skruis

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.

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?

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.

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:

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.

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

Is there a way to interact with the line drawing system via scripting? I've supported 'ink' in my mod/app (http://www.athenamod.com/) for a while now. It would be great if I could copy the stroke collection from my app and have it drawn on the ingame map 1:1.

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.

1212, the clients will not but the server will have to run the athenasvr addon (in development, yet to be released). It'll create save files using the exact same format as if you clicked 'record' in Athena but it will include all data, not just for your side. It will zip the data so that's easy to share w/ your Athena users. Additionally, I plan to add 'synced' playback so that you and others can connect to the same server and someone can initiate a replay and have the playback sync'd across each of the Athena users but that particular feature will come later. Initially, the files will be made available and each user can play them back separately.

Ha, maybe, we'll see. I've been looking at Xamarin as a potential cross platform 'thing'. Odds are against it though.

Tank, thanks! Also, the application 'does' support running ARMA on one PC and the Athena Desktop application on a 2nd PC (Windows Tablet, Laptop/Notebook, etc.). I myself run ARMA on my main PC and then Athena on my Surface Pro 4 (Windows Tablet) but any 2nd Windows machine will work as well.

Tank, I didn't even know creating locations mid-mission was a 'thing' :-) so your conclusion is correct. Currenlty, locations are only 'polled' during map export but I'll look into ways to support that w/o re-exporting every 'location' every frame.

1212, No worries. Didn't mean to come off argumentative. If I did, I apologize. The debate in my head about what to show and what not to show spilled into a conversation in a forum :-) Please don't read into it. I'll take a 2nd look at Thirsk. "In fact, I've even work on how to hide the default arma map to replace it with a more inacurate one" - Oh, you mean the ingame arma map? lol Um, if you want to import more, go for it. You might have to re-import later to get them perfect but I'll investigate everything you reported. It's all appreciated :-) -bus

I took a look at Zargabad, the only missing buildings I could find were actually ruins or rubble. Can't seem to find a download for Mana, do you have one? Re: Thirsk Winter, there are some missing 'ruins' but ... yea, those should be visible. I had hidden ruins just because most of the ruins in A3 tended to be blown out houses w/ just rubble and no semblance of walls or structure but the ones in Thirsk do ... and that offers some strategic advantage so yes, it should be visible. Will show ruins in the next version. Also, for Thirsk, some of the boulders are displayed as 'building like objects' in A3 but are not displayed in Athena. I'm not going to be showing large rocks in Athena so the 'many missing buildings' in Thirsk is really a few missing buildings and some rocks.

1212, 3-6 hours, that's crazy but, um, thanks! :-) Out of curiosity, you didn't 'pause' the game or hit 'escape' and then leave it to run because in single player, that would 'pause' the game and the scripts as well. I might have a different algorithm for detecting 'forest' tiles. I'm sure it will cut down on that 3-6 hour export greatly. I downloaded the maps you posted ... are these the ones you had issues with? 1. Isla Duala - looks good to me. 2. Ziawosogo - all those trees! and the rendering error w/ the black 'blob' at the bottom. Will investigate that. 3. Daryah - None of the roads exported (are there roads?) and I'm not sure why the color heightmap is mostly orange w/ no green. 4. Bin Tanh - Another rendering error w/ the river. Will investigate that. That kind of thing happens when it overlaps itself while drawing the contour. 5. SMD Sahrani - What's different about this from normal Sahrani from CUPS or is this just a non-CUPS version of Sahrani? Re: the color maps on 0 altitudes, is it because the forests blend in or because the heavy green drowns out other objects like buildings? Or do you mean that it's hard to use on maps that are essentially flat? If they're largely flat like Daryah (Takistan has a lot of mountains though), there's not too much I can do on those. Athena, for performance reasons, will contour at every 10m vertically (up/down) from 0 and the 'shading' for the heightmaps applies at every 10m interval. It's beyond Athena's current capabilities to generate a more detailed heightmap that's relevant for flat terrains where 1m or 2m vertical changes are important. For flat terrains, I wouldn't both with Athena for 'vertical' information and use it primarily for relative positioning. Thanks again for your effort w/ exporting that map and posting them! -bus

Yea, the trees and forest calc take a while. On Cherno, the forests take as long as the terrain. Marker support is ... so/so. The next version, after this version, I'm going to focus on a visual overhaul of Athena, making it more like an MFD kind of interface, and overhauling the markers. I'll look into the language issues as well. Thanks!

Not really. More than anything, I just want to make sure that another user, not me as the developer, can actually make it through an import. I know the Altis one could take, depending on your computer, 15 minutes or so, but the others, besides Cherno, should be much faster ... so I was just curious to hear opinions on the process. Re: CUPS, I use the same terrains mod and I was able to export all of the CUPS terrains w/o issue ... except the ship from Utes doesn't get exported. That's the only issue I'm aware of.

Yea, Altis and Chernarus take a little while. Did you try exporting any other maps or is that the only one? I'll look into the 'setCaptive'. With regards to the map detail, that's all automatically generated by the export scripts and I'm pretty happy with how it looks so I don't think I'll be tweaking it any further. Here's some snaps of my setup: ​

Hmmm, yea, because the side changes, all data collection would cease because the side is never recalculated, currently, after mission start. That's a fairly important oversight on my part. You know, I test things from my perspective but anticipating how someone else goes about doing things is always a guessing game. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, will resolve. Did you try exporting any maps from Arma into Athena? I see you're on ... Altis? Did you download the pre-generated version from the website or is that one you exported on your own?

Yea, its really hard to capture in an easy to relate to way. Maybe ill post a pic of my setup when i get home tonight. Tank, how was the setup? How's it tunning?

Ok, well, this isn't the 'formal' release but if you don't mind helping to 'test' the latest version, you can download it here: http://www.athenamod.com/download/20160427.zip. So, there are a few things you should be aware of should you decide to test this version: 1. I have not yet submitted the extension DLL to BattleEye for whitelisting so for now, disable BattleEye if you intend to use Athena. 2. After you download the zip, it may be 'blocked' by Windows so you have to right click on the zip file, go to the "General" tab, place a check in the "Unblock" checkbox at the bottom and click "OK". Then it's ok to extract the contents. 3. You should uninstall and remove older versions of Athena from your "Add/Remove Programs" or "Programs and Features" 4. You should delete the current @athena mod folder if you have one. 5. You should delete the current Athena folder in your "My Documents" or "Documents". The map, saves and the recording formats are completely different. To use Athena: 1. Extract the contents of the zip (which you unblocked) to a folder on your hard drive 2. Copy @athena to your Arma 3 directory and add it to your list of Mods in the ARMA 3 launcher 3. Disable BattleEye (for now) 4. Launch ARMA 5. Launch Athena Desktop (either on a 2nd monitor or on a spare laptop - wired ethernet connections yield the best performance if you're running Athena Desktop on a different PC from the ARMA PC) 6. Click "Start" in Athena Desktop to go into "Start" mode 7. Launch a mission in ARMA (multiplayer will require the server admins to have the ATH.bikey in their keys folder) 8. Athena Desktop, once it establishes communication with ARMA, will display the relevant mission data. If it doesn't have the world on which the current mission is based, it will prompt you to import it. Read the notification and then proceed if you are comfortable. Altis and Chernarus are pretty slow but others will only take a few minutes and it will inform you of the status of the import. There are 2 stages to the export. The first is getting data out of ARMA and the 2nd is the actual processing of the data by Athena. Once the first stage is complete, ARMA performance will mostly return to normal and any ingame actions will not affect the quality of the exported world (dieing, mission restart, crashing, etc.). The 2nd stage will take about the same amount of time as the first stage but once it's complete, the map will auto load and display the unit information, assuming you are still in the mission. The actual displaying of the map is CPU intensive and will slow ARMA momentarily but after the map is loaded into Athena, performance will return to normal. Should the import fail, for whatever reason (mission change, arma crash, etc.), close Athena, go to your My Documents\Athena\Maps folder, delete the folder for the world, then restart Athena and go back into "Start" mode to try again. I highly recommend performing the map export/imports in an editor session. While ARMA is exporting the data, avoid restarting the mission or doing anything that interupts the scripts. You can walk around but if you die, stay dead, do not 'restart' the mission. Restarting the mission stops the scripts on which the export relies and will result in a failed export. Now, because the export process for Altis and Chernarus is so slow, I've made pre-packaged versions for those worlds but I'd like for you, as testers, to try to export the others. Here are the downloads for Altis, Chernarus and Chernarus (Summer): Altis - http://www.athenamod.com/download/mapsv2/altis.zip Chernarus - http://www.athenamod.com/download/mapsv2/chernarus.zip Chernarus Summer - http://www.athenamod.com/download/mapsv2/chernarus_summer.zip A couple of other things to note: This version 'should' be much faster than any version before it. The less data for it to export, the faster it'll be. If you're in an editor mission by yourself, I would expect the update frequency (how often the data in Athena is updated) to be almost real time (by the time your eyes shift from ARMA to Athena, it should be up to date). As the mission grows and more units, markers, vehicles, etc. are added, and as more of your CPU time is dedicated to other functions like processing AI, the less frequent the updates will become however in my testing w/ ~100 units in an editor run singleplayer session, the update frequency was much much better than the current official version, 1.0.0.26. Additionally, Athena does support running the @athena mod on your ARMA PC and having Athena Desktop run on another PC (an extra PC, a spare laptop, a Windows tablet [i use a Surface Pro 4 myself]). The new version uses 'sockets' to transfer data from ARMA to Athena and back again. If you decide to use Athena Desktop on a different PC than your ARMA PC - Not a 2nd monitor, open the Settings menu in Athena Desktop and set the hostname/ip to your ARMA PC. You should not need to modify the port, only the hostname/ip. If you're not able to establish a connection, ensure that any software firewall you may be running on either PC allows the traffic or is disabled (preferably you know how to modify your firewall to allow Athena, (TCP ports 28800, 28801, 28802), rather than disabling your software firewalls completely). In my testing, the faster the connection between the two PC's, the better the Athena experience ... obviously but take note: A wired connection is usually lower latency when compared to wireless (wifi) which means more frequent and relevant updates to Athena. Of course, this depends on the quality of your network and wireless hardware but in general, a wired ethernet connection to your router, switch, etc for both your ARMA and Athena PC is ideal. This is especially important for you laptop and windows tablet users. Also, do NOT forget about Ink. It's easy to overlook the ugly "I" button the left but if you're playing in a multiplayer session w/ other Athena users, Ink is the killer feature for collaboration during battle. You'll see your ink and the ink of any other Athena user (on your side). Everyone that uses this feature instantly realizes how powerful it is. Now, it's intended for use with an Active Digitizer/Stylus (stylii?) but it works almost as well with iPad capacative stylus's if you have a touchscreen or just a plain mouse. I've tested Athena extensively on my Surface Pro 3 and 4's and the quality of the 'inking' experience is far superior with an actual active digitizer like the one paired with any Surface device. Other than that, please keep in mind this is the first release with the new communications platform, the new map rendering system and a bunch of other changes...it's a beta. Please report any bugs and provide constructive criticism. If you're reporting a bug, please be descriptive about what you were doing, what was going on in ARMA, etc. at the time of ... whatever it is you're reporting :-) To resolve the issue you're experiencing, I'll need as much info as possible. If you have questions, feel free to respond in this thread, to look for skruis or bus on Steam and/or check out the ARMA 3 or Bravo Company Discords. I'm usually lurking about. Thanks! -bus (skruis)

I didn't have a .local/shared in my home folder. I had to create those and then the Arma 3 and Arma 3 - Other Profiles folders and various files populated properly. Also, (i'm a linux newb) .local wasn't appearing via a regular 'ls' - I'm guessing a . preceding the rest of the name for a folder is a quick way of making something 'hidden'. I had to specify the flag for 'ls' that would return hidden files and I had to modify WinSCP to show hidden files as well. Just an FYI. Running on Ubuntu.

Tankbuster, I think you've helped to identify one of the biggest strengths of Athena I've known about but haven't pushed: that it's a great tool for mission makers. There's an additional mod coming out that will make that even better. It's intended for use with server side AAR recording -but- it can also work with Athena Desktop directly. To calm fears that people might use it to cheat, it's signed with a different key that I'm not going to release but it exports 'all' unit data, for all sides. Why that's great for mission makers is that if you've ever wondered "Where are those units?" or "Did the script run and create that fireteam it was supposed to?", running Athena while you're developing and testing your mission gives you that feedback. It'll give you an overview of the entire map and what the AI is doing. Additionally, it's great for mission designers when not paired with ARMA. Imagine you're on your couch watching TV and either your Windows tablet, your touchscreen enabled laptop or even your normal laptop is there with you and you have a spark of an idea. Fire that device up and sketch it out in Athena using Ink. Using Athena with a stylus enabled (active digitizer) device is the best possible combination but you can use 'touch' for ink or you can use an iPad stylus with your touchscreen laptop to get a slightly higher level of precision versus just touch. Athena is such a great tool for mission design and testing. With regards to the release time frame. We're almost feature locked at this point. If my testing goes well, we're days away, not weeks, and I'll be very interested to see how Athena works with your Domi mission.

Nearing the next release and I wanted to share some recently completed work with you. So, 'tracking' has been in Athena since the beginning. The primary feature of Athena was to find your own unit on the map, to follow it as you moved through world and to help you determine your position within the larger operation. That remains the primary focus but what you've known as 'tracking' is now 'following' and an additional mechanism is being introduced under the 'tracking' name. Imagine you're a pilot. You may be a part of a group of pilots, a group of helicopter pilots ferrying units to and from the battlefield. You get a call for extract from an infantry group leader. Traditionally, you would spend some time communicating, getting their location, hashing out an LZ, etc. but now with Athena, you simply open the ORBAT window, find the group in the list and click 'Locate'. The Athena map is instantly panned to the group leader's location so now you can scout around Athena and find a good LZ. You find one and you create what's now referred to as a "Map Anchor". In the ORBAT window, you go to the ANCR tab, you type in "LZ Bravo" and enter the grid (or the specific coordinates if you have them) and click "Add". A "Map Anchor" is placed on the Athena Map and you relay the grid to the group leader and tell him to meet you there. At this point, you would normally go into the ARMA map and perhaps, if the difficulty allowed it, place a waypoint for yourself and that might suffice but with Athena, you can 'track' groups, units and map anchors. When you 'track' a group, unit or an anchor, you're telling Athena: "This is important to me. I want to know where I am relative to this object at all times. I want to know how far I am away from it and I want to know on what bearing I have to travel to get there." Athena understands this and to help you, it draws dashed lines (up to 3, 1 each for a group, unit or anchor) to each of the objects you're tracking. A red line for map anchors. A green line for groups and a blue line for units. The exact distance and bearing are displayed in the lower left but to make it easier for you to ascertain, at a glance, how far you are from your tracking target, the line is 'dashed' and the length of the dashes increases as you move away from your target and decrease as you move closer so again, at a glance, you know where you are relative to the group you're picking up, to the LZ Bravo map anchor you created and to the fellow pilot in your own group flying his own chopper.

So, as of right now, the biggest pet peeve of Athena is importing and exporting maps. I'm happy to say that I've solved that particular problem. All of the work on the new rendering system has paid off, though it still needs some tweaking, and now new worlds will import into Athena automatically. Let's say you're playing on Chernarus and you start Athena. Athena will notify you that you don't have this world and it will offer to import it for you. All you have to do is tell it to 'proceed' and it will launch a series of scripts that export the terrain information (elevations, trees, buildings, barriers, walls, roads, locations, etc.) to Athena while you continue to play ARMA (FPS will be impacted). Once the data is exported, ARMA will continue to run as normal while Athena analyzes the information and turns it into a usable format. When that stage is complete, the world will be loaded in Athena and you'll begin to see the mission data populate (groups, units, etc.). The process takes minutes and apart from asking for your consent, is entirely automatic. In my testing, most maps export within a few minutes. Larger worlds with more complicated geometry, trees and roads (like Chernarus - Chernarus takes the longest) will take longer but on average, it's a fairly quick process. I was able to go through and export all of the CUPS and vanilla terrains within an hour or so. Some users may not want to wait so I will continue to post completed exports to the athenamod.com website however for any worlds that are not posted, users will now have a much easier time using those worlds with Athena. I still have some changes I want to make before I release this version for testing, some have to do with the import and world rendering and some, well, some don't :-) For example, a 'behind the scenes' improvement, well, I guess it's not completely behind the scenes, is that I've overhauled the grid system. It was tied specifically to the ARMA3 vanilla terrains grid systems. In previous versions of ARMA, some of the grids were calculated beginning in the top left of the world so 000000 was in the NW corner but in ARMA3, 000000 is in the SW. As part of the new world import system, I'm now grabbing the world offsets (from where on the map to calculate the grid from), steps (in what direction do the grid counts increase) and centering positions (show the correct part of the world when the map is loaded) and I'm now able to match the 6 digit grid positions on non-ARMA3 vanilla worlds. A good example of a world with an odd grid definition would be Bystrica or "Woodland_ACR" (another small change is that we're pulling the 'descriptive' title of the World and displaying that in the map menu). Most worlds either start their grid systems (000000) in the NW or SW corners. Bystrica's actually starts 30m south of the NW corner so the NW corner is actually 000999 (or something) and 30m south of it, is 000000. I'm sure there's a good reason for that oddity but more importantly, Athena now calculates grid references in a more reliable manner. Another new addition is a change to the upcoming ORBAT window. In addition to providing a list of groups and units for your side (or others if you're playing an AAR recording), it now has a LOCs tab. In this tab are all of the 'locations' for the world. This is very helpful for people like me who either have a poor memory for places or haven't fully explored the world yet. When someone tells you "I'm in Gorka", you can reference the LOCs tab. You can scroll up and down through the alphabetically sorted list to find the location. The LOCs tab will display each location's 6 digit grid reference as well as it's XY coordinates. If you click on a location name (to select it), the "Locate" button will be displayed. Click "Locate" to have the map auto-pan to the Locations ... location. No more scrolling across the map, leering at titles and searching for the one you want. The LOCs tab provides you with a much more user friendly list. This is all well and good but when will you be able to use it? Soon. I have a few minor changes that I want to make before I release the next test version ... and 1 major feature addition. The major feature addition ... it will be difficult to make it perfectly 'fluid' using just hotkeys but pilots will love it and I'm excited to share it with you ... soon.