SkyEye without official TacView Exporter

[shaji-Dev]

Hi,

We've had to turn off TacView recently as we were having a lot of performance stability issues on the server, it's basically impossible to use on big missions with a lot of units.

Is there or there will be a version of SkyEye that does not require TacView by having its own Hook script to extract the realtime mission data?

I understand feeding off TacView instead of having another hook extracting data is better for performance, but in the case of TacView being disabled for reasons described above would be interesting to have it if possible.

Thank you.

[dharmab]

A while back I prototyped some code to replace the official Tacview DCS exporter with my own that uses DCS-gRPC, querying only air units and at a much slower rate. It produced valid ACMI data. But my initial approach prioritized low memory usage too much and kind of backed me into a corner in regards to other features I wanted to support like filtering to only detected units instead of a global view, or including terrain elevation data. So I put that aside for a while to revisit later.

https://github.com/dharmab/acmi-exporter

I'll swing back around to it eventually. However it's a lower priority for me personally because the server I run and the servers I play on don't intend to use it, so I'm somewhat less motivated to work on it :^)

You can also modify TacView exporter's Lua scripts to not query so often. In the somewhat longer term, I believe Tacview 2 intends to ovarhaul the exporter for improved performance.

[shaji-Dev]

Thank you for the detailed reponse.

We've done a lot of optimizations to squeeze in TacView to the our feature list, but we realized for a mission like this it's going to be impossible, while TacView 1.9.5 Beta 3 helps with performance with its multithreading experimetal feature, it crashes the server regularly and the TacView team confirmed me that this experiment has failed and as they will have to try a different approach. But I think it will always affect performance on big PvE servers regardless of the improvements, that is why I was asking if there was an option to avoid TV alltogether.

Thank you for your time.

[dharmab]

Tacview 1.9.5 beta 5 has added a new tacviewDataCaptureMode setting. If you edit this setting via a text editor rather than through DCS, you can put any number of frames in here, and tacview will only export data at intervals of that frame. For example, if your server runs at 60 FPS, you can set tacviewDataCaptureMode to 120 to export data every two seconds or so. This might give you an alternative for performance reasons.

I may still develop my own exporter to provide terrain data and line of sight data, as those features are unlikely to appear in the official Tacview exporter until at least Tacview 2 if not later.

[shaji-Dev]

Yes, thank you, we tested it as soon as it came out, our previous reports led to this implementation as they became aware we use the exporter explusively for SkyEye. We tested with 60 and 120, unfortunately we still have performance issues running TacView, the server flat lines and gets stuck on an endless event loop that adds thousands of repeated entries to the log file, this only happens when there's a lot of load on the server usually. We'll keep testing and send the results to TacView, but as you said, having your own exporter would be best, especially for the other features like terrain data and line of sight.

TacView exports all objects on the map on every data capture, meaning statics, ground units and air, this is a very taxing function call when you have a mission of about 10K objects. Building your own exporter I think you can filter only air units which is far less taxing on performance and would solve many of the issues we're having now.

Thank you again for your dedication.

[dharmab]

TacView 1.9.5 has released, is the performance improved vs the beta?