[DCS ISSUE] tracks totally useless now

[eatthis]

they were very hit and miss before the patch but since the last patch not a  single trakc is even remotely useable. it always goes off in the 1st few seconds and thats it.
anybody having that issue? 
is there anything i can try?
 

Edited December 17, 2020 by IronMike

[RaisedByWolves]

I gave up viewing them over two years ago. Never aware they have ever worked.

[DimSim]

Same, tried to watch my carrier landings to improve but replay is nothing like what I did, ditches into the see shortly after start.

[Bearfoot]

I've never had a single F-14 track ever work.

 

Ever.

 

:(

[Uxi]

Never have worked for me with Tomcat.

[IronMike]

The problem is Jester multicrew, and that tracks in DCS record every one of your inputs and then try to recreate from that. It doesn't account for 2 cockpits though, Jester, etc... If tracks would simply record the aircraft position, like in some other sims, that would be all less of an issues. We hope we can find a solution with ED one day.

[Nealius]

Jester/whoever is in the back doesn't have any controls that can affect flight control, though. So any inputs in the back seat shouldn't matter in terms of recreating from pilot/RIO inputs. 

[RustBelt]

Just because it "Shouldn't" be an issue, has no bering on it actually being an issue. I don't think ED is ever going to make a solution. A third party is going to have to step up and make something like a version of tacview that can take over the game engine and force a verbatim replay. 

[Katmandu]

Trying the free weeks of the F-14 (a year after the last free trial) and replay tracks did not work then and do not work now. Even on the simplest take off and land single player empty map missions. All other aircraft work 100% in this condition, and mostly work (90%+) in complex longer SP missions. All the hard work on the beautiful F-14 external models are lost without the replay mode, so it's a deal breaker.

On 12/17/2020 at 9:22 PM, IronMike said:

The problem is Jester multicrew, and that tracks in DCS record every one of your inputs and then try to recreate from that. It doesn't account for 2 cockpits though, Jester, etc... If tracks would simply record the aircraft position, like in some other sims, that would be all less of an issues. We hope we can find a solution with ED one day.

F-14 is not the only plane with multicrew. L-39 and now Huey both have multicrew and none of the problems with replays. Plus, as was said above, Jester has no input on flight dynamics.

Edited December 24, 2020 by Katmandu

[virulosity]

This is definitely a DCS issue, not module specific.  If you have enough things going on, it will lose track.  Since the supercarrier, if you have more than a handful of planes operating, my F-18 will drive off the end of the deck and crash instead of lining up for the catapult.  In missions with the Harrier, I can usually take off, then refuel 400 meters away from the tanker and crash.  With the mirage, I have about the same luck as the F-14, barely make it off the ground.  FC-3 seems to fair better, but those are low fidelity models.  The architecture of the replay system is probably the same as the Flaming Cliffs days, and what worked then doesn't now.  You aren't wrong to say this should be fixed, but you need to tell the people who can fix it, not a 3rd party dev.

[WytchCrypt]

I've been flying since the Flanker 1.5 DOS days in the 90's and it seems as time goes on with each release the track system becomes more and more unreliable.  This is really a shame because the ability to rewatch missions to study and learn is one of the core things that kept me loyal to Flanker (and the DCS that it eventually became) all these years.  As it is now, flying off the SuperCarrier in my Hornet guarantees the track will be a hot mess even if the SC & me are the only things in the mission.  I have pretty good luck though with accurate tracks starting a Hornet carrier ops mission in air and landing on the SuperCarrier.

 

I agree with the earlier comment that it will likely take a 3rd party developer to step in and create a bullet proof replay system.  Even though the DCS team probably "could" do it, I have the feeling they're spread so thin already developing new stuff and trying to get early access modules into full release that it's just not a priority...unfortunately

[Nealius]

Many people rely on Tacview for tactical debrief and review, but for reviewing landings and carrier traps it is 100% useless, not to mention the fact that Tacview recordings destroy your framerates in DCS.

[Katmandu]

Continued in this thread with an experiment involving several DCS modules 

 

[andyw248]

The culprit is probably the complexity of the tracking/replay functionality. It seems that it records everything that is done during a flight (i.e. click this, click that, move this, move that) and then re-computes the impact that all these individual actions would have on the flight path etc. This makes the "Take control" feature possible, which allows me to take control at a certain point of the track and see what happens if I had made a left turn instead of a right turn etc. Personally I think this is an edge case scenario.

 

In comparison, just tracking the 3d-coordinates and orientation, plus the status of certain items (like control surfaces, pilot's head etc) of each object at a certain rate per second should be much easier to implement and be much more reliable to replay. And it would satisfy two important use cases: learning by watching, and making videos.

[fat creason]

15 hours ago, andyw248 said:

The culprit is probably the complexity of the tracking/replay functionality. It seems that it records everything that is done during a flight (i.e. click this, click that, move this, move that) and then re-computes the impact that all these individual actions would have on the flight path etc. This makes the "Take control" feature possible, which allows me to take control at a certain point of the track and see what happens if I had made a left turn instead of a right turn etc. Personally I think this is an edge case scenario.

 

In comparison, just tracking the 3d-coordinates and orientation, plus the status of certain items (like control surfaces, pilot's head etc) of each object at a certain rate per second should be much easier to implement and be much more reliable to replay. And it would satisfy two important use cases: learning by watching, and making videos.

 

This is correct. You can hear us talking about the replay system here. It might be caused by some type of memory related issue and will likely be extremely difficult to solve, but it's hard to say. We have practically no control or insight over how the replays record and how they play back. Time has already been spent (read: wasted) looking into this, and we effectively made no progress. Based on that experience, the probable large amount of time/resources required to actually fix it effectively pushes it far down the priority list. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to spend our very finite resources on delivering the remainder of the F-14 package and fix more pressing bugs whose resolution takes fewer resources. We won't forget about this one, but we can't commit a large amount of resources into further investigation at this time. This is all assuming that it's something we can fix ourselves and not a DCS bug beyond our control. The jury is still out on that one, as of now we don't see anything we're doing to directly cause the problem.

Edited February 16, 2021 by fat creason

[andyw248]

13 hours ago, fat creason said:

 

You can hear us talking about the replay system here. 

 

 

Wow that was a great interview, thanks for sharing the link! So if I understand this correctly there is a server recording that is available in multiplayer because the servers that run multiplayer missions have that recording?

[fat creason]

1 hour ago, andyw248 said:

 

Wow that was a great interview, thanks for sharing the link! So if I understand this correctly there is a server recording that is available in multiplayer because the servers that run multiplayer missions have that recording?

 

Yep. You can run two instances of DCS on your own machine (one server/one client) and get the same thing. That's how all the big trailer/movie makers do it.

Edited February 16, 2021 by fat creason