Editing or Shortening Trk file ????

I have a Trk file (29mb) from a 6 hour series of flights involving 5 different A/C. All was good until the last 3 minutes when I was re-arming on the carrier. All I want to salvage is those last 3 minutes.

Is there any way to somehow reduce this (either trk or a resulting video) to view. I don't want to spend 2 hours on hi-speed to get to that point or generate a HUGE video.

Appreciate any help...

I really don't think it's possible, sorry.

From what I understand of the DCS 'track record/playback' mechanism there is no way to skip ahead or chop off the beginning.

During playback the state of the the DCS 'world' at any given moment is merely the product of all 'actions' and 'inputs' since the 'beginning of time'.

It would be nice to have a 'reset track' feature (applicable both to playback of a track and recording of a track during 'live' play) to record the state of all entities at that moment in time and make it the new 'beginning of time' (thus discarding the previous track history up to that point).

Incidentally, running a 6 hour track at x10 time acceleration should take about 36 minutes. Set an alarm and go read a book? :)

(I can't remember, what's the maximum acceleration rate? x15? That would only take 4 minutes to playback a 6 hour track.)

You may be able to do that manually and unofficially, I'm looking into it, it appears if I move the ending ... err header because you want the the ending, but it's going to take some time figuring out how long the header is in HEX exactly, and then to do some tests to see how much filesize does one minute take and that can be quite a big trial and error to hit your 3 minute mark, because it depends how many buttons/actions you press/do, I can only simulate it roughly/average but it's probably easier and faster to just eye-ball it, and then to test it, standby.

EDIT: Heh, oops, if the subsequent actions depend on the previous ones ... it wouldn't make sense, but I don't know, I'm going to try it anyway.

I have successfully shortened the ending of a test track, repeatable, no crash, however trying to shorten the beginning may be a different story because what looks like to be the header keeps changing and the patterns are a bit trickier there.

Too late today, report tomorrow. Please send your track.

I stand happy and ready to be corrected but I will be incredibly surprised if you find it possible to cut out sections of a track file and have it still be a true and valid representation of the original history.

Cutting short a 'story' by trimming off the end is fine because it in no way effects the integrity of the story.

Cutting off anything at the beginning or middle will corrupt the 'history' of events.

Simplified example of what I mean:

INITIAL: start at grid reference 4,4. Facing 'up/North' towards grid ref 4,5.

STEP: move forward 3

STEP: turn right 90 degrees

STEP: move forward 5

STEP: move backwards 1

END: (final position is grid ref 8,7. Facing right/East)

If you remove 'INITIAL' then you've lost all context of where you started from, so all following STEPs are meaningless.

If you remove any STEPs then you corrupt the history of events and the final position will no longer match the original series of events.

Oh yes yes, I forgot to add, not so fast, it just didn't crash, but if there's any bugs that I cannot guarantee, the debriefing info in the end may not be correct, I do not know.

I have seen replays do things I never did myself first hand before, but it was 1-2 years ago, things may have improved now.

The thing is, it was a fluke really, I probably spoke too soon, good thing that the actions file is not actually CPU instructions as we might have assumed, it doesn't have recognizable ASM code, so it's a lot more simpler, but happens to be in hex aka binary.

The track file is a "PK.." file, it's a renamed ZIP. There seems to be a lot more metadata to a track needed such as options, the mission it self, and other things that are packed into a zipped track package, the modifications I was doing pertain to the extensionless binary "action" file you find inside.

Yes this is what I was thinkering over with the header about this continuity concern. If there's some kind of an intitalization procedure that should also be moved along to the later position for example. But it keeps changing, headers usually don't change for a given format, it maybe is just lack of data in the beginning, it could break the debriefing or desync it. Thinking debrief info is probably not in the action file but it has a direct relation, and I don't see any debried files in the TRK elsewhere so it must be inside there IMO.

For the EOF bit, I don't even know if that's a real EOF (end of file signature) I'll try more combinations and even tihngs like just deleting what I think is the EOF, and seeing what happens. I was not sure it would work because of the different patterns toward the end, then I figured, well those may just be actions when you stop controlling and press ESC and quit game.

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UPDATE1: Yep, I was right about the EOF bit: Without it the sim crashes to desktop without any error message during the loading of the map.

2020-02-25 10:14:47.951 ALERT DCS: Unhandled exception: Unexpected end of track fiber track/action

UPDATE2: What I'm hoping for is that it just teleports you to the next location ... if the middle is missing, but I'm trying to make it so to avoid that and start right from the middle. We'll see how it goes, but something else just came by, I have another bug report to fill out and the other stuff, so I'll get back to this a bit later today.