Athena - An ARMA 2nd Screen Application

[fathersarge 46]

Snazzy! Can you interface with athena using the touchscreen?

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yes, but it really is unhelpful. If I touch the tablet screen, my player chap looks down and fires his weapon. I guess he looks down because I told windows the tablet screen is under the main monitor so a touch there is the same as a mouse down movement, and touching the screen is interpreted as a mouse fire button.

 

I was hoping that a 2 finger pinch or spread might zoom in and out, but afaiks, it doesn't. I could turn the touchscreen off on the tablet, I suppose.

[skruis 180]

Tank, that's interesting so ... mouse and keyboard support work properly, right? It's just the touchscreen input that's a little wonky? It's most likely that because ARMA has 'focus', that it's processing the mouse input that it's receiving through the touchscreen on the Android tablet. That's the exact behavior I would expect if it were running on a touchscreen on a dual monitor Windows PC (ARMA on non-touch screen and Athena on 2nd touch enabled monitor). Split PC setups really are the most ideal simply because of the way apps and app focus work. Hotkeys were introduced to try and work around that issue. If you were to alt-tab out of ARMA, and focus on Athena, I'm guessing that touch would work like you'd expect. That's not in any way ideal though. I'm guessing the hotkeys process properly as well because the application is still technically running on the ARMA PC, it's just the 'display' that's forwarded and rendered in the Android app.

[Tankbuster 1733]

 If you were to alt-tab out of ARMA, and focus on Athena, I'm guessing that touch would work like you'd expect.

Exactly, yes.

[Tankbuster 1733]

 Hotkeys were introduced to try and work around that issue. . I'm guessing the hotkeys process properly as well because the application is still technically running on the ARMA PC, it's just the 'display' that's forwarded and rendered in the Android app.

Not tested them yet. I will do so and report back

[fathersarge 46]

Ah yea, I'm not sure why I didn't process through that myself.

 

Now I've got all these ideas to make my tablet and 2nd monitor focused on different parts of the map and have my laptop as my drawing one hahaha.

 

3 Athenas running at the same time.

[skruis 180]

I'm seriously hoping I can interact w/ this: https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/190676-line-drawing/

 

Status Update

 

Took a short break but I've gotten back to bug squashing so I've resolved:

 

1. Renamed the 'track' button to 'follow'

2. The 'side' of the player will be captured on each frame now.

3. The missing 'ruin' buildings are now included in the exports.

4. I've disabled the auto-hiding of unit icons. It was inconsistently hiding the icons for units when it came to being mounted in a vehicle.

 

Next on the list are:

 

1. Supporting scripted locations

2. New algorithm for forest calculation

3. Debug issues with black blobs on maps (rendering issue)

4. Allow users to increase sizes of unit icons

 

-bus

[skruis 180]

1212, you weren't joking about N'Ziwasogo. I think I've identified the issue with the 'black blob' generation and I've improved the forest calculation and rendering. So I'm exporting N'Ziwasogo as a test and I'm about 30m into it and the bulk of the time so far has been exporting the trees. It is literally a tree world. I haven't touched the import process for the trees (getting the trees out of ARMA) but I have improved the 'processing' portion for the trees/forests in Athena. It's been a pretty dramatic improvement on the other worlds so we'll see how long this takes to calculate the forests for this world.

[1212PDMCDMPPM 200]

What was really weird is that Song Bin Tanh has more trees but took far less time to process (or my Athena managed to level up a few times processing the other maps and put all her points in speed :) )

[skruis 180]

Ok, so the process for N'Ziwasogo completed in just under an hour on my PC (i7-4770k, 850 EVO SSD). The exporting of the trees took the longest time but the forest calculation was pretty quick (less than a minute or so). I'll look into possibly speeding up the tree exports. I'm guessing that it took so long because of all of the writing to disk...maybe I can save the data in chunks of 500 objects instead of 100 and I'll see what happens. Also, I've resolved the black blob issue:

 

[1212PDMCDMPPM 200]

Excellent, Bus !!

[Jnr4817 215]

I really want to use this mod for flying. I am running a Dell U3415W. What would be the best application to get this going? Add another monitor, touch screen monitor, Ipad, etc? Cant wait to use this.

 

THanks,

Jason

[skruis 180]

1212, I was able to export Song Bin Tanh in about 30 minutes or so so yea, there's a drastic difference. N'Ziwasogo is 5km larger than Song Bin Tanh (20km vs 15km). Most of the rivers in Song Bin Tanh were colored properly as 'blue'. The 'internal' rivers (one's entirely contained within a land mass) are still being filled 'ivory'. I'll try to come up with a low tech solution for that that doesn't involve a complete rewrite but even still, the absence of the 'black blob' is a good thing :-)

 

Jnr, I use the same monitor. It's nice, right? As far as the best experience, I use Athena sometimes on a 2nd monitor but I prefer to use it on my Surface Pro 4. Another user here uses his touch screen laptop. Athena is a 'Windows' only software so you'll need to run the application on a Windows PC. That can be your ARMA PC w/ a 2nd monitor, a spare laptop, a Surface (like me) or you can use an Android tablet to mimic a 2nd monitor like Tankbuster (check some of the previous posts in this thread) [i'm not sure if iOS has something similar]. Athena doesn't support pinch to zoom (yet) but it does have on screen buttons that you can press with your finger. It's intended to be used with stylii so that you can 'draw' on the Athena map. If you have a touchscreen monitor on a 2ndary laptop, I would recommend getting an iPad capacitive stylus. They basically mimic your finger on the touchscreen and your 'ink' will be much smoother. I hope you like Athena :-)

 

All, We're probably set for a small upgrade this weekend.

[1212PDMCDMPPM 200]

Thx for the info and solving the black blob issue ! :) 

I never realized N'ziwasogo is larger than Song Bin Tanh... How embarassing..  :wacko:

[skruis 180]

Tank, I added support for capturing and displaying locations added via the createLocation command. Just because of the way I'm handling locations, the locations added via createLocation will be appended to the list of locations in the LOCs tab in the ORBAT window. They should also be automatically cleared when the mission switches, restarts, etc. whereas the 'world' defined locations should be permanent. As of right now, it doesn't support moving the locations if you should change the position but if you update the 'text', it will update the text. Is changing location positions a 'thing' too or no?

 

[Tankbuster 1733]

It is possible to change to position of mission designer created locations but I don't do it. To be honest, I don't think many designers would - it's a bit nonsensical.

[skruis 180]

Tank: Yea, I just went ahead and added support for 'location' movement updates as well because ... why not? I haven't tested the actual movement of the locations yet but feel free (once released).

 

All: I know I had mentioned trying to get a release out this weekend but I felt like doing some experimenting. Athena does an 'ok' job with the update frequency but you know ... I want it to be better.

 

https://youtu.be/LDs4b5AC27E

 

That looks pretty good to me :-) It requires some optimization and some code cleanup because as of right now, it has a ~10fps hit. Athena typically seemed to have a ~5fps hit prior to these changes. I'm pretty sure I can reduce the impact of the new data collection routines and get closer to the traditional performance impact of ARMA. What you were seeing in that video was Athena displaying the data it was receiving at 30fps. So, ARMA was running at 30fps and on each of those frames (it was being executed on "EachFrame"), it was pushing the ARMA data to Athena. Now, I don't really think that kind of update speed and it's associated performance impact is required for this kind of application so I'm going to investigate ways to either reduce the frequency while also trying to keep it smooth.

[Tankbuster 1733]

 

Respawn. Athena loses track of players when they respawn.

[skruis 180]

Ugh, will fix. So, they respawn, they get deselected on the list but you can reselect them, right?

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yes. It might not be so easy as you think though, I don't know how much knowledge you have of mission scripting so please excuse me if I appear patronising when talking about stuff you may already know... :)

 

format player will be unchanged during respawn, but you might need to get the respawn delay too, and even then, players often don't respawn at the earliest opportunity once tge respawn delay has elapsed.

 

In BI respawn/revive, the player does actually die even during a revive. But in some revive systems, the player doesn't actually die and is made unconscious, invulnerable and captive all at once so a revive type medical simumlation can kick in,

[skruis 180]

Yup, so the 'player' may or may not exist, may switch sides (civ), etc. all for a variable period of time. I think this will be manageable though. I'll know to look for 'the player' and if he or she is not in the list, I can assume they're dead, wait for them to re-appear in the list of units and reselect them but still allow the player to interact with Athena and select another unit to follow. Sound good?

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yes mate,I think you've covered most of it. Couple of other things ,the player might be teleported during respawn so don't update until he's alive again.

Will there be a 'mission developer’ mode that shows units of other sides? I'm not sure now you'd secure this, perhaps only allow it when they server name contains the string ’test', but it would be properly useful to me and others like me to see civs, indi's etc

[skruis 180]

Tank, is 'following' the player if they moved a major issue? The more complicated I make the 'follow' function, the more prone it will be to breakage.

 

Re: dev mode, yep. You'll actually be able to use the @athenasvr mod for that. I'm trying to nail down issues related to recent changes, the update frequency increase and the performance improvement. After I get this next version shipped, I'll backport changes tot he @athenasvr mod and release it.

[skruis 180]

btw Tank, nice picture (elephant in the room) :-)

[Tankbuster 1733]

I didn't want to flood you with requests when what I thought the most difficult (respawn) was probably on your mind as well as mine. :)