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skruis

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Everything posted by skruis

  1. skruis
    I edited my previous response but I don't think you saw this part: Out of curiosity, how was the performance of your ARMA experience affected while using the new beta? It definitely drops the framerate a bit but do you think it was too noticeable? Was it worth the dropped frames? And the update speed in Athena, it 'was' pretty close to real time, right? What kind of mission were you playing? How many AI? How many human players?
  2. skruis
    Originally, this was a Windows 8 application w/ Multi-Touch, Ink, etc. all built in but I got some push back on the Windows 8 requirement and I ported it to the old Windows 7/Windows Vista era WPF/Silverlight ink canvas and 'touch support' is hacked in somewhat. I still want to move it to the UWP framework as that'll provide the 'best' experience IMHO but if no one was able to play it, what was the point? but w/ Windows 10's adoption increasing amongst Steam users, the time to move back to the UWP is probably fast approaching. I love the idea of Athena running on an Xbox One at a LAN party or groups getting together to do an AAR via Athena on a big screen and that kind of thing is easier if it's a UWP app so, yes, that's all on the radar -but- the part that's ruffling my feathers the most about the new beta is the rendering performance. My goal is for it to scroll smoothly, perfectly smoothly and I'm in the middle of implementing a new technique. Once I get that done, I'm going to start bug hunting and nailing down the stuff you're talking about. Out of curiosity, how was the performance of your ARMA experience affected while using the new beta? It definitely drops the framerate a bit but do you think it was too noticeable? Was it worth the dropped frames? And the update speed in Athena, it 'was' pretty close to real time, right? What kind of mission were you playing? How many AI? How many human players?
  3. skruis
    In 1.0.0.26, in the config file for the mod, there's a spot where you can designate where to 'save' the output files. In the application, you can tell it where to pick up the files from. You can use this with shared drives w/ mixed results. In the upcoming version (I'm working on it again atm!) and or the beta (which is listed in earlier posts in this thread), the mod has been changed to use sockets which is much more efficient. The already available beta and the upcoming version will import maps you don't have auto-magically!
  4. skruis
    Well Jaax, you've got to get the milsim boots on the ground on board for next level coordination with Athena ;-) She's feeling much better. Done with Chemo, about to come back from a well earned vacation and I'm looking forward to getting back to Athena. I've been sitting on some major changes (a beta was released earlier in this thread) and I'm eager to release them.
  5. skruis
    Still being worked on. Had to take a break due to wife's illness. I'll be back on it in January.
  6. skruis
    Warbird, EMFtoPNG.exe not linking? If you're playing Single Player, try the beta of the new version. The link is posted above. It's faster w/ integrated map export/import.
  7. skruis
    Rheal, I've had to take a second break from Athena due to my wife's illnes. I expect to be working again on it soon. As far as winning a medal, I doubt that's going to happen :-) The parts of the community that are aware that Athena exists are mostly anti-second screen. With regards to the controls, Athena in no way affects your key bindings. I'm not sure what's happening with your controls ... unless there's some odd error with switching between the ARMA and Athena windows mid-game. -skruis
  8. skruis
    Ha! I didn't realize it would run like that in the main menu. I disabled the world loading in the main menu in my launcher settings so I never experienced that. Too funny. I absolutely plan to get it working with BE. The dll was in such a state of flux that I would have been pestering BE to whitelist it on a daily basis there for a while. I'll review what I was planning on adding to the dev version prior to release and if there isn't much 'meat' left, I'll apply for whitelisting 'as is'. Thanks, skruis (bus)
  9. skruis
    CNutter, I should probably pull the store version. It's hopelessly out of date so you should use th one from the webstie or the 'dev' versions I've been posting here. Actually, I'd recommend using the 'dev' version. For one, the map exports are almost completely automated and the update frequency is much improved. As far as why it's not working in the latest versions of ARMA, I'm sorry...I don't have an answer for you. I've taken a little break from ARMA and haven't had a chance to look into the issue with exportnogrid. Sorry. Re: the images, whoops :-) will fix. Thanks for the heads up. Thanks, skruis (bus)
  10. skruis
    Oh, I screwed up, the athena desktop.exe in the zip was out of date, I updated the zip. If you downloaded it already, please redownload. Sorry for the inconvenience! I also just noticed that Athena doesn't work with the campaign or at least, the beginning of it. I took a look at the data coming from ARMA. It's sending vehicles but no groups or units. I'm guessing that's because, currently, I'm starting the collection routine for both groups and units with a call to allGroups. allGroups according to the wiki, collects all groups except those of sideLogic. So at first, I thought I had a major issue but the thing that caught my attention was that vehicles 'were' being populated. If there aren't any groups on my side and there aren't any units on my side, how am I able to pull up crewed vehicles belonging to my side? I believe it's because the vehicle collection script iterates through all of the vehicles and then compares them directly to the 'side' of the player whereas the other scripts use allGroups. I'm guessing BIS is doing something smart in the background with sideLogic in the opening of the campaign that's causing the allGroups to not work the way I was expecting. I'll revise the data collection scripts. I was hoping that by calling groups for a side and then collecting the units of the groups that perhaps I could cut down resource usage rather than iterating through all of the units and checking their side ... but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work or at least, how I'm going about doing this isn't working so ... yea. A fix will be available later tonight (GMT -6).
  11. skruis
    Thx bud, appreciate it
  12. skruis
    ...doesn't matter :-) I don't think anything in the mod relies on anything in the dev version though the export scripts performance will be improve slightly when the next version is released...just because of changes to a couple of commands but even still, it won't be a huge difference.
  13. skruis
    You guys feel like doing some bug hunting? Well, it won't be difficult :-) http://www.athenamod.com/download/20160610.zip Be sure to: 1. Download the zip 2. Right click on it and select properties 3. Look at the general tab 4. On the bottom of the tab, it may indicate that the file is 'blocked', click 'unblock'. Place the @athena folder in your arma3 folder and run the Athena Desktop.exe. You may get a prompt from your firewall software to allow activity, allow it. Additionally, the extension has not been submitted to BIS so 'DISABLE BATTLEEYE'. In this release, I've included: General 1. Per frame unit position and direction updates 2. All other data is collected at minimum every 5 seconds but actual updates will depend on your PC speed and mission scripting complexity 3. Updated the scripts to track player side changes 4. Disabled the auto hiding of units 5. Enabled auto zoom when in vehicle based on speed (needs serious improvement, non-configurable and cannot currently be disabled) Mission Exports 1. Resolved issues with the black blobs in < 0 elevation terrains 2. Improved the forest rendering algorithm and lowered map export times Application 1. Renamed the 'track' button to 'follow' Not included but previously claimed as 'done': 1. Locations added via scripts - the current version of the script crashes ARMA when exporting heavy amounts of data (N'Ziwasogo crashed when exporting the forests consistently when the location script was in use) So, this update, again, features some architectural changes: why? There are going to be multiple Athena applications and multiple Athena supported clients in the future. These changes both helped to improve my debugging of the mod and laid some groundwork for the future. These changes resulted in the creation of the Athena Relay program that will launch and close automatically with Arma 3. If you get a prompt about Athena Relay, allow it to run and open holes in your computer's firewall. Also, with the introduction of the per frame updates, performance issues in the desktop app have surfaced. The app used to take around 4-5% CPU depending on what was going on but on mine, I'm seeing 20% usage at time because of the 30+ updates per second. This is driving the need for streamlining and optimization within the desktop application. That will happen but it has not happened yet. This is a test release just to get feedback on the per frame updates. Additionally, Multi Ink seems to be flaky. It's on my 'to investigate' list. Give the new version a whirl and let me know what you think. Thanks, bus (skruis)
  14. skruis
    Well, I improved the performance to the point to where I don't really see a point in 'not' tracking all friendly per frame. Additionally, I've made some architectural changes. Instead of going straight to a socket server and pushing the frames to the Athena application, I've created a separate executable that hosts a pipe server and will perform the socket operations for me. Offloading some of the functions to the executable helped increase the performance a bit, although probably in ways that could have also been implemented from within the ARMA extension, but mostly, it's made debugging so much easier. I can attach to the executable and see what's going on behind the scenes (what data is coming from ARMA, what data is going into ARMA, what data is coming from Athena, what data is going into Athena) so tracking down formatting and communication bugs is much much easier than it used to be. Another change is that multiple simultaneous Athena clients are going to be supported... why is this something you should care about? I don't know...but for those of you that are hardcore pilots...maybe you can imagine the possibilities. Also, I imported Tonoa: ​
  15. skruis
    Ok, so here's a status report: First, my wife was in the hospital for a scheduled surgery so I was unable to actively work on Athena much but I have also been experimenting with using the per frame handler from CBA in order to provide X amount of updates per second (actually real time). What I've determined is that, and this is going to sound pretty obvious in hindsight, is that the impact on FPS greatly increased with the amount of friendly units. So, if it's just you, there's no impact to the FPS. If it's you and 60 others, I was able to measure an almost 30% impact to FPS. For example, I launched my test mission w/ around 60 friendly units in it. When I stared at the ocean, I would hit 100FPS. When I turned on Athena (pressing "Start" in the app), the FPS dropped to around 70. When I would actually particpate in the mission, I would get around 40FPS while walking around shooting at the enemy but when I turned on Athena (again by hitting "Start"), the FPS dropped to just below 30. To me, that's unacceptable. What if you're playing a mission w/ a 100 friendly units? It just doesn't scale well. I tried some tricks but querying the position and view direction of 60 units and then exporting that data to an extension takes some time and then if you have 60 FPS, it'll try to do that 60 times per second so even though we're talking about operations that take fractions of a second, multiplying those fractions of a second times the number of friendly units takes time away from other operations and thus reduces how many frames arma can produce per second and has a very noticeable effect on your experience. So, here's what I'm thinking: YOUR position will be updated in real time ... maybe your groups as well but the rest of the friendly units will continue to update as quickly as ARMA's scheduled environment is able to provide those updates. Does that seem like a good compromise?
  16. skruis

    Line Drawing

    skruis replied to solzenicyn's topic in ARMA 3 - DEVELOPMENT BRANCH

    I'd still like to be able to retrieve the points of the line as well as to be able to create a new line by supplying points. Arrays of 2d points would be fine.
  17. skruis
    Tank, As of right now, it 'is' hardcoded to the center. Hmm, well, it's in already, just have to give users a way to turn it off. If it turns out to be universally hated, I'll pull it. In other news, I 'think' I have a solution for your respawn problem. I added a 'static' player entry to the unit list. The problem is mostly because players are associated with actual units and the player 'occupies' a unit for what could be a long or short time but I figured the 'player' mostly wanted to track themselves. By default, it will track the 'player' unit. If the user selects a specific unit from the mission (themselves or another unit) and that unit disappears from collection (you switch sides, they switch sides, they die, you die, etc.), it will default to tracking the 'player'. Sound good? -bus
  18. skruis
    Ok, I added it and it's pretty cool. I just need to add a way to disable it and then we're good for a release.
  19. skruis
    For you pilots, auto zoom adjust while flying based on speed? Sound like a worthy feature?
  20. skruis
    Yea, I know it might break immersion for certain solutions that scripters are using to simulate situations but with the variety of solutions that ARMA is capable of and that mission designers may use, strategically in terms of development effort, it makes a little more sense to keep the 'follow' function simple.
  21. skruis
    Yea, and this 'instability' in the tracking was actually emphasized w/ the more frequent updates from ARMA so it's a bigger issue that needs to be addressed. I'm going to try and nail that down tonight.
  22. skruis
    btw Tank, nice picture (elephant in the room) :-)
  23. skruis
    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.
  24. skruis
    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?
  25. skruis
    Ugh, will fix. So, they respawn, they get deselected on the list but you can reselect them, right?
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