Strange discovery about track replay? An "almost" workaround.

TLDR: Flying the F/A-18C first, and then switching to F-14B in the same mission makes the replay work a lot better (but not perfectly).

The long explanation:

I have desperately tried to find workarounds to make track replay work for the F-14B. Because I love the plane, and I love doing airshows and watching them back from the ground afterwards.

But, as all owners of that module probably knows, replay doesn't work... at all. The plane will not take off, nor taxi correctly if you watch it back in a replay. It's like it suddenly "forgets" to record certain control inputs or something. If it somehow manages to get into the air in the replay, it will suddenly plunge into the ground or something else that never happened.

Anyway.

I was experimenting with different hypothesis of workarounds:

- what if I play with no weather

- what if I wait a few minutes before starting to fly (maybe it takes a while for all the "systems" to come online)

- What if I do a full controls wipe out (including flaps and spoilers and everything) before throttling up

- What if I play without any external stores

- What if I start in the air or ramp start instead of "parking hot" which is my usual way

None of the experiments had any real success.

Then I remembered someone saying that recordings from multiplayer servers are somewhat better (not that I've seen any examples of this, but all avenues have to be explored). So I tried setting the F-14 as a "client" plane instead of "player". I still played it as single player mission though.

There was a moderate success: It did take off and fly for a while, but after a few minutes, it suddenly made a turn into the ground and that was it.

So, finally I tried putting two client planes in the mission: One F/A-18C (that always works in replay) and one F-14B. Then I took the F/A-18C for a short flight and landed back on the airfield and then spawned into the F-14B with the "choose slot" option. In other words, I kept both planes in the same track file.

The F-14B took off and flew for a multi-minute airshow with hard maneuvers and dropping flares and what-not. All without making any visible deviance from how it had happened when I flew it. I was shocked and recorded clips and did screenshots, desperately hoping I might have stumbled onto a workaround.

Then after about five minutes of show-boating, I slowed down and did an approach and landing, and this is when the replay suddenly bugged out.

The F-14 was way too high compared to what I had did, and also missed the runway by hundreds of meters to the right. It throttled down once it "landed" several hundred meters into the air and stalled into the ground with a bang. As in, the "normal" F-14B replay.

In other words, it seems the replay works much better and for a longer time, IF you have a recording of a working plane first. It seems that "something" is deteriorating over time as you get into the F-14B.

I hope this discovery can help ED / Heatblur figure out why replays still don't work on the F-14, when it works pretty much flawlessly on so many other modules.

F/A-18C and F-16C works ALWAYS, even with other planes in the track or dogfights or whatever.

PS: I am posting this in questions as I don't know where else to put it. Heatblur don't really respond much about the replay issues, even though there is a huge thread about it on their sub-forum. They keep saying it's a DCS bug (as in, not a problem with their module), so I post here, hoping we can figure this out.

PPS: I hope I am not the only one desperately wanting this fixed. I hope ED/Heatblur also wants it fixed, despite the planned upgrade of the replay feature some time in the future. I can guarantee that there will be more YT videos of the DCS F-14B if this feature is fixed. And that can only be a good thing.

A couple of clips from the replay. I haven't been able to get the replay to work long enough to be able to do this before. It may be just placebo, but I think it works better when you spawn a working plane first: