How to Output map screen onto second monitor or device?

[terox 316]

This is a vision only at the moment and not even on the initial planning stages, so am asking for advice from those who have an idea on how one would go about this

The end product would be

1) Output the local players A3 map accessed via the "M" key and output that onto a second monitor or device such as a tablet for the local player

2) The info shown on this secondary map would be the same as shown on the ingame map, groupIcons, markers etc

3) At present I don't need this to be interactive although if such a system was possible then designing it for interaction for some future update

 

More specific questions would be

How can I grab the data ?

How can i redisplay the data?

 

if this is even possible

 

[Flax 397]

Hey Terox this is definitely possible and has been done in the form of the Athena Mod - http://www.athenamod.com/ The forum thread can be found here:

 

[terox 316]

Hi, I  already know about athena thanks,

I'm not sure if its still supported or worked upon, so was more looking into how this would be done and getting my head around the process

[Flax 397]

Ah ok well the basics of it would be to take the data from in-game and write it either to a file or a database, the latter probably being the preferable as it is more versatile. Once you have the data you would need to find a way to read and translate that data into an external map. You would have to do this on a map by map basis as there is no real way to capture the map "picture" in real time in game: To summarise:

 

Prior to Game:

• Capture image of clean map and create grid system on second display program.
• Create second display program that can pull data from DB.

 

In Game:

• Capture and write player location to DB.
• Capture and write marker location/ type/ colour etc and write to DB.

 

After Game:

• Clear DB so it doesn't interfere with future games. 

 

I can go ingot more detail if you wanted as there is a fair bit of technicality missing form the description above.

[terox 316]

Thx for the feedback, i was hoping there would be a way to grab the map image instead of having to create one, although athena mod seems to have gotten that fairly simplified, 

I was hoping for a more fully automated approach

[Flax 397]

Yes it's frustrating but as far as I'm aware there isn't another way to do this. Another example of a mod that does this is ALiVE, which I'm sure you will have seen but that is not in real time and again already has pre-exisiting map images. 

 

If anyone does know another way I'd love to know.

[terox 316]

maybe they will release an api at some point :-)