ZDPS - Damage Meter And Companion Tool

ZDPS is a Damage Meter and Companion Tool for Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. It's built on modern frameworks, making it fast and efficient at performing the role of a DPS Meter. It however also packs a lot of additional features in it such as complete Encounter History, Module Optimizer, Log Reporting, Field Boss/Magical Creature Spawn Tracking, Cooldown Tracking, and more.

Getting Started

If you encounter issues, or have questions/feedback, the BPSR Devs Discord is available to join.

Prerequisites

Before ZDPS will run, you first must have Npcap installed. It can be found at https://npcap.com.

• Download and run the Npcap 1.85 installer for Windows file. If a newer version is available it will work as well.

If the game was already running when Npcap was installed, you will need to restart it.

ZDPS is built on .NET 9 and requires it to be installed. If you do not have it installed already, head over to the Microsoft website here. Download and install the .NET Desktop Runtime 9.X.X for x64.

• Note: This not the SDK, or other "Runtime" versions on the site.
• If you fail to install this before running ZDPS you will recieve a popup on launch prompting you to download it before it can be run.

Installing ZDPS

1. Download the latest release of ZDPS by heading over to the Releases section and downloading the latest ZDPS - Damage Meter.zip
   • You do not want to download the files named "Source Code" as those are just raw files for developers.
2. Once downloaded, extract the contents of the ZIP to a location of your choice.
   • Extracting into "Program Files" should be avoided as security permissions are far more strict there and can cause problems.
3. Once everything is extracted, run BPSR-ZDPS.exe
   • There is no actual installer for ZDPS, this is the entire application itself. It is entirely portable.

Features

ZDPS has a very rich feature set which goes beyond what typical DPS Meters support but remains incredibly fast and memory efficient the entire time.

Note

You can also run both Standalone and Steam game clients at the same time without causing data issues (you will need to specify which client to collect data from in the Settings menu).

When running ZDPS, Encounters are automatically split by "Phases." This means there's no need to remember to manually start new Encounters from a button, Keybind, or setup arbitrary "timeouts." As you clear dungeons, the mobbing/trash phase and the Boss phase will be automatically split into new Encounters to let you track each step without needing to remember to do anything. This applies to all content you do including Raids, Stimen Vault, Events, etc. If you happen to have a party wipe that will have the Encounter split automatically too!

Of course if you wish to do manual splitting a button exists at the top of the ZDPS window as well as a Keybind you can setup in the Settings menu.

If you want to see the metrics of a past Encounter, you can always open up the Encounter History window at any time, even if you've closed ZDPS before but wanted to check an Encounter from the prior day. All of the Encounters you take part in are automatically stored in a local database ready for your immediate viewing.

We also know sometimes you look away or go to another application while sitting in a queue. Or you're waiting on your party leader to enter a raid but it's taking a while and you go into another application. ZDPS supports playing alert notification sounds when queues pop and are waiting for you to accept them. You'll never miss a queue again! You can also have a sound play when a Ready Check is performed. Both of these have a default sound effect but you can specify your own custom MP3 or WAV file along with setting if it should loop or not.

Group content is a big part of Blue Protocol, as such, ZDPS supports sending automatic reports of your Encounters to a Discord channel of your choice. All you need to provide is the Webhook URL for the channel and you're good to go. If you're worried about multiple users sending the same report at once, ZDPS supports a Deduplication option to ensure only a single report is sent even when multiple players are running ZDPS in the same group.

ZDPS also has it's own Module Optimizer that runs incredibly fast without any GPU Hardware Acceleration needed. You can now find the module combination that meets your stat priority preferences within seconds (or even less than a second it's so fast on modern CPUs).

There is also integration support for third-party services to help provide a more complete experience. The current one supported at launch is BPTimer. You have the option to enable support in the Settings menu to allow viewing Field Boss and Magical Creatures spawns directly inside ZDPS. There is also the option to allow reporting data for those monsters back to BPTimer.com to help in the crowd sourced data efforts.

Many windows feature a number of buttons in the top right on their title bar. While some are unique to the window, the most common ones you will find are a Thumbtack for Pin Window As Top Most to make sure it remains above any other application/window, and Two Arrows for Collapse To Content which hides most of the "options" related elements of the window and leaves just the meaningful content visible. If you're ever unsure of what one of the buttons does, mouse over it and there is likely a tooltip telling you what it does.

Important

ZDPS does not send any web requests or data to any services automatically. Any web requests or data you want to send must first be enabled in the Settings menu. As such, it is strongly recommended to first go through the Settings menu when first using ZDPS to ensure you have configured it to your liking.

This includes checking for updates.

For a more detailed breakdown of individual features in ZDPS, please see below:

Most features including Settings are accessed from the "Cog Wheel" icon in the top right corner of ZDPS. This is called the "Features menu."

Meters

There are 4 default meters: DPS, Healing, Tanking, and NPC Taken. Each of these meters displays realtime metrics about their relevant filters.

• Entries are formatted with the Position, Class Icon (if enabled), Character Name, Profession/Spec Name, Ability Score, Active Per Second Value, and Total Value (Damage Done/Healing Done/Damage Taken).
• Support for entirely custom meters is planned for the future.

Encounter History Browser

Accessed from Encounter History on the Features menu.

ZDPS stores the complete Encounter state history in a local database for any Encounter you take part in. Every single Encounter can be viewed on a detailed individual basis or Encounters can be grouped together into "Battles" which merge Wipes and Phases together for a single holistic view.

Clicking on any Entity in the Historical Encounter allows you to open the Entity Inspector to that saved state. Additionally, you can filter what entities are displayed by right-clicking anywhere in the list and specifying the filter you want to use.

Entity Inspector

Accessed from clicking an Entity in any Meter or Historical report.

Any Entity (Players and NPCs) can be clicked on in the Meters or Encounter History to get a detailed breakdown of everything they did in the selected Encounter.

Note

By checking the Persistent Tracking box the window will continue to follow the selected Entity across multiple encounters so data is always the latest for them.

The details included in this window the following and more:

• Name / UID / Level / Ability Score
• Profession / Profession Specialization
• HP / Max HP
• Attack, Strength, Endurance, Armor, Crit, Haste, Luck, Mastery, Versatility, Block (These are primarily only for your own player but can also appear for others).
• Encounter specific metrics such as Total Damage, Total DPS, Total Shield Break, Total Hit Count, Total Crit Rate, Total Lucky Rate, Total Crit Count, and more.
• Damage, Healing, Taken skill tabs.
• A complete list of every skill cast with the Name, Total Damage (or Healing) dealt, DPS (or HPS) dealt, Number of Hits, Crit Rate, Average Damage/Healing Per Hit, and the Total % of Damage/Healing it did compared to the other skills the entity used.
• An indicator of what skill dealt the killing blow to the entity.
• All Attributes of the entity.
• Complete list of all Buffs that impacted the entity with indicators if they were Buffs, Debuffs, or Shields.
• Graphs for displaying Total Damage Over Time, Damage Per Second Over Time, and Hits By Source.

Database Manager

Accessed from Database Manager on then Features menu.

Since ZDPS features a local database, being able to manage how much content is stored in it is important. This allows direct realtime manual management of how much is actively in it. The Settings menu has options to allow automatic management of it though if you don't want to deal with manually clearing old data.

• Note that while deleting all Encounters are possible, it is often times not needed thanks to the database compression that allows thousands of Encounters to be stored with minimal impact on system storagfe.

Raid Manager

To assist with Raid (Group) content, ZDPS has features tailored to those experiences.

Cooldown Priority Tracker

Accessed from Cooldown Priority Tracker in the Raid Manager on the Features menu.

One of the group gameplay features is the Cooldown Priority Tracker. This allows you to specify a list of players (or NPCs) you wish to track and what skill casts you want to watch for. This can help organize what order players should use a utility skill like Airona or Tina - making it much easier to ensure the correct player uses their tools without the need for callouts.

This screenshot shows adding an entity by their name (in this case it's a character), and adding the Airona Battle Imagine (named "Arcane! Blessing of Life") to the tracker with a 150 second cooldown time.

When using the Cooldown Priority Tracker there are a few steps to follow first:

1. Open the Add Tracked Entity menu.
2. Type in the Name or UID of the Entity you want to track casts for.
3. Click on the Green Plus to add the Entity, or the Red Minus to remove them.
4. Open the Add Tracked Skill menu.
5. Type in the Name or Skill Id of the Skill you want to track being cast.
6. Type in the Cooldown time, in milliseconds, for the selected skill.
   • It is suggested to use the base highest cooldown time for skills rather than the lowest to ensure it accurately reflects for players with lower tier Battle Imagines.
7. Click Add Skill To Tracker.

Note

When adding Skills, the names used are the same as displayed in-game. If multiple results for the same name appear, you likely want to use the lower Skill Id version. In the screenshot above, Skill Id 3920 is the actual Skill Cast for the Airona Battle Imagine. For Tina the Skill Id would be 3921.

In the actual Entity list at the top, you can freely change the order of Entities, giving them your priority cast order. Such as which player should cast Airona first in the event of a death.

Above is a screenshot showing the window given some transparency via the Settings menu, Pinned on top of the Game, and making use of the Collapse To Content button on the top bar.

Benchmark

Accessed from Benchmark on the Features menu.

Optimizing ones own rotation is a constant process. With the ability to define set Benchmark periods, you can perform consistent checks to see how much damage you can deal in a fixed time period and compare that with other players.

Integrations Support

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance has a number of community driven efforts. In order to support those, ZDPS can integrate with them to provide a richer experience.

BPTimer Integration

Accessed from BPTimer in Integrations on the Features menu.

Note

BPTimer Integration, like most integrations, must first be enabled in the Settings menu before it can be used.

With the BPTimer integration you are able to view Field Boss and Magical Creature spawns directly inside of ZDPS. You also have the ability to help contribute to that crowd sourced dataset.

In the Spawn Tracker, you can select what game region you want data for in addition to specifying what monsters to track and how many lines to show at once for each monster. If you wish to change the scale of the text or lines, settings for those can be found in the Settings > Integrations menu.

Tip

If you find your connection to BPTimer.com to be interrupted and the Spawn Tracker does not automatically reconnect, try closing and opening the window again. If it is still a problem, click on the "Server" icon on the top of the menu bar to force a reconnection.

Like a number of other windows, you can pin this as top most, making it always be above other windows by clicking the "Thumbtack" icon. Additionally, it also supports the "Collapse To Content" feature, hiding the top options panel and leaving it just as a list of tracked spawns.

If you run into a monster which is already dead, but the tracker shows it as "Unknown" (or simply not already dead), you can right-click the Line for it and perform a manual report of the monster being dead. This helps keep the data on BPTimer accurate and all users benefit from accurate state reporting.

Module Optimizer

Accessed from Module Optimizer on the Features menu.

Directly within ZDPS you can load up your inventory of Modules and within seconds find the best combinations based on your stat priority preferences to get the most out of your Modules.

• It really is fast! With nearly 1000 Modules ZDPS can find your results within seconds on a modern CPU. No GPU acceleration (like Nvidia CUDA) is needed to have incredibly fast times thanks to our CPU AVX2 optimized code.

How To Use Module Optimizer

To get results immediately, using the tool is very straight forward.

1. With ZDPS running, log into your character, teleport to a new zone, or change Lines.
   • This will update your Module Inventory in ZDPS and save it to a local file so it can be used again without even having the game running.
2. Open the Module Optimizer if it is not already open.
3. Add any Stat Priorties you want for your build.
   • If you have a specific Stat that needs to be at least a specific level, enter it into the text box for that Stat. Such as 20 for Armor to ensure results given have that stat at 20 (or higher). If your requirement cannot be met, no result will be returned.
     • Values here can range between 0 (meaing it can be anything) and go up to 20 (or higher if you really wanted to but it's unlikely you would have a match then). Keep in mind these are the values, not the Breakpoint Levels (lvl 1-6).
   • You can use the Up and Down arrows on the left of each Stat Priority entry to shift their importance. Priorties closer to the top are weighted to be more valuable than those closer to the bottom of your list.
4. Click the Calculate button at the bottom.
5. Browse your results.
   • The Top 10 results found based on your inventory contents and Stat Priorties will be shown.

If you wish to share your Stat Priorty list with other users, navigate over to the Settings tab within the window. Here you can copy your Preset Share Code for sending to others/posting online. Additionally, you can paste in a Preset Share Code from other users to instantly apply their setup to your window.

Note

You can also change the Link Level Boosts for the calculations in the lower part of the Settings menu. The changes here ARE NOT included in a Preset Share Code. Be mindful of this when sharing/using Preset Share Codes to ensure you are getting the expected results.

Tip

In the Settings menu for the Module Optimizer is a setting named Include All Stats In Scoring. By having this enabled (default), any stats not in your Stat Priority list are still scored and given value when calculating your best module combination. If you were to disable this setting (not recommended) then any stat not in your list would essentially be considered "worthless" and when you calculate your combination, the results will be different.

Important

The calculation phase of the Module Optimizer is entirely CPU based and will use a significant amount of your CPU while the calculations are being performed. Once they are done, it will go back to barely using your CPU resources at all.

Matchmaking Alert Notification Sounds

Accessed from Matchmaking tab in Settings.

Settings Menu

Accessed from Settings on the Features menu.

ZDPS supports a wide variety of settings. Most of these can be found in the dedicated Settings menu, though some windows may also contain their own smaller set of specific settings either in their own Settings tab or various other menus such as a right-click menu.

Below will be descriptions for some, but not all, of the settings contained within this menu. It's strongly encouraged to go through the menu to see all that is offered as of the latest version. Many items within ZDPS also have tooltips to provide further clarification as well.

Note

Settings are applied only when Save is clicked. They are not applied in realtime.

General Tab

Network Device

ZDPS will attempt to select the most likely network device on your machine as the deault selection to capture game data from. However, if you find no data appears in ZDPS, you may need to come here and change the selection.

Game Capture Preference

By default, ZDPS captures game data from the automatically detected running game process. However, some users may decide to run multiple version of the game at once (Standalone and Steam). In these cases, you will want to change this setting to be for the specific version you want to actually capture the data of. Otherwise both clients will send their data to ZDPS and result in incorrect data reporting.

Keybinds

ZDPS supports setting Keybindings for specific features.

Important

Since the game itself runs as Administrator in order for your key presses to be seen by another application such as ZDPS (while the game is in focus), you need to run ZDPS as Administrator too. If you do not, your Keybinds will only work while the game is not in focus.

Currently you are able to set a Keybinding for Encounter Reset and Pinned Window Clickthrough.

As can be seen in the above screenshot of the Settings menu, the Encounter Reset Keybind (and button) are typically going to be unnessecary for ZDPS users as the tool is capable of detecting your Encounter states and splitting them automatically for you, including when you wipe.

In order to take advantage of having a window pinned on your screen, but interacting with the content behind it, you will want to setup a binding for Pinned Window Clickthrough. When you press this Keybind, any window which is Pinned will stop registering your input for it. To help identify when this mode is active, the Pin button will turn Red if Clickthrough is currently active. Otherwise it will be a white/grey color depending on Pinned state.

Combat

Normalize Meter Contribution Bars

• Having this enabled will present a familiar style of DPS bar filling. Where the bar for each player is their contribution percentage out of 100%. If this is disabled, the bars will fill their contribution amount to have a combined total of 100% instead.

Use Short Width Number Formatting

• This will keep the numbers displayed a short and consistent width, avoiding values being shifted around in relation to other entries, making it easier to directly compare vertically stacked numbers.

Use Automatic Wipe Detection

• This is one of the special features in ZDPS where it watches for player and boss states to determine when a party wipe has occurred and when found, splits your Encounter automatically for you. This is a setting should that should pretty much always be enabled.

Skip Teleport State Check In Automatic Wipe Detection

• This should very rarely ever be enabled. It exists primarily for reporting a wipe in very specific content that does not perform a "teleport" animation for the player when they are respawned. These instances are almost exclusively just Guild Hunts.

Split Encounters On New Phases

• This is perhaps one of the biggest strengths of ZDPS. While this is enabled, you never have to worry about manually splitting an Encounter again, or thinking about how long to set an arbitrary combat timeout timer. ZDPS watches for what objectives are happening in an Encounter, such as a dungeon or raid, and automatically will split your Encounters for you when it detects you've changed phases.
  • This also means for Raid Bosses with multiple phases each one is split up. For example:
    • Ice Dragon contains 3 Phases, initially fighting the boss, transitioning to the Ice Spear Pathways, and returning to the proper arena to finish the fight.
    • Void Dragon contains only 1 Phase, which is the entire fight including going through the Dimension Banishment.
    • Light Dragon contains 3 Phases, the initial fight, the crystal platforms, and returning to finish the fight.

Display True Per Second Values In Meters

• Most DPS Meters, including ZDPS, report the "active" Per Second Values of a fight. However, this means during downtime the DPS number is not actively dropping. For those that wish to see the true realtime DPS values, turning on this setting will display an additional field during combat that contains the actual DPS as it rises and falls every second. Both the "active" and "true" values are accurate but are different measurements of the data.

User Interface

Color Class Icons By Role Type

• Class icons in the Meters can be either colored by their role (Tank/Healer/DPS) or white like the rest of the text.

Show Skill Icons In Details

• Skills can be hard to figure out just by their names for classes you don't play. With this setting enabled the icon for the skill will be shown next to it, making it easier to identify what the skill is.

Only Show Damage Contributors In Meters

• By default, ZDPS will show all nearby entities in the Meters UI even if they never perform a single attack. If this is enabled, the entities will need to perform an attack to show up.
  • Even if an entity does not appear in the meter because it did not attack, they are still being tracked in the Encounter data.

Pinned (Top Most) Window Opacities

• In here you can set how transparent you want a pinned window to be.

Window Scales

• In here you can change various scales for different windows. Not all windows support being scaled and some may have more options than others. These settings are typically useful for 2K and 4K resolution users.

Matchmaking

ZDPS has the ability to play alert notification sounds when specific events are triggered. Alerts support changing their individual volume levels and looping the sound file until the event times out or you respond to it.

Play Notification Sound On Matchmake

• When a matchmaking (or Challenge) queue pop occurs, an alert sound can be played on your system to let you know it happened without the game being in focus or even visible.

Player Notification Sound On Ready Check

• When a party leader performs a Ready Check, you can setup a sound to play even without the game in focus or visible. This can help make sure you're aware of it and respond to it before it disappears.

Note

If you do not want to change the volume level in ZDPS, you can use the Windows Volume Mixer to adjust the ZDPS volume - changing all sounds it plays at once. This however is not the recommended way of adjusting them.

Integrations

ZDPS supports integrating with third-party services. In this menu you can control which ones are specifically enabled.

Save Encounter Report To File

• This specific setting isn't actually tied to any particular third-party service but is part of the local integration feature. When it's enabled, it'll save your Encounter Report to a local file in a Reports sub-directory as a PNG.
  • Even if other Report integrations are disabled, this will still write the Encounter Report file for you, as long as this setting is enabled.

Minimum Player Count To Create Report

• This setting is useful for when running solo content or when you only care about creating reports for specific player sizes such as 12 and 20 player raids.
  • Bots are considered part of this count when running content in 'Challenge' mode.

ZDPS Report Webhooks

Reports are able to be sent automatically to Webhooks of your choice. This is most commonly done via Discord Webhooks but a completely custom Webhook is also supported.

Webhook Mode

• By default the Discord Webhook mode it selected. This allows you to enter in a Discord Webhook for a specific channel and automatically send your Encounter Reports to it. However, if multiple users in your Encounter are running ZDPS with this setting, each user will send a report - resulting in duplicate messages.
  • To avoid duplicate messages, using the Discord Deduplication mode is suggested. This will first send a web request to the selected web server (defaulting to a ZDPS server), that determines if your request is allowed to be sent to Discord or if someone else has already reported that Encounter within the past few seconds. The message sent to Discord is ultimately coming from your own PC.
  • Fallback Discord Deduplication (Not Recommended) is another setting which is no longer supported by the current ZDPS web server. When this is used, your entire Encounter Report is sent off to the Deduplication Server and if it's allowed to be sent to Discord, the server itself would send the message rather than your own PC.
  • Custom URL is how you can send your Encounter Report to any arbitrary server you want and let it perform whatever actions it is setup for. This is likely not an option most users will want to use as the data sent is currently the same as the Discord messages and not something intended for third-party services to process at this time.
    • An option to send raw data consumable by a third-party service is planned to be added later.

BPTimer

As mentioned already, BPTimer is one of the launch Integrations for ZDPS. In this section you can configure if it is enabled and if so, what parts of it are functional.

BPTimer Enabled

• This setting alone just enables the BPTimer Integration feature - allowing the Spawn Tracker to be used, but you will not be reporting any data to help it.

Include Own Character Data In Report

• By default, your Character UID is not included in Reports sent to BPTimer. With this enabled, it will be sent. As it's currently optional to include, the setting is purely a choice for if you want to contribute that back to BPTimer or not.

BPTimer Field Boss HP Reports

• This setting allows your client to send data to BPTimer for helping crowd source the Field Boss and Magical Creature line status'. It is recommended that if you enable BPTimer that you also enable this to help the crowd sourcing data efforts.

Development

Most of the settings in this menu should be ignored by regular users. However, there is one noteworthy setting.

Write Debug Log To File

• Having this enabled (default), allows ZDPS to write a log file named ZDPS_Log.txt to the directory of ZDPS. This is important to supply when submitting bug reports or requesting help with an issue.
  • Running ZDPS while a ZDPS_Log.txt already exists will rename the last one to being ZDPS_log_last_run.txt. This can be useful for ensuring you provide the correct log, and gives a chance to avoid losing a potentially important debug log file.

Additional Notes

ZDPS was internally developed for the Harmony guild before growing into a large scale project and public release. Special thanks to all of the Harmony members who helped with testing and providing feedback during the ZDPS initial development.

Harmony guild representing ZDPS in the only way they know how.