[Fri] January 7 2011 - Black Shark TARS Test

So that future players might learn (if the flight recorder even survives)

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[Fri] January 7 2011 - Black Shark TARS Test

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Friday evening was the first group TARS test at Folk which spanned more than an hour and was used for more than just unit testing. It marked the first time that.
  • We had more than two people in a TARS session.
  • We did a legitimate DCS play session at Folk.
  • A-10C was successfully tested with TARS.
Many thanks to Banshee, Gixxer, and Hojo for participating. Beta testing can be tedious, repetitive, even stultifyingly boring. But with all of your help, I was able to eliminate one bug and locate two more. I will have a new Alpha for you as soon as I'm done fixing the bugs we found tonight.

But even better, after our session ended, I checked my logs and realized that I had left TacView running on BlackShark the whole time. And it recorded everything. For those not familiar with it, TacView is this awesome tool that uses the same means that TARS employs to export data out of the DCS (and LOMAC/FC2) games and produces entirely legit ACMI data based off of real terrain. It's been around for years and works with various flight sims. I added some TacView output to this AAR.

The session started out with Banshee and I trying to do the “Coda” 2 player co-op mission against the AI. Too bad the game basically dumped us into the middle of a storm. It was pretty rainy on the ground, but we wouldn't know how bad it would get until we got to a higher altitude. Banshee suffered a rotor intersection and had to respawn, but eventually we were off to the target area.

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It turned into the worst IFR conditions I'd ever encountered in Black Shark. I had never played around with the weather that much in the game, and we found ourselves negotiating mountainous terrain in zero visibility, with only the radar altimeter to tell us if we were about to hit a hill. After we got into the cloud layer, there was no visibility at all and I could not even see Banshee even with his lights on.

At one point we had to cross some mountains and I was convinced that I'd end up running into the side of one. The radar altimeter and the ABRIS' topographical data is what saved me. The TacView of this looks relatively innocent; the reality was not (the below screenshots represent the same "time slice" ingame).

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After Gixxer entered the party and installed the TARS Alpha, we hopped into the 3v3 deathmatch mission. Here's Gixxer starting up his green-skinned bird:

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The deathmatch mission featured two warring sides (REDFOR and BLUFOR basically) with IVFs and IR SAMs bracketing each side. I took a hovering position on the periphery, but Banshee decided to do this epic run of destruction which I Frapsed, and which also made entertaining viewing in TacView.

Banshee starts his run by blazing away:

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Eventually almost every enemy AI unit on the map is shooting at him.

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The session was almost worth it entirely for this shot where a stinger barely misses him:

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Eventually Banshee's helicopter was so shot up and useless that he had to eject. Here's the view from my cockpit of Banshee's helicopter, flares, and all the smoke and tracers from various weapons being shot at him:

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Later on, Hojo helped me test TARS in DCS A-10C, which was a success. We ran through some radio tests and then I ejected a few times in order to reproduce the bug that we saw in the Shark with ejected pilots not being able to talk on the radio. Other than that, everything seemed to work and hopefully as we get more players using the mod throughout the community, there will be more bugs revealed to go after.

The ejection test went well.

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I started working on this project when I was in England, in November of last year. Tonight was the very first time it had ever been fully tested between two clients on the game it was originally designed for—all of the other times, it was Black Shark, due to the lack of stability that the betas are having on some clients (mainly). That's a milestone I'm happy to reach, thanks to everyone's help. :dance:

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