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@Pax1601 Pax1601 released this 24 Jul 07:38
· 15 commits to release-candidate since this release
v1.0.4
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Download DCS Olympus v1.0.4 from this link: DCSOlympus_v1.0.4_manager.zip

Important note: the file DCSOlympus_v1.0.4.zip is intended for automatic installation via DCSServerBot and must not be used for manual installation

Quick install instructions

To learn how to install DCS Olympus v1.0.4 please carefully read the instructions here.

The mandatory steps are summarized as follows:

  1. Completely uninstall v1.0.3, depeding on your original installation method as described in section 1.2;
  2. Remove your url reservation using the netsh delete command as described in paragraph 1.2.3;
  3. Download the manager version of DCS Olympus from here DCSOlympus_v1.0.4_manager.zip;
  4. Unzip the file from the step above in your Documents folder;
  5. In the folder you just created, execute the installer.bat file by double-clicking on it;
  6. Follow the manager instructions as described in section 2.4.
  7. Enjoy!

What's new

Olympus Manager

With version v1.0.4 of DCS Olympus comes the new DCS Olympus Manager.

Key features:

  • Install, manage and update DCS Olympus instances via a UI
  • Download and install the latest version with one click
  • Far fewer complicated commands and steps when changing things like ports or passwords

But really the main benefits are all hidden behind the scenes, mostly fixing technical debt, that will soon allow for some great new features, and thanks to the manager easy updates for you to experience them with.

For more details on how the Manager visit the relevant section of the Installation Manual.

What else is new?

So what else is there to be excited for in 1.0.4?
Well we thought you might like:

  • The ability to have DCS maps within Olympus
  • A camera function that snaps DCS’ point of view wherever you are looking in Olympus

New maps generated from DCS

Many of you noticed the differences when using the real-world maps to line things up into DCS. It wasn't just the big issue where some maps don’t match up at all, but also smaller things like not being able to hide a tank behind a building easily because it's only in DCS.

So, we got busy getting the DCS maps out and into Olympus for you. Our automated map exporter tiles and tessalates its way around DCS at many different zoom levels to bring you a fairly seamless DCS map in Olympus. We’ve found the overall experience using these maps is great, especially on maps like the Caucasus.

Live camera control plugin

We’ve also added a camera control plugin which will allow you to move the Olympus map and it will move the DCS map in sync with your movements, after you’ve installed it. (This live moment is turned off by default and is toggleable)

You can do this with the map (F10) or the “live” free camera view (F11), not that you need to press F10 or F11 it can do that for you too. It will zoom in and out and follow you around in game as you move about in Olympus, honestly we think it’s pretty cool and it really makes locating and seeing things just that much easier for game masters.

camera1

Whereas Olympus itself can be run standalone on a server, and anyone connects through to it via a web browser, to use the camera control plugin (even on other servers) you’ll have to install Olympus on your machine as well. We’ve built into that the camera control plugin as an optional extra, you can decide to install it or not from the Olympus manager. [Link to that section of install instructions]

Maps and camera control plugin disclaimers

Here’s the disclaimer for the maps, we’re going to be hosting the maps to start for you and seeing how everyone’s performance is when using them together. If it:

  • runs like crap
  • has some really poor performance during peak times
  • doesn’t work at all for some people (if our servers crash etc)

you’ll just have to deal with that and use the other maps which, let's face it, are still great. There are some cool plans coming soon to explain how server owners can host their own copies of the maps, just for their servers, or if they are really cool for everyone.

Here’s the other disclaimer, though the actual map grabbing code is automatic, it takes ages and ages to run through and create each map even when done by computer. It takes even longer when you factor in stuff like wives turning off PC’s that were just left on, cats urinating onto machines power supplies, power cuts, running out of disk space, not owning all the maps and Tonio’s crappy internet which means:

  • Not every map from DCS is done yet.
  • We’re doing them in the order that we want / think is best.
  • Where we don’t use them we’re doing it by what we think makes sense.
  • We aren’t doing this on maps until we think they warrant it, e.g. we think they are complete enough.

Right now we’ve done five of the big ones:

1. Caucasus
2. Nevada
3. Persian Gulf
4. Syria
5. Marianas

For the camera control plugin disclaimer, we aren’t really sure yet what issues people might find crop up, from our testing it worked really well.

The big one is that to do this onto a server via the internet it is going to need the server to be setup correctly to be https. This is due essentially to how browsers work these days, sensibly requiring secure connections to websites, unfortunately for a lot of community servers running Olympus, especially one’s just from a person's machine, they won’t be set up to be https. Setting up a server to be https is also not really anything to do with Olympus, and there are several ways to do this. So if you want this you’ll have to pester your group's server owner to look into all of this, and pester them to set it up to also work with Olympus.

The other possible problem is with the local client install, despite the install being part of our manager, we are honestly a little worried about it. Mainly this was due to the lack of reported issues with it as it’s almost too good so far. We suspect for those with issues, they are going to be really complicated and go wrong because of custom things you have done. As this is a side part to Olympus, not something needed for it, and it’s likely complex and will involve your server owner heavily (for the https thing) we’re not going to be providing support if it goes wrong, sorry. You’ll need to ask your server owners for help or the community.

Other updates

So obviously we’ve also done some other stuff in Olympus bar just creating these new cool things.

You won’t believe us but the camera control plugin and map creator tool stuff were both side projects that took a few days, the creation of a map takes way longer than making the tool. Most of the time has been spent on what we’d call fixing technical debt from the initial launch and what we learnt, ensuring future updates can be way easier and also faster for you and us in terms of development size (hence the Olympus manager) and just all around behind the scenes stuff prepping for the other cool stuff that is coming ‘soon’ but definitely not in two weeks plus visible and non visible bugs / fixes.

If you are after a bug fix list, or a feature change list we forgot, and we also can’t be bothered to do one given our small team. Vote, comment, react on the discords ‘bug lists’ for things if they are still present for you in 1.0.4 as we use those to judge what is a priority for people and you’ll see we did fix loads as well as add in some missing, and new unit types etc.

The actual cool bits that we think you’ll care about are:

Kola and Afghanistan map

The Kola and Afghanistan maps are out and so we’ve integrated them along the other DCS maps so you don’t have to manually go there to use them with Olympus. It should also hopefully nicely work with the camera control plugin but both are definitely still work in progress so we don’t have plans to create map tiles for them until those are finished.

Set skill level at spawn

Being able to adjust the skill of the units you spawned in through Olympus was requested by quite a few people who suck at dogfighting, yeah I said it! :)

Possibly also because it’s a fairly sensible thing to add into the menu as an option you can now tweak it if you so wish before spawning.

Clicking on the Faction / Liveries / Skill Level Options arrow will expand the menu with advanced
spawn options for the unit. These consist of:

  • Country of Origin
  • Livery
  • Skill Level as:
  1. Average - Rookie
  2. Good - Trained
  3. High - Veteran
  4. Excellent - Ace

Air units spawn by default with the skill level of Excellent and for ground High which was what we found worked best in Olympus.

Warning: we suggest you don’t change the default skill level, this is a setting you think you might want but in reality possibly you don’t. AI skill level comes with built in things like detection ranges coded in, you’ll find where AI doesn’t detect anything they probably won’t act in the manner that makes sense and, especially for planes, really don’t react to things at all. It could feel like Olympus is ‘broken’ but really it’s just the skill level you picked and it’s better to accept a tiny change in how good the AI is at BFM versus nothing working. You’ve been warned, if you post a ‘this thing isn’t reacting in Olympus’ post without saying they are on default skill values we know you didn’t read this disclaimer not to mess with it. It’s already hard enough to make the AI do what we want, don’t make it harder for yourself.

Olympus creator top tips: If you want easier dogfights and to make planes less lethal but still react interestingly in your missions, set them to weapons hold and no reaction and tell them to follow behind a player, the maneuvering isn’t that bad. Set them weapons free when you think it’s time to stop playing with them and re issue the attack order. For AAA, or tanks / infantry that are too DCS laser perfectly accurate, we think creating neutral units and setting them to use the Olympus ‘shoot AAA’ commands is far better, especially for helicopters. On max settings they’ll often hit, or get close to, players who are flying in a predictable manner with a much more realistic reaction time and for everyone else who doesn’t fly like an idiot wanting to die they’ll get a great experience without being 1 hit sniped out of the cockpit from behind a tree.

Spawn history

Instead of configuring the spawn menu every time you want to spawn a unit, DCS Olympus’ spawn menu keeps a spawn history of each item spawned through it - though not if copy-and-pasted. When spawning the same unit, you can switch to the spawn history and then spawn the unit from there. The list is ordered with the most recent spawns at the top, so when you spawn something again, it will move to the top once more.

Fewer compatibility issues - mods and scripts

Though our normal disclaimer still applies that we can’t support issues where certain mods, missions, other scripts or mission / campaign live creation tools might not work we’ve been able to amend a few core things to make these less likely to occur which is really cool going forward. Especially given that the actual issues we saw here weren’t issues with Olympus, especially where mods were concerned.

The big one being an update to MIST which should solve hopefully a few of the niche script issues that were around payloads.

The future and what comes next

Part of our design philosophy is to try and not tell anyone when anything is coming next and instead to just dump it on you and hopefully, as a result, pleasantly surprise you without hyping it up for 5 years.

With that in mind, we’re going to be very tight lipped about what cool stuff is coming next, as always we’ll think you’ll love it. We will give you just one tiny little sneak peak behind the scenes as a reward for reading this far as lot of the core changes in 1.0.4 are making us able to work toward this rather nice, and quite different, UI shot I’ve just taken from a tablet.

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What's Changed

New Contributors

Contributors

Dahlgren, LethalsLoaded, and 6 other contributors
Assets 4
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