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Hailing another bridge using webcams

posted Oct 22, 2012 02:22:13 by JonathanPreston
We play every thursday with 2 or sometimes 3 bridges here, since 2 are permenatly installed rooms that have been re-arranged to fit the Artemis layout nicely. My question is, how hard would it be to get Comms to push a button that would change the main view over to a given webcam address? That way the two (or three?) bridges could speak, especially at the begining or wrap up of a mission. Also great for the annoying "are you ready yet?" yelling between up and downstairs. Currently we have the comms officer on teamspeak, but it would be super awesome to have an actual main screen chat with another ship. I've cross-posted this in the dev section to see if there's any desire to be a feature added, but my main question is has anyone done it? My current thought is for the comm officer to have a HDMI switchbox that would switch the inputs from the viewscreen computer to a computer playing the other bridge's webcam, but that is inelegant for 3 or more bridges. The other thought is to simply have a seperate monitor for cross-ship comms, and give the captian or comms a mute button so it's not blaring all the time, and put all ships in a conference webcam mode. Any thoughts?
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27 replies
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Mike_Substelny said Jan 11, 2013 14:03:00
Drspacemonkey, any chance you could share that script with the rest of us? I have a big Artemis event coming up and I might try it.
"Damn the torpedoes! Four bells, Captain Drayton!"

(Likely actual words of Admiral David Farragut, USN, at the battle of Mobile Bay. Four bells was the signal for the engine room to make full steam ahead).
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SigbiornSigmundarson said Jan 12, 2013 03:17:08
Realizing that you can have a skype or google hangout window running in the backround using the new Windowed fullscreen mode. Just Alt-tab when you want to talk to the other ship.
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Cmdr.Brandr said Jan 14, 2013 13:14:54
The problem with the Alt-tab method is that you sometimes get the dreaded "3D" error which sometimes crashes the program. Drspacemonkey's solution doesn't change the window focus; it merely makes the focused window transparent and thereby avoids the error condition.
Commander Brandr
Commanding Officer of the ship Calamitous Intent

-------------------------------------------------------
Check our crews adventures at http://nerdneerdowells.com
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Cmdr.Brandr said Jan 14, 2013 13:16:19
Which reminds me? Like Mike said, Drspacemonkey can we get a copy of your magic code???
Commander Brandr
Commanding Officer of the ship Calamitous Intent

-------------------------------------------------------
Check our crews adventures at http://nerdneerdowells.com
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SigbiornSigmundarson said Jan 14, 2013 19:32:52
Really??? Hmmm...
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drspacemonkey said Jan 15, 2013 00:27:39
Crap, sorry - forgot to post it.

http://pastebin.com/ApS6F7uy


You'll need to have nircmd.exe (available from http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html) in the same folder as your script. This script gives you two modes:

1) Artemis invisible and muted, microphone on, google+ hangout window sound on
2) Artemis visible and unmuted, microphone muted, google+ hangout window muted

Pressing space toggles between the two. You can also manually switch between them by pressing 1 and 2 on your keyboard. These hotkeys are easy to change.

Setup:

On the computer running your ship's main viewscreen, run your Google+ Hangout in fullscreen mode (press F11 in your browser). Then, run your Artemis game. In 1.6, you'll need to run in Window mode at your screen's native resolution and do a WinKey+left click to activate borderless fullscreen (winkey+right click to switch back). The new fullscreen window mode in 1.7 doesn't need that part.

That's it. Might want to play with it for a few minutes just to make sure that it behaves properly, but you should be good to go. Something to keep in mind is that running this script with AutoHotKey will disable use of your spacebar, 1, and 2 on your keyboard. You can change that with a minor tweak, but I prefer it this way because our comms officer uses a DiNovo mini wireless keyboard hooked up to the computer running our main viewscreen. This way, he or she just has to press the spacebar on the little mini keyboard to switch back and forth.
[Last edited Jan 15, 2013 00:33:14]
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LawsonThompson said Jan 15, 2013 03:49:44
Any chance you have a YouTube video of what this setup looks like in action?
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JonathanPreston said Jan 16, 2013 01:51:11
I'm atempting to run this script, but I'm not sure anything is happening. How do I run this with NirCmd? Do I run it before or after I load Artemis/Chat? What should be happening to tell me it's running? Do I just make the file loadable by NirCmd or do I pass it to the program via command line? Help? :)

-JP
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drspacemonkey said Jan 16, 2013 04:12:17
Troy: I don't have a video, but we have another event happening this weekend. I'll take some video of it then.

JonathanPreston: You don't have to run NirCmd at all - the script will call it automatically when you hit the hotkeys. I should have been more clear - it's a AutoHotkey script, so you'd have to run that script through AutoHotkey. NirCmd should be put in whatever folder you saved the script. If you don't want to install AutoHotkey, you can download and run this version of the script:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2605175/Artemis%20AutoHotkey%20Script.exe

Edit: I don't know why Chrome is tagging that as malware. If you're wary (and understandably so), just install AutoHotkey and run the script instead of the self-contained executable.

Also, this won't work on Windows XP - application-level volume control is needed to mute everything.
[Last edited Jan 16, 2013 04:54:21]
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JonathanPreston said Jan 16, 2013 07:07:11
Yeah, my secondary system is running XP 64bit. The window switching doesn't work so well. (I finally figured the autohotkey part on my own, duh.) It's like it doesn't go transparent for whatever reason. The Artemis screen remains and it looks like artifacting errors or windows merging. Any ideas on resolutions for that issue in XP or XP64? I can figure out a bypass for the mute if I can figure out how to leave the window switch working right. Since this is my 2nd ship (and not the server), maybe a normal alt-tab style thing would be better? Any easy fixes you can think of?

Almost there... !

-JP
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drspacemonkey said Jan 19, 2013 01:00:34
Sorry, I don't even have an XP system to test it on anymore. As for alt+tabbing, you'll still get that directX error every time you switch back to Artemis.

You could try this:

http://pastebin.com/c5evK616

It hides the game window instead of making it transparent. It doesn't cause the popup error on my system, but it also doesn't look quite as smooth.
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matt.schillinger said May 29, 2013 12:48:54
drspacemonkey: Would you mind offering up your AutoHotKey configuration?
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