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Olympus is a program designed and created by a small group of people who love DCS. We felt there are ways of playing DCS that could be more fluid, and involve less use of Lua, and to open up mission making to a greater group of people.
This led to the creation of the Olympus program. A web-based app that does a lot of the thinking for a mission, then simplifies it and tells DCS what to do. Thus removing the mission editor (almost) entirely from the process.
The user interface is key to this experience, and we have done our best to make it clear and fun to use. We have leveraged the conventions many of you may have gotten used to via other real-time strategy games as Olympus does turn DCS into a real-time strategy game. One in which a Game Master can create as complex a mission as they like, however they like, completely on the fly. Using Olympus requires a human to play it "live" like a game master; it is not a tool for pre-game mission creation or planning. However, it will work alongside any premade mission.
| Handle | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Veltro | Project originator and lead programmer |
| El Tonio | Concept originator and programmer |
| Dogma | Upside down UI Wizard |
| Peekaboo | Programmer |
| Wirt | Lua Consultant |
| Woods | Programmer |
| Shredmetal | Legal Eagle |
| Lovo | Dog's Body |
| Jay | Programmer |
If installing Olympus for the first time the process consists of a few simple steps:
- Downloading and installing the manager.
- Updating the manager.
- Adding Olympus to your DCS instance.
- Updating or creating your autoexec.cfg file.
- Setting up optional feature plugins, like the map or SRS integration.
- Close DCS if it is already running.
- Download the Olympus manager from https://github.com/Pax1601/DCSOlympus/releases
- Extract the downloaded file somewhere on your computer, we recommend extracting this into your Documents folder. The folder can be anywhere except for your DCS or DCS - Saved Games folders.
- Open the folder and run the installer.bat file.
- If prompted for a ‘Windows protected your PC’ prompt, click ‘More info’ and ‘Run anyway’.
- The installer will run, this may take some time depending on the speed of your internet connection and if you need to also download and install node.js.
- The Olympus manager should automatically open, if it does not you can open it from the folder you extracted the files into.
- You should get a prompt that you are using an old version of Olympus, click ‘Accept’ to update to the newest version.
- Wait for the update process to finish, this may take some time.
- Click ‘Add Olympus’.
- Follow the onscreen instructions, as appropriate, that will guide you through the install process. If you are unsure what certain aspects are, see the relevant sections in this guide.
- If prompted by Firewall alerts, you will need to click ‘allow access’ to any such prompts. These should be for Electron by Github Inc.
- When installed you’ll see a success message on the screen but don’t start DCS just yet, take note of the ways you can launch Olympus listed here.
- Follow the instructions for ‘Updating your autoexec.cfg’ file if you haven’t done so before.
- Follow the instructions for ‘Starting Olympus’ and enjoy using Olympus; if running locally don’t forget to unpause the mission before it will work.
There are several new aspects of Olympus, which are great features like the SRS radio integration, but do not make sense for local installs or people without specific server setups (such as ones not setup for https). Please read the other sections of the guide for more information on these topics.
There is a video guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y7ZgRrO6Fs&t=258s available here that covers most of this process, ignore the early parts of the video unless updating from a very old version of Olympus 1.0.3 or before which nobody should be on so instead we suggest you go from the time stamp in the link.
If you want to add mods to Olympus, or add back in your mods, follow the instructions in ‘Adding mods to Olympus’
Updating Olympus should be a lot easier this time due to your existing Olympus manager, which should guide you through everything.
If you used custom mods with your Olympus read the appropriate section below on mods as well before starting.
To update Olympus:
- Close DCS, and Olympus if it is already running.
- Locate and run your Olympus Manager.
- You should get a prompt to update the manager if on an old version.
- Click Accept.
- Wait for the update process to finish, this may take some time.
- Follow any onscreen prompts through the process to update your instances.
- If prompted by Firewall alerts, you will need to click ‘allow access’ to any such prompts. These should be for Electron by Github Inc.
- Follow the instructions for ‘Update or create a autoexec.cfg’ to allow mods to work with DCS, if you haven’t done this already.
There are several new aspects of Olympus, which are great features like the SRS radio integration, but do not make sense for local installs or people without specific server setups (such as ones not setup for https). Please read the other sections of the guide for more information on these topics.
DCS update (DCS 2.9.18.12722) introduced a new ‘permission’ system for mods and mission scripts. You can find more info here: https://forum.dcs.world/topic/376636-changes-to-the-behaviour-of-netdostring_in/ in theory this has been reverted but a lot of people still appear to need to do this so we've left the step in.
This will improve security and modularity but by default blocks Olympus and many other similar mods.
To reallow Olympus, follow these steps for every DCS instance you have installed on your system:
- create a text file named Saved Games\DCS\Config\autoexec.cfg. The file extension .cfg is very important, make sure it is correctly set;
- using Notepad or any similar text editor, write this content into autoexec.cfg and save:
if not net then net = {} end
net.allow_unsafe_api = { -- this defines the secure zones where net.dostring_in() can be called from
"userhooks",
}
net.allow_dostring_in = { -- and this defines the zones that should be addressed from net.dostring_in()
"server",
}
That's all! Other mods/scripts may require you to further edit this file. Please refer to their specific instructions, and make sure to only enable the minimum set of permissions required by the mods you use.
After the manager has updated if you haven’t got any installed Olympus versions you will need to ‘Add Olympus’ to DCS.
- If not already open, start the Olympus manager
- Click ‘Add Olympus’.
- Follow through the onscreen instructions.
Either run the Olympus client or server shortcut as appropriate, from shortcuts on your desktop or use the Olympus manager.
- Open the Olympus manager
- Enter ‘Expert mode’ in the top right corner.
- Find the Olympus install you want to launch
- Click Start Olympus and pick start server or start client as needed.
If using it locally, remember to load a mission and unpause it in game before Olympus will work.
Olympus allows you to link up your Olympus map to wherever you are looking currently in DCS from the F11 free view. This can make controlling the battlefield in real time a little easier to manage and see what you are doing when being a game master.
This is an option during Olympus installation so simply install Olympus on your machine following the instructions. You will need to install Olympus locally on your machine for the camera integration even if you want to control the map / camera on a different server.
Olympus 2.0 also allows you to talk on radios, or play sound files, or even over a loudspeaker / PA system attached to certain units.
Installation is done only on the server side, as part of the install process, you can also change the ports if required in the manager, however to work it requires:
- A server side ‘SRS server’ to be running
- A server that is setup to handle https traffic for your Olympus server
The second requirement will likely prevent smaller setups and servers from using this functionality and this is unavoidable due to security requirements.
No, sorry, we’re at best going to link you to this post saying we won’t help. There is a channel in discord called #audio-backend-support where other Olympus users may help / provide advice if you ask nicely. Long term trawling this channel may also help you find others with the same issues.
In simple terms this is nothing to do with Olympus, highly dependent on your setup and if you need to ask for help in how to do this, or will need help troubleshooting it you’re honestly not going to be knowledgeable enough to set it up even with help. People pay good money for people with these types of skills and one of those skills is also sheer bloody mindedness and determination to figure stuff out for yourself.
However, that said, if you do have a dedicated server, some prior technical experience and more importantly that sheer bloody mindedness and determination you should give it ago. Some kind people in discord using a similar setup to you may also be willing to help if you ask nicely and go show you’ve really tried and got close. If you want to read and learn about it yourself start here:
- Read about web servers like https://nginx.org/
- For your type of web server look into ‘reverse proxy’ or ‘proxy managers’
- For https certificates https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/ or read about OpenSSL and self signing certificates
It can be done for free (if you have a server) just as well as if you pay so don’t buy or pay for anything here. But again we’re not going to help you as we need to spend our free time with our families (we really mean creating more features), at least not unless you offer us a ride in your Spitfire, fighter jet or something equally as cool.
To create users or groups, setup your admin password from the manager, then in Olympus go in the settings page, enter the admin mode, and create:
- users on the right side by setting username and password;
- groups on the left side by setting group name and permissions.
The main use for users and groups right now is to ensure people have their own set of user keybinds per person (or user account).
The other reason is to set specific groups with a certain permission level, if you are using some form of alternate login or SSO style solution with Olympus and only want .
There is no reason to use ‘users and groups’ for a local install of Olympus, key binds go under the Game Master role.
Groups are for people using custom SSO style login implementations, you can pass in the http header for login which groups they are part of and they’ll get that groups permissions. Given the permission set within Olympus is very limited currently this is more like ground work for possible cool features we might do in the future. If I had to guess less than 1% of servers will need to use this feature as it currently stands so if you are confused just ignore this.
Users are a tiny bit more useful for people on a shared server, you can set someone's permissions here but the main use case is having a user profile on the server that remembers their custom favourites and keybinds without messing up someone else’s preferences. You don’t assign users to groups which is maybe a tad confusing but you’ve now been told.
You need to restart Olympus before new users and groups will take effect.
We envisage most people will be happy with the custom keybinds and trust people to only use the role they should use appropriately and so don’t need to worry about this page. Again this does nothing of use in a local install.
- Game master - allows you to do anything
- Blue commander - same as game master but only for blue coalition
- Red commander - same as above, but just for red coalition The blue and red views also only see what their respective systems can see, some units won’t fully tell you a type of make or model until one of your units can
If your server has setup users, as above, and doesn’t integrate with an SSO or similar you can Login by role or Login by name at the login page.
Login by role just lets people pick from one of the three role permissions we have, Game Master, Blue or Red commander.
Login by name lets people login as their own user account, setup in the users tab explained earlier that saves their permissions.This will remember user specific keybinds and favourites for that account, so if you do want to change the defaults and not piss off all the other users this is where you login as that once users are setup. Again this is pointless for a local install, all Keybind specifics are saved as Game master.
Olympus now has inbuilt quick guides for how to use it, for example to learn how to move, spawn units, move the map around or use the audio backend:
- Login to Olympus
- Click the ‘?’ symbol in the bottom left corner
- Click on the relevant topic you want to learn more about
Each panel that you expand in Olympus also often has a dedicated ? symbol on it (normally at the top) that you can click on to learn more about that function.
Alternatively hover over an icon and right click to see what it does if it has the ? symbol.
To make the UI more usable with tablets there are often two ways to do the same thing, one is obviously a lot quicker with a keyboard and mouse. We won’t mention everything here as it’s mainly explained by the ? tooltips well just mention the big ones / cool new features.
Most things are done via left and right clicks, or holding the click down. Ctrl, shift and alt can be used as modifiers. You will also get different menus / options or effects depending on what you left and right click, or long press on.
You will find there are many ways to achieve the same effect, it might even seem redundant at first, but the various methods are to cover easy use with:
- Mouse and keyboard - designed for fast easy controls and many shortcut keys
- Mouse only - for when in your simpit, VR, or similar and you can’t use a keyboard but can left and right mouse click, scroll etc
- Tablet mode - when you only have the power of tapping on screen
Obviously, it’s slower and harder to use only a mouse or just a tablet and it requires different design elements. Ultimately one of the bigger changes to the UI was to allow for this to be possible.
You can also now customise the controls and keybinds to change them if you don’t like them, rather coolly this is on a per user basis as well with the info stored on the server in case you disconnect, if you click the cogwheel in the bottom left you can find the keybindings menu.
Check you haven’t accidentally bound something to something new, or different, or worst case reset all the key bindings.
However, sometimes you might find something that normally works with a right click sometimes becomes a left click such as moving a unit about. This might be because you are in tablet mode, having accidentally selected an option in a box on the right hand menu.
Obviously, tablets don’t have a right click so we need this alternate mode / toolbar to help there and it uses a lot of ‘left clicking’ to do everything.
You can select units by clicking on them as before, double left clicking selects all units of that type that are visible.
Shift + left click drag will select a group of units.
Ctrl + left click adds more units to that selection, or deselects them from the current selection.
Unfortunately right now you can’t shift + ctrl drag select to do both but hot groups can help solve that limitation.
As before you can add them to hot groups, for example to add them to hot group 1 use Ctrl + 1, or shift + 1 for a mass addition.
Pressing 1 then selects all of those units assigned to hot group 1.
There is also an option on the left hand menu to mass select certain ‘filtered’ unit selections, like all human planes on the red side; this is particularly handy on a tablet.
The default right click moves units still, or you can use options in the tablet bar on the right or by long left clicking on the map (after selecting a unit).
Holding down ctrl + right click sets multiple waypoints, one after another.
Yes those little pin markers can be moved after the fact if you put one down to adjust the route on the fly, cool eh! Technically it has to reset the whole route, so sometimes you get odd behaviour but it works well enough.
Planes, once they get close enough to the last waypoint, go into orbit mode, as before. The difference is now you can adjust the orbit by moving either of the two circles when it’s in orbit mode. This allows you to adjust the orbit and / or make it into an oval, circle or a long racetrack as you desire.
You can’t adjust the width of the orbit exactly, this is based in DCS on the speed of the aircraft and a few other factors, but basically the faster a plane goes the wider the orbit the graphical representation is our best guess.
If you have more than one unit selected right clicking makes them converge on a single spot.
If you instead hold the right mouse button you can make them hold relative formation to each other. Moving the mouse about in this mode also can rotate the final relative formation about to face other directions. Right click again to make this a command when happy.
This mode also works with ctrl + right press (and move mouse) to set multiple waypoints with rotating relative formations.
You can also use various modes in the tablet bar to achieve similar movement effects, without right click.
Olympus now works fairly well with a tablet, especially for basic / simple movement or attack type commands. It is quite different to using it with a mouse and keyboard and you need to use the tablet bar on the right hand side of the screen for most things. Tablet mode is still not an end design goal for Olympus, we know it has limitations, and we aren’t planning on perfecting it sorry tablet lovers. We basically never use it ourselves for real missions, apart from shouting over the radio for a joke when not home (or secretly chatting with each other), so for us it’s sort of a planned happy accident.
This also means it can REALLY suck on some types of mobile or cellphone with the smaller screens as you can’t see enough or certain UI aspects block the whole view.
Remember when you expand a menu, say the spawn menu, you can minimise it again by tapping on the crossed out eyeball and re expand it again with the sideways arrow. This for example is really useful when spawning units.
Again there are several ways to spawn units.
The first is to click the + sign on the left, and open the spawn menu. From this you can pick sub categories to find the thing you want to spawn be it plane, ground unit etc.
Once you select a particular thing you get more options to customise the unit, such as its heading, livery, skill, role, loadout etc.
You then click on the map where you want it to spawn, if you want more than one keep clicking. To stop spawning stuff close the menu, double left click quickly, or press escape.
The rest of this spawn menu is to make it finding a specific unit easier.
The search box is a pretty obvious useful tool, if you are looking```` for an aircraft, click on the aircraft menu and then type some parts of that aircraft's name and you’ll see the options reduce in real time. You don’t need to hit enter to search, it will refresh the web page. It’s also only a simple search, you can’t use more advanced search tricks like “Su-27 Flanker” | “Mig-28” to only find that unit, just type flan or su-2 and you’ll find it works well enough.
The second cool feature, which is arguably more useful than the search is to click the little tags at the top to show only that type of ‘thing’ for example to see all AWACS type aircraft, click Aircraft and then tap AWACS. If you can’t find what you want, use the mouse wheel to scroll.
Here you can also hit the star to favourite a unit and have it appear in the quick spawn / favourites unit list, you can also give it a reference if you want.
Remember to pick the correct coalition.
Finally, possibly the easiest way to spawn something is to select an existing unit and just use copy and paste via ctrl + c, ctrl + v on the keyboard. This can also be a really useful way to spawn stuff without editing loadouts and user databases which is complicated. Want a specific plane, with a certain livery and weird loadout that isn’t in the pre set options or even in Olympus at all. Just set it up somewhere in the mission editor away from the action, possibly uncontrolled, and copy and paste it as and when needed.
If you prefer the old way to spawn units, or want a faster way to spawn something you can right click on the map.
This brings up the old style spawn menu which works exactly as you’d imagine, though for only one unit at a time, it also will list any favourites you have. If you want to remove a favourite from the list click the cross.
Deleting stuff or how to blow up a lot of stuff quickly like in the video We actually just blew up a load of infantry hidden in the trees at the same time in a line.
You can delete anything selected by pressing delete, or by long left clicking on the unit / units to find the sub menu.
Similarly shift + delete brings up the explosion menu, we used that on a line of infantry for the Napalm in the trees effect.
However, using the left hand spawn menu that persists you can also do multiple explosions, smokes or effects to achieve a similar effect to that in the video in a different manner if you prefer.
You cannot delete placed smokes yet via Olympus so try not to go crazy, they vanish after a default five minute timer.
We have removed the giant static fire effects, I’m not sure why we probably had a good reason. We may add statics in the future but as of yet they are not in Olympus v2 either, I know a lot of you asked for this but we forgot, don’t need it for our missions, and it’s a lot of crap to add / update which scares me.
The best way to make stuff fight is just to get things close to each other with the correct rules of engagement set so they fight each other, e.g. weapons free, radar on so they will detect each other and fight, then simply let them have at it.
Typically if you are doing things in groups of one they are quite good at not all attacking the first thing they see.
If it doesn’t work it’s likely because:
- the ROE and so forth isn’t set correctly
- the options to let them detect each other are off, i.e. radar
- the unit can’t detect the other unit at all e.g. no radar and it is not close enough to be visual.
If you do want to make something attack directly press Z and click on the unit you want to attack or pick from the right hand bar the option and click on the unit to attack. There are many other options and actions you can do too, like bomb, lase, land, refuel, blow up or even follow.
Formation mode has changed quite a bit, select some units press F and click on a unit to get the formation menu to pop up.
You could just press apply and they’ll then do whatever formation you set, or you can pick a preset formation and click apply to have them do that one.
Make the formation closer or looser, or more stacked vertically up or down, with the respective buttons but if you want to get fancy customise the formation yourself by dragging the aircraft around you can also save custom formations to your PC and load them in, great for fancy airshows, Red Arrows eat your heart out.
You can’t do this with other units, like ground units, though the long right press to move can work as a good substitute as long as things are in the correct formation to start with.
Exactly what it says, there are a choice of maps, top right corner.
Map drawings are available on the left menu, you can use this to spawn a bunch of integrated air defences / SAMS, guns etc, within a certain drawn shape. Right now they don’t do anything else but you can guess what these might be used for. You can also use them for just marking areas on a map, like a line of death or no fly zone.
However, and this one is a big one as far as drawings go you can also show drawings from the mission itself, by default this is turned off to not clutter the map but in the bar on the top you can click hide / show mission drawings to toggle them on or off, neat eh!
One of the best features of Olympus that I suspect many people didn’t realise was even there is what we called miss on purpose mode.
It was great for simulating flak boxes, nighttime AAA over Baghdad or having immersive fire around planes that isn’t as mentally accurate as the default DCS AI is, especially in say helicopter missions. No longer is that dude with a rifle able to snipe your pilot from 3 miles away first time every time.
We’ve vastly improved this in Olympus 2.0, though it works in the same way.
Setup a load of neutral units, AAA, flak, infantry etc. and set them to Scenic mode on, and to act as whatever coalition makes sense to shoot at your plane. When people get into range they will start blasting away and you’ll get a very dramatic flak box or AAA defence that isn’t laser accurate.
Scenic AAA mode is as it says, it just shoots into the sky, it looks cool and looks great for a WW2, or Vietnam era, flak box type defence or Baghdad gulf war at night just shoot into the sky type of effect. It’s been tweaked to spread out and look better than before and deal with planes that are more spread out but its just to look cool.
Miss on purpose mode has been heavily changed in how it aims, it works way better, looks way cooler and we’ve fixed most of the small errors that stopped it being quite as cool and dramatic as it should have been. We hope you like it, also on minimum scatter it will very likely hit you now especially if you fly straight and level so we can’t really call it miss on purpose mode anymore, hence the name change. It’s a nice balance between accuracy and not being an instant shot to the face first time everytime, great for really dramatic WW2, Korea or Vietnam style missions with non radar guided AAA and especially fantastic for helicopter missions.
To use the audio backend in DCS Olympus, first make sure you did the following:
- Your Olympus page MUST be served through https
- In your olympus.json file, set a unique WSPort for each Olympus instance you have installed, e.g. 4000, 4001, 4002 and so on
- If you use a reverse proxy like nginx, setup a ws location that points to the audio backend
So if your olympus.json audio section looks like this:
"audio": {
"SRSPort": 5002,
"WSPort": 4000,
"WSEndpoint": "audio"
}
Then in ngnix add a location like this:
location /audio {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4000;
# WebSocket support
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}
This is probably the coolest new Olympus feature by miles, and though talking over the radios is cool and obviously very useful, you might have been able to predict that one was doable. What I hope is that nobody will have guessed that an in-game unit PA or carrier 5MC, blasting out your favourite war movie song from low flying Huey, was on the cards.
If you read the earlier requirements for this and have it setup and working with your server we hope you enjoy this, sorry to everyone else that can’t use it on simpler server setups it’s just not possible to make it work without https (with what we know).
To use this enable the audio interface by clicking the icon at the top allow the web browser to access your microphone and headset, so you can talk and listen, and then go to the radio tab on the left side.
Change the input and output device as appropriate and then hook up your Microphone to whichever radio, or output source, you want, it’s basically connect the dots (or lines). Expand the radio tab to amend more stuff, like the frequency, and click the transmit button to talk.
Alternatively press the relevant shortcut key for that radio to transmit on that frequency or click on the radio icons on the right side, which also light up when someone is talking on that radio.
There are loads of little options, like which ear you want to hear each radio in, or how loud you want the radio or your microphone to be depending on your setup or if you even want to listen to a radio or not. You can even see what frequencies a person is currently tuned to just in case they didn’t listen to the briefing.
The main confusing bit is you need to link up each source to each output by clicking the small + and - signs next to them but play around and you’ll get it quite soon.
You can also do text to speech, though right now the voice isn’t that great, I’m sure you can guess what we’ll use that potentially for in future release (we’ve got several working proof of concepts actually already but they aren’t good enough for wider release sadly yet and need a lot of work).
What is cool is the ‘add audio source’ option. You can use this for a myriad of cool things, which we’ll cover in ‘cool scenario ideas’.
Finally, you can make a unit an audio source, click on a unit and select ‘loudspeakers’.
Then go to the audio panel on the left, where the radios are, and you can transmit to that unit. Everyone within a sensible radius can hear what is going on, the further away they are the quieter it gets. We all know what you’ll use that for but you might not quite realise how many will work well.
The only downside is to hear it a unit needs an intercom in SRS, not all units have an intercom naturally but you can add an intercom to a plane fairly easily in the SRS code (easy if you are a coder anyway) a really easy crude radio can be added by copying the Yak-52 simple intercom into the correct spot for the planes you want. This isn’t something we will help you do however, SRS isn’t our thing, but we’re asking the super cool guy who does SRS to add this to all the planes by default assuming they like this feature as much as we do.
We’ve added a lot of small quality of life things that can let you now operate as a JTAC, FAC, AFAC or similar a lot easier from within Olympus.
You can obviously talk on the radio now, without having to go to another tool like in game or SRS, that hopefully makes things a little slicker.
You can use the new lase and IR marker options to ….mark and lase from a ground unit, along with the existing smoke effects that are now easier to deploy. None of this needs combined arms to work.
You can also add an audio source, such as an mp3 of a battle taking place and gunfire, to constantly play to the radio in a loop at the same time as your Microphone. When you press transmit the other end will hear you talking over the radio with the dramatic ambience going on in the background as if you are really there down on the ground
Combine that with some of the improved simulate firefight stuff and scenic modes and you’re a sure fire contender for ‘best DCS JATC mission of the year’.
Psy op warfare (PA system) aka that bit from Apocalypse now This one's obvious you will need:
- a Huey unit setup as loud speaker (other helicopters are available)
- get your copy of Ride of the Valkyries (other movie soundtrack songs are available)
- Hook that audio source up the Huey
- Wait for someone to ask for PsyOp warfare as they head into the landing zone
- Press play and sit back and enjoy, and maybe sprinkle in some Napalm effects
There are some other cool potential uses for the same type of principal / idea as well like an:
- Air raid siren
- Base PA telling someone to scramble or WW2 style scramble bell
- Ambulance / fire engine siren
- Carrier ship missile brace for impact general quarters style messages
One of the coolest ones is to hook up your Microphone to the loudspeaker an aircraft carrier and shout at people like you are addressing them over the 5MC some things you can do:
- Shout at people who don’t put their googles on
- Shout at people with lights on deck
- Do a cool start em up call
- Tell people on deck to launch certain planes, taxi to a certain catapult if they get confused, fight fires, wrap the waist, rig the barricade, say the ship is turning left or right etc
- Play Shania Twain songs way too loud over the PA as everyone starts up (this is 95% of our actual use case)
Really the world's your oyster.
By default the F-18 doesn't have an intercom so things like 5MC calls on an aircraft carrier will only be heard by things with one, like the Tomcat.
You can add an intercom to any plane in SRS by editing your SRS lua file.
- Find your DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone.lua file, this is likely within Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Services\DCS-SRS\Scripts
- Navigate down to the appropriate part of the file you can do this by searching for the function SR.exportRadioFA18C(_data) to get in the correct space
- Go down til you see the -- AN/ARC-210 -1 radio, around line 4414 in SRS version 2.2.0.5, and insert the following code above this.
_data.radios[1].name = "Intercom"
_data.radios[1].volume = SR.getRadioVolume(0, 358, { 0.0, 1.0 }, false)
_data.radios[1].freq = 100.0
_data.radios[1].modulation = 2
- Save the file and restart DCS and SRS, you'll now have an intercom in the F-18 that works with Olympus, you can adjust the ICS switch in the cockpit as well to make it louder or quieter as desired.
If you want to add an intercom to another plane you do almost the exact same thing for that plane, however if the plane doesn't have a volume controlled ICS switch to adjust the volume you must instead use the following code.
_data.radios[1].freq = 100.0
_data.radios[1].modulation = 2 --Special intercom modulation
_data.radios[1].volume = 1.0
_data.radios[1].volMode = 1
If you want to setup an intercom tied to a volume switch you need to find the correct button for that type of plane and amend this part to have the correct button number instead of 358.
SR.getRadioVolume(0, 358, { 0.0, 1.0 }, false
I am afraid I can't help working out what the button numbers are for other modules you'll need to look them up or work them out yourself. You'll also need to make this change everytime you update SRS unless you can convince the owner of SRS to change it.
This one should be really obvious, you’ve got a nice map, the position of planes, and a thing that tells you where the bullseye is of stuff and / or headings to aircraft. You can even set a plane to be a bullseye reference to make it really easy.
Then just read out picture calls and vector fighters into the fight as you keep the scenario immersive and working with Olympus controlling the enemy.
There’s even an AWACS map mode, though right now all it does is make the background dark, it does a lot more in our next version testing but it’s not close to being ready yet sorry.
Everyone on a boring bit of the mission, going to refuel, spice it up a little and talk to them as if you are the tanker tell them whatever plane they are in isn’t as cool as the other one.
We’ve also improved the tanker menu as much as we can, along with the racetrack orbit you’ll hopefully really like how easy it is now to setup.
ATC is pretty obvious, tell people to land and takeoff without needing another tool, maybe even add in some AI traffic and do the voices or play sound effects or TTS to pretend to be AI talking on the radio.
You can also easily add ATIS to a radio for an airfield by playing an mp3 or TTS on loop, AI can make great ATIS clips maybe this is something we can automate in the future too.
Olympus uses Google's Text to Speech service to generate speech from text. To make this work, you will need to setup a Google Cloud project. Google Cloud projects are not free, you will get billed depending on how many requests you make! Having said that, however, at this time (August 2025) Google has set some thresholds of usage and if you stay below them the service is completely free of charge. From our experience, normal DCS Olympus usage will stay well below such thresholds and you should not be billed. To avoid surprises, we suggest you enable a Budget in your Google Could project and set it to whatever amount you are willing to pay, even if this is 0.
Setting up the Google Cloud is relatively easy:
- Select or create a Google Cloud project here
- Enable billing on your project
- Enable the Google Text to Speech service
- Setup authentication on the machine where Olympus is running
The end result will be that you will have downloaded your Google Cloud credentials .json file on your machine and you will have set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable that points to it. Restart Olympus and you should be good to go!
The UI change is a big one, change is scary and most people don’t like it at first. We were the same,but now we’re used to it we can’t go back. The real reason for the changes though are deep down, we fixed loads of technical debt and issues with the first implementation that were stopping us doing cool stuff and that’s the real secret reason it all changed. It was long term planned to be more like this rather than our initial quick bodge first go. The fact it works for tablets and similar is also mostly a happy accident but partly a driving factor behind it too.
Anyway I hope you soon get used to it and start to prefer it like we do now.
So as you can see LOADS of things that can really add to the immersion of your mission and for those with a good imagination you can see what loads of these things allow us to potentially do in the future. Basically Olympus 2.0 is a huge set of building blocks and changes under the hood to allow us to do really cool future ideas. The only problem is, with limited time, what we work on next.
We love hearing your ideas as well, and then stealing the best ones, so let us know, though at the end of the day we’ll do the things we want to use in our missions first so apologies to those that didn’t get requested features into 2.0.
Since much more people use mods than we anticipated, we have streamlined the handling of mods a bit. The particular issue is that as new modules are released for DCS, the databases need to be updated, meaning that any change made by users need to be written over. To do so, mods are now stored in two separate files: 1) Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Services\Olympus\databases\units\mods.json is the unified database for all mods. It is no longer split by types as it was before. 2) Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Services\Olympus\scripts\mods.lua is the unified DCS lua file for all mods. It contains both mods definition and unitPayloads. mods.json To populate the mods.json file, copy any custom entries you made to your unit databases in v1.0.4 and copy them over in mods.json. The only change you need to make is adding a category entry, which can be either aircraft, helicopter, groundunit, navyunit, like the picture. Notice that the important part to add is category, not type, which should already be there from the previous version and is important for ground and navy units
mods.lua In a similar fashion, to populate the mods.lua file, copy the unitPayloads you added to your unit database in v1.0.4 and paste them over in mods.json. No change is needed here. Remember that if you put the same entry both in the mods.lua and unitPayloads.lua, the latter will "win".
WHY THIS CHANGE? Thanks to this split, whenever Olympus gets updated in the future (e.g. a new module is released) all the other database files will be automatically updated, while mods.json and mods.lua will persist. This way, you won't need to manually change anything when you update.
A copy of your original databases is moved over in /DCS Olympus Backups so you can recover them from there.
Be careful though, if you reinstalled Olympus twice than yes your changes are lost as this backup will be a backup of the last install (which is now modless). We will join you in a minutes silence for your lost mods, just chuck a candle gif in the discord chat or something and we’ll empathise, at least you can be happy that in the future you won’t have to do this again.
No sorry, we honestly barely ever use any mods in our missions and we have little desire to sit down and create 1000s of entries over the course of a month for something we’ll never use.
We do use the A-4 Skyhawk and there is a short guide on how to add this to Olympus below, you can use this as a template to see how you actually go about adding your own mods if you want to customise them. Unfortunately it's very easy to mess up adding mods as a single mis placed , " - / { } can totally break everything but if you are struggling check there are no errors here. Because most troubleshooting for mods involves looking for a single mis placed , in a 10000 lines of text we're not going to help you to do this if you can't get it to work.
That said one of the reasons for this change to the way we do mods is that in the future it may let us make this a lot easier, or even have a repo of mods you can add from users.
The other reason is that naturally people who don’t have the mods, or ability to amend them, might get really confused when instead of a Sopwith Camel a default Su-27 flanker spawns as the mods not present on the server, or worse the server crashes and they then blame Olympus unfairly. If you mod your Olympus at least by doing it yourself you do so at your own knowing risk and can remove the mod if it does go wrong to test things.
Sorry, it just is you need a lot of stuff to spawn a DCS unit, we know loads of you love 1000s of mods, again this is a call to arms to mod pack makers or helpful people to create and share those mod .json file entries. At least this time should be the last time you need to add them, future Olympus updates will keep your mods.
Remember you can just put mods in the mission itself and then copy / paste them, for a lazy way to achieve exactly the same effect, this is 99% what we do.
We have an example Olympus mods.json and mods.lua file edited to include the A-4 Skyhawk mod, you can use this as a template to see how you can edit the files yourself to add other mods.
If you don't have any mods added yourself you can just replace the files with these new files from the Olympus repo docs filder, that include the Skyhawk mod, you can download and save them to your machine from these links below and then selecting in the top right corner click 'Download content'.
mods.lua
https://github.com/Pax1601/DCSOlympus/blob/release-candidate/docs/mods.lua
mods.json
https://github.com/Pax1601/DCSOlympus/blob/release-candidate/docs/mods.json
Once you have these we'll replace your Olympus instance with these files, after backing up the original files naturally in case it goes wrong.
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Navigate to your \Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Services\Olympus\scripts folder.
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Make a backup copy of the mods.lua file, in case this goes wrong.
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Replace the original file with your mods.lua file you downloaded from our Olympus docs repo.
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Navigate to your \Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Services\Olympus\databases\units folder.
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Replace the original file with your mods.json file you downloaded from our Olympus docs repo.
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Open the mods.json file with a text editor like Notepad.
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Refresh Olympus and you should see the A-4 Skyhawk avaliable as a new plane, you shouldn't need to restart Olympus and DCS but if it doesn't work do this too.
If the install goes wrong it's as easy as putting the backups back in place.
NOPE, cool eh!
Do remember though if multiple people are sharing the game master role, it may confuse matters if they change things and you weren't expecting them. This may be a possible issue with detecting Microphone audio input / output.
You can now set these per user and setup Olympus however you want to control it, also cool eh.
This section is a work in progress, right now we didn’t actually have many issues during beta testing. More will come out when this is live I am sure, if you want to report an issue please provide us with logs.
Why can’t I hear sounds from the loudspeaker unit - you may not have an intercom in that plane, the volume turned up enough (on the intercom and on the input, or within SRS itself), check you are transmitting and have connected up all the appropriate lines and the unit might be too far away and naturally check you are on the correct SRS server, and other things work (like the radios).
When in game master slot, or logging in to the game, I hear all the loudspeakers everywhere on the map - Yeah that really sucks, sorry I have no idea why the game master slot location isn’t tied to whatever unit you are in e.g. the carrier or appropriate tank and it’s just how SRS works we’re operating within the limitations of existing systems (which lets face it for free mods are amazing).
Why use SRS and not in the game voice / radio stuff - because the in game radios don’t allow you to connect and transmit to them from outside of DCS yet, we also use SRS in our group not the in game radios (which for us seem to lag the server too much to warrant them being useful)
**I didn’t get the update option when running the Olympus manager ** - You're either on the correct version already, check if it's up to date against the latest release, or we’d recommend uninstalling and totally reinstalling Olympus from scratch.
It might also be a transient problem, like your internet is unable to check against Github, or possibly too many people trying to update / check at once. Wait a bit, restart, and try later.
The Olympus manager can't detect my DCS install - (Steam edition possible error)
If you open the older where the Olympus manager is you will see an options.json file.
You can add to the following additionalDCSInstances section where your DCS Saved Games folder is
{ "mode": "basic", "additionalDCSInstances": [] }
this will end up looking something like
{ "mode": "basic", additionalDCSInstances": ["C:\\user\\name\\saved games\\DCS"] }
Note the double slashes \ are note an error or typo, you need to put them like that for your equivalent file path and each \ you'd normally have.
Re run the manager after saving this change and it should detect the instances.
To uninstall Olympus, simply start the Olympus Manager and uninstall all installed Olympus instances. Then, delete the folder where Olympus was initially extracted, remove any remaining shortcuts and that’s it. If you created any backups for your databases and mods files, they will be preserved in a separate folder named “DCS Olympus backups” and located in the same folder where you extracted Olympus. You can archive or delete these as appropriate.