left and right monitors. Peral's A10 is a interactive cockpit A10 for Arma so the MFDs are interactable. 

[n_icomach 312]

Is there a way to track only the squad leaders and not every group member.

Id like to enforce this as a mission maker.

[TopDogAssasin 1]

@Tankbuster Hey mate, was wondering if this still works for you? If I completely reinstall the mod it says in chat that it's exporting, but the world's folder in appdata remains empty and the world never exports, if I try again the messages of it exporting don't appear aswell. I got the website part via the http server instead of https

[Tankbuster 1733]

No, I stopped using it some time ago for the same reason.

[TopDogAssasin 1]

1 hour ago, Tankbuster said:

No, I stopped using it some time ago for the same reason.

A update, I got it working using the latest version of the DLL with the last vversion of the mod uploaded in the forums, I.E one before the steam version. It works but as the dev said markers aren't working and hence its pretty much unusable. It's such a interesting project. Shame it got abandoned.

[Tankbuster 1733]

It worked well with relatively little tweaking and performance was good. I miss it too.