Something very funky about mission data recording

[Bahger]

Posting this just in case it's something the devs wish to acknowledge and/or fix. I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground with it.

 

In repeatedly testing a .miz I made in the ME, the following always ocurred:

 

- "My Victories" in the debrief screen no longer appears to work.

 

- The mission track system has never, not once, reproduced a mission accurately (thank goodness for Tacview.) I know this is an old issue but it's so egregious that I'm not at all sure what, if anything, the tracks are good for.

 

- Aircraft losses are not reported accurately when pilots eject. In a recent play-through, Blue losses were recorded in the debrief as 0/18, yet an F-15C was shot down by a MiG-23 MLD and, interestingly, an A-10 that strayed into this dogfight was hit by a stray AIM-120. I'm not sure about the two Red a/c that were destroyed (pilots ejected), but Blue lost 2 a/c, neither of which were tagged as "Dead" or as any sort of loss in the debrief.

[NoCarrier]

AFAIK, the developers acknowledged a long time ago that the track recording function doesn't work right most of the time, especially when the mission is long and/or complex. When you compare the size of a DCS track file with the size of a Tacview recording, you'll see that the Tacview recording is larger by about a factor ten. It's obvious that the track file is probably a little too sparse on the data, but I imagine it's very difficult getting that just right. I mean, I'm sure it's relatively easy to dump gigabyte upon gigabyte of data on the harddrive, but then watch the average user play a few missions and wonder where their free harddrive space went.

 

I agree with you that Tacview is an amazing tool, though.

[Bahger]

The tracks are not big files because they are not replays that record missions, they are merely collections of mission input data that, when re-inputted during the playing of a track, rarely produce the same results. It's been like this since LOMAC, despite all efforts by the devs to fix the system, or improve it.

 

What concerns me more is the other examples of iffy data reporting that I have cited. It's one thing for the tracks to be inaccurate, quite another for the debriefs to be as eccentric and unreliable as the tracks. Shot-down aircraft should be accurately reported as losses.

[Dejjvid]

It would be awesome if you could convert TacView files to .trk files.

Perhaps it's possible, I do own TacView but I rarely use it.

[Paganus]

A text log file named debrief.log gets over written with the most recent mission run. It is accurate. Thats what our squad uses. You'll find it in the saved games folder.