ATS/ETS2 Local Radio

[Carmichael]

Hello Koen, first of all thank you for this amazing mod . I do however have a request if possible, Is there anyway you could add a setting to have radio signal all the time ?? Ex while you are in Poland all radios will have max signal not losing it when you go too far a way from a city, or from its broadcasting area.

[Koen]

@Carmichael Nope, that's not possible. I simply do not know which country you're in (the telemetry doesn't tell me that), I only know what city you're near to (and a city is located in a country). You can see how that works when you look at the coverage map (or here)

[Carmichael]

I see, no worries it still remains one of my must have mods . Thank you !

[minamo99]

Hey koen, long time no see! still enjoy your mod, so thanks for that.Just wondering, is this up to date with the latest promods?

Thanks!

[Koen]

@minamo99 Yes it is. It works with the latest ProMods, RusMap. It will also work with the next version of ProMods and with the Italy DLC.

[Alaindor]

Hey Koen, absolutely love your software, it brings a great sense of immersion to the game, and works very well!

Now I have a suggestion for greater immersion: how about coupling the radio playing when the ignition key is turned on? (and turn it off when the engine/electric is off). It should be simple as you can use the ElectricEnabled property of the plugin.

I'm not sure if the ElectricEnabled property from nlhans' plugin works though... which brings me to a second question, why don't you use the dll plugin from funbit? It is actually a fork of nlhans' but corrects some properties, and is used by many truckers as it is the basis for other telemetry skins such as dashboards and Mike Koch's trip advisor. That would avoid having to use two separate dll plugins (I suppose several programs can share the dll since the properties are exposed in shared memory?).

Thanks for your continuous improvement anyway!

[Koen]

@Alaindor Thank you I could do that, I'll add it to the list (though it doesn't have great priority). It's a nice touch.

I used the plugin from nlhans because it was simply documented better, and both work. I only needed the coordinates anyway. ElectricEnabled does work properly on both though.
I actually ditched ETS2 Telemetry Server because it used too much CPU, and decreased the framerate by 5~10fps. Switching is simply not really worth the effort honestly, and having more than one DLL shouldn't be too big of an issue.

Perhaps I'll switch when I start refactoring the code (there's a lot that could be improved), but then, this whole project (from getting the cities' coordinates to displaying the overlay) is one giant hack anyway, so I'm happy as long as it works

PS: I know Mike Koch's trip advisor uses Funbit's plugin, just look at the contributers list

[Alaindor]

Thanks Koen for your detailed answer. I don't know if it's a hack but it works damn well and is a great immersion aid! Btw, is the audio flow html5? I ask this because I wanted to redirect the local radio to another set of speakers using AudioPick extension in Chrome, and it doesn't work (audio is routed on default device). The only thing I can think of is that it's not html5 audio (as the AudioPick extension works well with YouTube for instance).

I didn't realize you were active on the route advisor + maps! A bit off-topic, I still don't understand why map images are not readily available and we have to use a hack-ish way: SCS code must translate maps to GPS images since even user-created maps get converted to the route advisor, I guess the process / code is not available nor documented...

[Koen]

@Alaindor Well, good that it works well. I sometimes forget that most users don't see (or care) about the back-end

The player does use HTML5 audio. There are three invisible audio elements at the top of the page (player, switchStation and whitenoise) that control the audio. I have tried AudioPick, but I could not get it to work either. Perhaps this'll work: https://github.com/audiorouterdev/audio-router

And SCS can do amazing things we sadly can't. @nlhans started working on something like that, but it isn't finished (and probably never will be). Perhaps some day... Though just managing this project is enough for me when it comes to ETS2-related things.

[Alaindor]

Thanks Koen for the link. Tried it and couldn't get it to work... and I don't want to use CheVolume I think it's too expensive for a basic feature Windows should have! (and had in XP). Quick and easy workaround: start ETS2/ATS with default sound to main speakers, alt-tab out and change default sound device, then start Chrome to stream ETS2 local radio on the latter, alt-tab back in ETS2/ATS and all is fine.