Shinja

~ About ~ I was bored so decided to make a little rainmeter skin to track the server population on any Jedi Knight 2 or Academy server. JK2 is what I play so the skin was primarily built with that in mind and only later did it occur to me that it'd probably work for stinky JKA servers as well. Please enjoy! The skin makes use of the windows version of netcat to query servers directly. This means master servers can go down and you'll still get info directly from your target server. The skin isn't resource intensive at all so you could probably get away with running many instances of it but I'd recommend keeping it to 1-5 of your favourites. ~ Requirements ~ Tested with Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. Rainmeter 4.3.0.3298 or later. https://www.rainmeter.net/ ~ Skin Operation ~ - Left click skin to cycle through different skin sizes. - Middle click skin to change target JK Server. This will give you the option to select JK2 or JKA, input Server IP and then Port number. - Scroll up/down over the skin to change upper and lower colours. Don't scroll too much or you'll end up opening multiple instances of the RGB selector. - The skin will directly query target server (via ncat) and retrieve updated player list around every half-minute. - To run more instances of this skin just make a copy of the following folder then "Refresh all" in rainmeter. \Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\JK2Status ~ Main Troubleshooting Issues & Netcat ~ What is Netcat? Netcat is a simple networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections using the TCP/IP protocol. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat Netcat and Anti-virus on windows Some Anti-virus products (e.g. windows defender) will report the windows version of netcat as a virus/trojan. This is due to the tendency of hackers to package it in the exploits they use. Netcat isn't a nefarious program in itself but it can be used in a malicious way which is why some anti-virus will block it. My skin of course just uses it to query jk2/jka servers for player info which you can see in the following file... \Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\JK2Status\@Resources\Scripts\jk2getstatus.cmd Please make sure your antivirus doesn't remove and quarantine Netcat (renamed to ncat in my skin) or the skin won't function at all. For the more paranoid out there who think I may have done something to the ncat executable itself, you can see the source I use at the following link and also follow the instructions to compile your own version which is actually pretty straightforward... https://www.rodneybeede.com/security/compile_netcat_on_windows_using_mingw.html ~ Credits ~ jsmorley http://jsmorley.deviantart.com/ (for RainRGB4.exe) Hobbit of Avian Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat (for netcat) ~ Changelog ~ v1.2 -Removed powershell script completely in favour of vbs script -Changed to more CPU efficient version of netcat that actually works properly all of the time v1.1 -Fixed issue where powershell wasn't closing properly for windows 7