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Logbook -- a tool to record SP & MP progress


Ansirial

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Il 3/1/2021 at 16:25, Pikey ha scritto:

Hi, lovely setup.
I'm an MP only player, I tested it out and I thought I'd pass my early observations. I do this from what I found personally missing, but without mentioning all the existing features you implemented, so it will sound like that entitled rubboish you see a lot, but the idea is that it's just feedback without emotion. It's just an opinion 🙂. Your work is outstanding and I know the level of effort involved and how these projects are all encompassing 🙂 Great stuff, I love it.

That said, for MP, here's my observations.
The debrief.log we dont actually use much in scripting or anything really in MP. Items like 'what pilot we were' (we were... "me") are irrelevant and even a bit confusing. Having multiple pilots, is also a confusing concept, I get you can have multiple pilots and they have nationalities and awards in single player but in MP, this is largely irrelevant and adds nothing, we have a playername. Also, "what side we are fighting". What!? 🙂. When filling out my first online flight I stopped at the log uploader and wonder.. well who was I really fighting and why does it matter at all? Most of the time we have to make it up like Westeros, Easterbly and Southeria. Simply isnt interesting (in Player vs Player), but what is missed is the mission name, the server name and that sort of thing. Maybe picking the answer... humans or AI makes more sense to MP players!

Then the debrief.log deficiencies came into the light. Why did we have to enter our aircraft type? This should be autodetected, its definitely available to mission based logging events.

We have three checkboxes which are utterly alien to me. "Set as training, show in the timeline, ignore undisclosed targets". Well we are dealing with data here and presenting it. You did such an amazing job with the presentation (i'm a DBA by trade) but have no idea how this impacts the presentation and data itself. For some, this is a serious matter. I would say when dealing with personal statistics, that this entire thing can be quite a critical thing 🙂
Then another obvious and critical difference between SP offline and MP online statistics in step two. "In game flight date". What?! 🙂 Oh right, we can create a historic pilot story with this... right, there are loads of people who will love this, but for logging for MP, nope, not in the slightest bit interesting, we want the timestamps of when we flew and inventing dates for the flights is absolutley strange for statistics, even to the point that its lying, it goes against what a flight log book actually is. So having two dates to track... that is confusing yes and even a little concerning.

I didn''t have any expectations. I did have a wish I could make this useful for my virtual squadron, but no expectations. In order for this to be useful without grossly deviating from it's intended design, I'd have these goals in mind for Multiplayer with perhaps these design choices. Read that - this isn't entitled requests, this is explaining the different concepts and needs of two different userbases (and potentially more)
. It might help, I don't know, generally I'd be interested in the feedback if I were new to MP in DCS.

- I'd scratch a lot of the fluff around the system that MP doesn't use. I'd use different designs. Out would go multiple pilots, multiple dates of flight, selectable aircraft, training/timeline toggles. In would come the data from the server, the playername, the birth events and aircraft types, mission data and automation.
- The data would be set as a custom file to export, it would be a rolling log extract of what happened, what server, mission and events detected and it would upload to the pilots database online with one click, not 3 steps (thats the goal anyway ;))
- The representation online could remain very similar and show pilots by playername, hours in airframes, weapons and hit recorded, ejections, landings and such, however with very little customised changing of the data - it simply shows what happened without the story or pilot names/alleigances/fluffy stuff.
- An optional empty segment to attach the data that can be added after (and I think in both SP and MP they have the same meaning) which is the After Action Report. An AAR usually consists of the "story element" to the log data explaining any notable things that happened. It's missing in the UI for SP and for MP. For MP it can hold data per flight and existing of commentary on weather, exceptional difficulties, damage, things that went right/wrong, lessons learned etc. Depending on the mission, you might add recon details and it is still relevant. For SP, it's almost identical, but you can add some more roleplay elements.
- This might take the form of a Lua plugin, with options and UI in game, that have dialogues. Using the plugin could bypass the requirmeent to write and format your own log export and also protect the data with some obfuscation to make data poisoning less attractive.

I undertand the usecase isnt the same and it's fundamentally hard to incorpporate these ideas, but it might be worth mentioning in case you wanted to embark on a branch of your work that deals with Multiplayer. If not, then to have the differences explained. 🙂 I hope it's taken in the right way. I think what you did is incredible!

 

 

 

Hi Pikey,

I must thank you for your precious suggestions, on my side as mainly SP player, I tried to do an effort to improve this tool to be share with the whole community. As you intended original design is string SP oriented.

 

I will try to explain my point of view about the points you listed and how I tried to extend the use case for MP and virtual squadrons:

 

Multiple pilots are a direct heritage of the SP concept, personally I have 26 characters from various nations and various simulations I played from the first years of 2000s; I slavishly logged any event and a couple of years ago I finally created a tool to have all my "history" in one place, also as real military awards and medal collector you also see the care I spent on ranks and awards. Well I understand this can be a little confusing for a MP player and, belive me, I thought a lot to find an acceptable trade off between two aspects.

 

To accomplish this I decided to create an allegiance called "Undefined" where no ranks or awards are present and inteded for MP; in this way and in my idea, multiple pilots would be still useful to:

- Arrange "dead is dead" characters once joined a virtual squadron; Once you created a squadron you can join this as user and create inside it many pilots.

- Divide experiences from different sims;

 

Following your suggestions, mission name is present, even if only in the narrative and I must say server name could be a very interesting add, especially for the statistics.

 

"Set as training" is a check created upon request to log practice mission where you may shot down dozens of planes ruining statistics, checking this box those mission are clearly hightlighted and kills are not calculated in cumulative statistics numbers.

 

"Ignore undisclosed targets", also realized on request, is to avoid the registration of the kills of the scenery objects with are logged as empty strings and are not significant for the gameplay.

 

Well, the date is an absolute crititical thing... Or I must say "double date". To limit this, the log application prefill the date of the log file and let you change the date to one of your preference maintaining the log file date as timestamp. Not perfect but I also use "present date" for DCS and this is in order to make double date transparent for this use case.

 

I'm really interested in your and other players suggestions, especially if this can help to make this tool useful for squadron management (thing you can try with "Create a virtual squadron" option).

 

When you say to get data from server and "The data would be set as a custom file to export...", what do you intend exactly? At moment I find only the poor debrief.log I agree is very very limited.

 

AAR section is already present, "Event notes" has this purpose and can be edited in the log parser too before sending them to the logbook.

 

Are Lua plugins intented to be integrated in DCS? Can you explain me how do you intend this? How this work? Are there some examples? Sorry but I play DCS only in the last year and all I done for this project is on my spare time.

 

I thank you again for sharing your considerations and I hope you can help me with some other advice to improve this tool. At the moment, for instance, I'm projecting a greenie board for virtual squadrons and/or users; one of the most complex thing is an accurate integration in the UI in order to avoid a jumble of functions without sense.

 

 

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Hi there again. So you dont need to explain your design, it is what it is and it is SP centric 🙂. What I was outlining is just possibilities. I see you have technical skills, don't be afraid of Lua, it's fairly easy to copy pasta learn.

What you could do is look at Simple radio mod https://github.com/ciribob/DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone/releases to see a Lua plugin and options. The difference between ED core plugins and 3rd party mod plugins is their location. The latter is in your saved games. A plugin is a format designed to be used to allow a UI in game on the games options page. It then configures global variables.

There are two sides to looking at additional scripting - from the mission, a locked down environment, designed for limited scripting api to the simulator scripting engine https://wiki.hoggitworld.com/view/Simulator_Scripting_Engine_Documentation mainly used to enhance the mission by allowing direct lua to be run rather than the mission editor conditionals, and the server side API which plugins only can access (but can also access the mission environment) )look in your install\API\DCS_ControlAPI.html for the extra API functions.

The kills, takeoffs, landings etc are realtime simulator events. You can attach handlers to them and do what you want with them. The Sim takes these and creates that debrief log you use. However, you can do all this yourself. So, one such approach would be to run a plugin that captures exactly what you want, in a format you want and writes it to your own file, or indeed as others have done, export to json or other mediums and sent directly (or entered into a local sqllite). Because these are realtime, you can even have the game crash and save the statistics for MP and be better than the game.

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There are lots of examples over the years of people creating statistics. SLMOD was fairly defacto at one point. The last one I saw is still WIP but you get the idea:

Hope this broadens your experience anyway. I dont know if its entirely what you want or need but feel free to PM me or find me on the MOOSE scripting Discord.

___________________________________________________________________________

SIMPLE SCENERY SAVING * SIMPLE GROUP SAVING * SIMPLE STATIC SAVING *

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  • 1 month later...
Il 24/2/2021 at 12:23, Nealius ha scritto:

Are there any plans to add the WW2 assets ground units to the logbook? It appears ground unit kills are not automatically synced with the website.

 

Hi Nealius, asset are manually syncronized by me, in the application is present a system that record the association. Periodically I check the info and I add missing assets basing on all users input.

 

Bye

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Hi everybody, I think it is the moment to develop a greenie board both for single pilots (not user) and for squadron.

 

May I ask some suggestions? Especially because I would like it will be suitable for all the users. 

I checked online and I see many standards, many legends, do you have any suggestion or reliable example to follow?

 

For instance I found for myself this:

  • Green -> Ok -> 4 points
  • Yellow -> Fair -> 3 points
  • Orange -> Bolter -> 2,5 points
  • Orange -> No grade -> 2 points
  • Red -> Cut -> 1 point

 

Then I will create a row with average and the sequence of landing outcomes.

 

Soon the app will be enabled to record grades in order to have a good base for the tests. 

Thanks in advance for the help, bye


Edited by Ansirial
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello !

 

Thanks for this great tool ! Really usefull ! Most of the time, I forget to save or parse my debrief.log at the end of a flight, and the one I want to log does not exist anymore in the logs.

 

Is there a way to have a sort of debrief.log autoimport, or backup, or something else ?

 

Thanks !!

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06th Multirole Helicopter Regiment

Bataillon d'appui aérien - Escadrille HOG

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
Il 13/3/2021 at 15:36, MirabelleBenou ha scritto:

Hello !

 

Thanks for this great tool ! Really usefull ! Most of the time, I forget to save or parse my debrief.log at the end of a flight, and the one I want to log does not exist anymore in the logs.

 

Is there a way to have a sort of debrief.log autoimport, or backup, or something else ?

 

Thanks !!

 

Hi MirabelleBenou, I'm thinking to an alternative to the log file... I know is very simple forget it.

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Hi everybody! 

I just released a massive update. 

In general new features are intended to online players, I would like give a correct tradeoff for any type of players.

 

Here the list of the new features:

 

Greenie board

Now LSO grades are parsed and you can see your own grades in statistics, also you can see you main errors to improve.

 

Immagine 2021-03-22 213751.png

Now is also avalaible a Greenie board leaderboard and if you have a squadron you can also enjoy same statistics in your squadron home page.

 

Multi flight parsing in DCS Sync

I noticed sometimes the parser were not able to parse all the flights in a MP session, now the process is able to reparse log to record all the flights.

 

User calendar

Historical dates can be confusing, especially for MP users, so I added a "User calendar" where you can see events arranged by timestamps and not by historical date.

If you have more than one pilot you can see all the events merged in one view.

 

Calendar loading improvement

Now, with the new calendar system calendars were too heavy, so I completely revised the logic for tha data loading, now it is a lot faster.


Edited by Ansirial
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What a great tool! Thanks very much for developing this 👏

System Spec: Cooler Master Cosmos C700P Black Edition case. | AMD 5950X CPU | MSI RTX-3090 GPU | 32GB HyperX Predator PC4000 RAM | | TM Warthog stick & throttle | TrackIR 5 | Samsung 980 Pro NVMe 4 SSD 1TB (boot) | Samsung 870 QVO SSD 4TB (games) | Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.

 

Personal wish list: DCS: Su-27SM & DCS: Avro Vulcan.

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21 hours ago, Ansirial said:

Multi flight parsing in DCS Sync

I noticed sometimes the parser were not able to parse all the flights in a MP session, now the process is able to reparse log to record all the flights.

 

 

Does this mean you can now take-off, fly around, land, then take change your slot to another plane? And this will count as two flights? 

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3 ore fa, Nirvi ha scritto:

Does this mean you can now take-off, fly around, land, then take change your slot to another plane? And this will count as two flights? 

 

Exactly!

And, yesterday I forgot it also to mention that now if you chose "Undefined" as allegiance, parser would not prompt anymore for factions (I noticed this may be annoying for online players)

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  • 2 weeks later...
17 ore fa, Nirvi ha scritto:

Don't know if this is possible: When you get a kill in multiplayer, can you get your victims name automatically added? 

So we would get: Date/ Allegiance/ Type/ Pilot Name

 

Hi Nirvi, at the moment with logfiles it is not possible but I'm investigating a more extensive integration with DCS, maybe in the future it will be possible.

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Another suggestion: Could you sort the eventlog, so that all "Undisclosed targets" are shown first?

This way, you can define the missing target types pretty fast. 

 

Right now, if you have only one undisclosed target at position 250 of 255, you have to click forward 250 times until you find the missing target type. 


Edited by Nirvi
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Just discovered this tool.  Looks awesome.  Does DCS overwrite the debrief.log after every flight?  I am looking for a way to upload my entire career from 2021.  Is that possible?

 

How do you guys manage the upload process?  You have to remember to sync after each flight?

 

Thanks.

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3 ore fa, Mistermann ha scritto:

Just discovered this tool.  Looks awesome.  Does DCS overwrite the debrief.log after every flight?  I am looking for a way to upload my entire career from 2021.  Is that possible?

 

How do you guys manage the upload process?  You have to remember to sync after each flight?

 

Thanks.

 

Hi Mistermann,

Unfortunately yes... You can of course upload all but manually if you know details. Platform can manage it.

You should sync after each flight or, alternatively just save debrief in game a sync them later, sync app can read both file types.

 

Bye

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2 minutes ago, Ansirial said:

... or, alternatively just save debrief in game a sync them later, sync app can read both file types.

Please forgive the newbish question.  How do I save the debrief in game?

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5 hours ago, Mistermann said:

Please forgive the newbish question.  How do I save the debrief in game?

Answering this for anyone else who's not familiar with this feature.  There's a SAVE DEBRIEFING option after exiting the mission.  Never even saw it!  🤪

 

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Edited by Mistermann
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 💻Processor:13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900K - 🧠RAM: 64GB - 🎥Video Card: NVIDIA RTX 4090 - 🥽 Display: Pimax 8kx VR Headset - 🕹️Accessories:  VKB Gunfighter III MCG Ultimate, Thrustmaster TWCS (modified), Thrustmaster TPR Pedals, Simshaker JetPad, Predator HOTAS Mounts, 3D Printed Flight Button Box 

Thrustmaster TWCS Mod

 

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Hello @Ansirial !

 

I might be wrong, but I can't find a way to edit the allegiance of my character. Is there any way to perform this action and if not, do you think you could add the option please ? I am currently in a program exchange for the next 6 months and I'd like to record it on my timeline.

On the same note, do you think you could add the A.L.A.T (Aviation Légère de l'Armée de Terre) the French Army branch who flies the Gazelle ? Last question, with the more broadly available multicrew possibilities in DCS modules (Tomcat, Huey, Hind, Kiowa, etc. ...) will you add an option to mention wich role in the aircraft we flew our mission ?

 

Thank you again for your hard work !

3rd Wing | 55th Black Alligators * BA-33

Εις ανηρ ουδεις ανηρ

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1 ora fa, tugais ha scritto:

Hello @Ansirial !

 

I might be wrong, but I can't find a way to edit the allegiance of my character. Is there any way to perform this action and if not, do you think you could add the option please ? I am currently in a program exchange for the next 6 months and I'd like to record it on my timeline.

On the same note, do you think you could add the A.L.A.T (Aviation Légère de l'Armée de Terre) the French Army branch who flies the Gazelle ? Last question, with the more broadly available multicrew possibilities in DCS modules (Tomcat, Huey, Hind, Kiowa, etc. ...) will you add an option to mention wich role in the aircraft we flew our mission ?

 

Thank you again for your hard work !

 

Hi Tugais,

This is not first time somebody needs this, by the way this is not an option because it is very complex, database references (ranks and awards) are quite strictly related with allegiances.

Adding new allegiance instead is quite easy, no problem for that.

 

For your needs I can give you 2 options:

- I can change you allegiance manually (this should not be intended for revert because the relations with ranks and awards will be missed)

- You can create another pilot for this purpose (this is main purpose for multiple pilot, in my intention)

 

Hope this can help,

Bye

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8 hours ago, Ansirial said:

 

Hi Tugais,

This is not first time somebody needs this, by the way this is not an option because it is very complex, database references (ranks and awards) are quite strictly related with allegiances.

Adding new allegiance instead is quite easy, no problem for that.

 

For your needs I can give you 2 options:

- I can change you allegiance manually (this should not be intended for revert because the relations with ranks and awards will be missed)

- You can create another pilot for this purpose (this is main purpose for multiple pilot, in my intention)

 

Hope this can help,

Bye

 

Thank you for your answer Ansirial. I don't want to bother you by changing manually my allegiance, I'll wait for the Aviation Légère de l'Armée de Terre to be added and then I will create a new character. Thanks again o7

3rd Wing | 55th Black Alligators * BA-33

Εις ανηρ ουδεις ανηρ

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7 minuti fa, tugais ha scritto:

 

Thank you for your answer Ansirial. I don't want to bother you by changing manually my allegiance, I'll wait for the Aviation Légère de l'Armée de Terre to be added and then I will create a new character. Thanks again o7

 

Hi Tugais,

Just added now!

Bye

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