Tacview 1.5 official thread

[Vyrtuoz]

Tacview 1.5 is now available to everyone!


Download: Click Here


While - at the first sight - this version does not look very different from the 1.4.3, it is a huge leap forward! This is simply the biggest upgrade to date: It took about 8 months of hard work and debugging to perfect a whole new telemetry engine and file format.

Why all this work?

The new telemetry engine is more powerful, transparent and efficient than ever:

• It can manage any kind of data even unknown one. The owners of the Home and Professional editions can now use the new raw telemetry tool to have a look at all the data recorded for each object of the battlefield. In a future release, new customizable telemetry windows will be introduced, in addition of the raw telemetry tool, to replace the old - and now overloaded - telemetry ones.
  
• This new engine also supports real-time data recording… which will soon lead to real-time flight data recording for the devices and simulators which support this kind of feature (like DCS World, FSX, X-Plane…)
• Thanks to lossless optimizations and improved structures, the new engine requires two times less memory to load the same amount of data as before!
• Thanks to full 64-bit floating point precision and spherical interpolations, replays are much more accurate than before, especially when analyzing real-life data and intercontinental flights.
• The “good” old text and compressed binary file formats are gone! From now on, Tacview will save all of your data in a much cleaner and more intuitive text format (optionally compressed in zip, and soon 7z). Please note that DCS World and FSX exporters will switch to this new format soon.
• This new file format is very easy to learn and to master. This means that, with just a bit of programming knowledge, you can easily create your own exporter. You can even create a file by hand - like show bellow - to inject data in Tacview world. A detailed documentation for the acmi 2.0 file format is available online: http://www.tacview.net/documentation/acmi/

What does that mean for you?

These two major improvements will soon enable really useful features. Here are two obvious examples:

• Real-time flight data recording, replay and analysis: Soon you will be able to see a flight in progress! Which is going to be very useful for instructors and referees.
• Soon, all the data available in your cockpit will be visible in Tacview: Like fuel flow, controls position and even the pilot point-of-view and head movements!

What about Bullseye?

Tacview 1.5 natively support the display of bullseye and bullseye coordinates. For now, you can display a bullseye by creating and merging a tiny telemetry file like the following. Tools will be added soon so you can create and edit this kind of data directly from Tacview.

• Each bullseye is positioned using the “T=” statement in the following order: longitude in degrees, latitude in degrees, altitude in meters (altitude is used only for display purposes).
• Use the notepad to create a text file containing the following data and use the merge function of Tacview to add it to your flight data.

Code: [Select]

FileType=text/acmi/tacview
FileVersion=2.0
100000001,T=41.72611|42.12278|2000,Type=Navaid+Bullseye,Coalition=Enemies,Color=Blue
100000002,T=40|44|2000,Type=Navaid+Bullseye,Coalition=Allies,Color=Red


FEATURES & CHANGES

• Brand new (fully rewritten) core telemetry system
• Telemetry engine now uses about two times less memory then before
• Full 64-bit telemetry engine for more accurate replays
• Fully rewritten merge feature which gives more stable and better results than ever
• Accurate interpolation (slerp) of geographical spherical coordinates
• Improved roll/pitch/yaw emulation for low-end telemetry files
• Added support for the new ACMI 2.0 text file format (import & export)
• Added support for telemetry files stored in a zip archive
• Brand new Falcon 4.0 VHS file importer
• Spanish translation by Miguel Víctores Franco
• Added preliminary support for bullseyes (you can import your own bullseye)
• Added day/night cycles to better represent flying conditions
• Added traveled 2D ground distance to the charts (vs 3D air distance)
• Calibrated air speed for standard atmosphere can now be displayed in the telemetry window and labels
• Added an option to switch distances to feet under 2 nm
• Unknown objects are now displayed using related 3D meshes instead of just boxes
• Improved SAM/AAA threat zones display
• Hovering the mouse on anti-aircraft unit will display its thread sphere regardless of the global option
• You can now double click in the 3D view to toggle full screen mode
• Restored support for Windows XP (at least until the 3D render is rewritten)
• Updated Falcon 4.0 terrains and databases to BMS 4.33 U1
• Upgraded the export script to gracefully support DCS World 1.5.4 new export options
• Added preliminary support for DCS World F-5E-3
• Increased charts time and distance measurement marks resolution to 1/10 unit
• Added support for the new Flightradar24 csv files
• Added support for comma as a separator for seconds in XML timestamps (GPX files)
• Improved GPX files support (invalid samples are ignored and more tags are supported)
• Improved KML files support for static objects (preliminary support of polygons)
• Selected objects labels are now always displayed regardless of the global option
• Removed multimedia keys support (mouse and normal keyboard controls are more than enough)

FIXES

• Fixed a crash when loading truncated lines in csv files
• Fixed a rare random crash when loading custom terrain textures
• Fixed slow startup with a lot of custom tiles textures
• Terrain custom textures loading has been tweaked and is now much faster
• Falcon 4.0 VHS files landing gear and airbrake are now displayed properly in Tacview
• Improved Falcon 4 "bubbles" handling and objects respawn
• Invalid UTF-8 characters in text files are now handled gracefully
• The advanced telemetry (effective) heading (HDG) is now properly displayed instead of the calculated one
• Camera controls are now more responsive while idle (playback paused)
• FSX2ACMI now better handles pauses during a flight
• Fixed Falcon 4.0 RKND & RKNW runways position and orientation

[Vyrtuoz]

Feel free to post here any questions and comments related to Tacview 1.5.

Please, create new threads for general questions.

[Asid]

Great news.

Tacview is an excellent tool. I recommend it to all. Especially when there is a free version.

Keep up the good work Vyrtuoz.

[Vyrtuoz]

Note for BMS users

Thanks to your feedback I have noticed that the day/night cycle is not correct with BMS VHS files.

This is because the time provided in VHS files is in local time instead of UTC.

I will manage properly this case in Tacview 1.5.1