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Axek/Axyl

Automated After Action Report Generator

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Hey Everyone,

Edit: First Release post.

Edit: Example of full unit tracking replay.

I've been working for a little while on an automated AAR generator tool. Through a combination of an extension and addon, it tracks your player's group recording members, position and any contacts. At the end of each contact, it records friendly and enemy wia and kia (along with total rounds fired). The intention is to create a partial AAR that players can then flesh out later with text or refer to in a forum thread after an op...or perhaps to create a set of Contact Reports that players can create a report around.

There's a bunch of possibilities here, such as just running server side and posting results automatically to a WordPress page or Forum Post or having an ingame replay system.

The first version's goal is to just have it generating the content on your local machine, so no other player also requires it, with a reporting tool that can generate BB Code suitable for pasting.

Note that I'm setting this up for coop groups, such as our own CTB.

Currently the BB Code is generating things like this...

+0:41:41: In Contact, initiated by B Alpha 1-1:2 (Base).  1,092 metres SW of Poliakko.
+0:47:03: Section members changed to B Alpha 1-1:2 (Base), B Alpha 1-1:3 (Oly), B Alpha 1-1:4 (Kushluk), B Alpha 1-1:5 (Hangfire), B Alpha 1-1:6 (marty), B Alpha 1-1:7 (Axyl), B Alpha 1-1:8 (EvilRooter)
Section Leader: B Alpha 1-1:6 (marty) REMOTE

+0:49:34: Contact ended.  Duration: +0:06:31, Rounds: 392, Participants: B Alpha 1-1:2 (Base), B Alpha 1-1:6 (marty), KTP_BLUFOR1, B Alpha 1-1:7 (Axyl), B Alpha 1-1:5 (Hangfire), B Alpha 1-1:8 (EvilRooter), B Alpha 1-1:4 (Kushluk)
with Friendly KIA: 4, Friendly WIA: 3, Other KIA: 15, Other WIA: 4

I've also been playing with a separate review mission that can read the reports and show a track on the ingame map...

JcZJcE4l.jpg

That's a real game example of a disastrous mission the guys played last week. :)

Note that the extension is saving the data to a text file, one per mission, not straight to a database.

If a decent Google Maps API compatible map of Altis is released, then this could easily put the reports up on that, showing track and contact reports.

If you're interested in this for your squad, then let me know. I will be releasing this to all, including source code for the extension, but it's not quite ready for that yet.

Edited by Axek

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This sounds great! At one stage in A2 there was going to be an AAR playback, but there were technical problems I believe.

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Thanks Guys,

Will keep you updated.

Played a short mission this afternoon with a few squad members and pubbers...

Just playing with an ingame AAR mission that shows the track and contact points (red shows in contact)...but I can't get the text to really show up well in game, for a screenshot.

zNwX1hEl.jpg

***

Zoomed in

***

AwX2otpl.jpg

***

and with narrower lines...

***

eq9mJkVl.jpg

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Nice idea! You might want to add-in the coordinates of the unit at the moment of contact, since it's (IRL) one of the information that you give in the contactrep.

Keep it up!

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This looks great... I have been wondering how something like this might be fleshed out while playing and someone is already doing it!... Looking forward to it.

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brilliant stuff, would really like to talk to you Axek, maybe on teamspeak?

its up to you, ill contact you via PM, very much a platform I would love to use.

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Thanks Guys,

I'm flattered.

CTB, AAF, XDF and some pubbers had a mission night last night.

The mission called for three main infantry sections (and a few extra attached units).

One of the CTB guys in the first section was running the AAR system and recorded this...

E3EbJyKl.png

So there's a few filtering problems...

  • The positions track only the group leader (not you). So if the leader changes, then the lines can jump around.
  • We had issues with people dying in this mission and not being able to heal, so there were times where the track went back to base.

so I ran a filter against this to only show tracks where the distance between each position update wasn't more than 700m...and came up with this.

jG5TX3Ol.jpg

That looks less confusing, but then there's a gap in the town where the group leader was, for a little while, back at base. (I actually thing the leader changed too.)

Currently, a contact report is triggered whenever a group member fires or is hit. A contact is finished when 30 seconds has elapsed since the last hit or fire event against any group member...so there can be a lot of contact reports where either someone was hurt by a vehicle, had an ND or a proper engagement with a few breaks.

But sometimes it seems to record things well...

http://i.imgur.com/EHgVnYt.jpg (493 kB)

Tough contact for the section with 6 KIA and 2 WIA, rendering them pretty much ineffective...

The sniper section recorded this...

http://i.imgur.com/YutGBD3.jpg (410 kB)

Not a lot of overwatch there...

The addon and extension are now recording the position of the group leader every thirty seconds and recording contact start/end to a file that's mission specific. Whenever a mission starts, the existing file is backed up. (And the older backup deleted.)

I now also have a separate single player mission that can list all recorded AARs and load up the selected one into the map. Which is how the above screenshots come from.

Short Term Future Plans:

  • A parameter to track either the group leader or you.
  • Parameter to set the contact timeout.
  • Parameter for how often to record the position.
  • Parameter for the filtering, so that teleports etc don't cause confusion.
  • Record who the section leader is at each contact.

Then I'll likely make an Alpha for people to run themselves.

After that, I'd like to integrate with a web based map of Altis and have two types of AAR recording systems. One for your personal AAR (which can include a lot more stats) and a server based one that can record all playable groups.

Axyl.

---------- Post added at 23:05 ---------- Previous post was at 23:04 ----------

Does it work for SP too?

Yes, it works fine in single player.

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Hi Everyone,

My first Alpha release is ready for testing/feedback.

Download from here. Currently version 0.4 .

Make sure that you modify the config file before running.

The included Single Player mission will let you load any recorded AAR.

Not included yet is a way to view AAR's view the web, but that's coming...

cOBJ9h1l.png

Axyl.

Edited by Axek

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Guest

First alpha release frontpaged on the Armaholic homepage.

=================================================

You are not registered on Armaholic, or at least not that we are aware of. In the future we offer the possibility to authors to maintain their own pages.

If you wish to be able to do this as well please register on Armaholic and let me know about it.

This is not mandatory at all! Only if you wish to control your own content you are welcome to join, otherwise we will continue to follow your work like we have always done ;)

When you have any questions already feel free to PM or email me!

Edited by Guest
added CBA as requirement

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This is great Axek!

Do you think it might be possible to have a full AAR system like VBS2 where a whole mission can be played back?

That would be a game changer... ;)

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This is great Axek!

Do you think it might be possible to have a full AAR system like VBS2 where a whole mission can be played back?

That would be a game changer... ;)

That's not my goal, but something similar is certainly possible. Certain events are only triggered on the computer where the player sits, such as the detailed fired event etc. So to cover that in a multiplayer experience would mean that you'd have to run the addon on every machine and send the event data to one destination. Once done, the magic would be in the play back. As per my first post in this thread, someone was working on that for ArmA 2.

My goal is an easy way to share AAR's with your squad.

Currently that's done through the single player aarShow mission, which you can take screenshots from and post to your forum...though I'd love to automate that, which is possible, but not done yet.

Addon requires CBA, plz update the download page with required addon section, thanks.

Yes, fair point.

Axyl.

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That's not my goal, but something similar is certainly possible. Certain events are only triggered on the computer where the player sits, such as the detailed fired event etc. So to cover that in a multiplayer experience would mean that you'd have to run the addon on every machine and send the event data to one destination. Once done, the magic would be in the play back. As per my first post in this thread, someone was working on that for ArmA 2.

My goal is an easy way to share AAR's with your squad.

Currently that's done through the single player aarShow mission, which you can take screenshots from and post to your forum...though I'd love to automate that, which is possible, but not done yet.

I don't know how well this would work for you and this in this situation but I have a shot and kill logging system. To get over the fact that certain events don't give that much information to other players I made it so all the players blindly send information to the server (via the CBA remote execution thing) and then server handles it and saves it there.

Not quite sure if this would be the best solution for this (which btw, is something I have wanted arma to have for a long time, so thank you) but you could in theory have it execute it on every player so that every player has the same information about each event, even if they didn't trigger it.

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What do we need to change in the Config?

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I don't know how well this would work for you and this in this situation but I have a shot and kill logging system. To get over the fact that certain events don't give that much information to other players I made it so all the players blindly send information to the server (via the CBA remote execution thing) and then server handles it and saves it there.

Not quite sure if this would be the best solution for this (which btw, is something I have wanted arma to have for a long time, so thank you) but you could in theory have it execute it on every player so that every player has the same information about each event, even if they didn't trigger it.

Good to know. I did figure that the full fired event would be too much detail to worry about in an AAR anyhow. But for doing some kind of replay thing...it could be useful.

What do we need to change in the Config?

The one thing you should check and change if necessary is the output directory for the AAR files.

---------- Post added at 06:36 ---------- Previous post was at 06:08 ----------

I have a tool coming that will let you create .html AAR files to load onto your Squads Web Server. You'll need to load up your own tiles of Altis etc too.

But here's an example of the output.

http://combatteambravo.com/aar/IntelOps.altis.raw_aar-20131105.html#zoom=3&lat=-172.25&lng=151.125

You can link to particular Contact Reports like this...

and as you move/zoom around the map, the URL's updated with the relevant navigation data...so you can direct link to any specific spot.

Big Ups to Marty and SlyDog for working on the Tiles and extra Map Layers.

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I love your work. Would it possible to add some kind of option to specify the time where the AAARG draws the situation. What I mean is that it would be great to be able to go through the AAR moment by moment. And see the situations unfold along the mission.

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I love your work. Would it possible to add some kind of option to specify the time where the AAARG draws the situation. What I mean is that it would be great to be able to go through the AAR moment by moment. And see the situations unfold along the mission.

I haven't written the existing AAR reporting tools to work like that, but the data's there, so it can be done.

For example, I've also been working on a full unit/vehicle tracking system that's pretty similar to the AAR stuff.

WyHngz0l.png

You can interact with a live example of that here.

Hit the back/forward buttons to move forwards or back in thirty second increments.

Not sure if I should make that a separate addon or somehow put it into the same system as this.

Axyl.

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Combining those two would be an excellent idea. With a system like that it would be a real delight to go over missions.

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Sorry if I sound stupid but I could not find the files in the download link.

Edit: My bad, did not know how to use the website. Keep up the good work.

Edited by Bumgie
Found it!

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