DCS Mission
Tracker

Two new tools, JTAC and ACIS, and a version read from one place. The E-2C console leaves the GCI and becomes a page of its own, /acis, and the JTAC (/jtac) compiles check-in, game plan and 9-line from the mission feed: the application now has seven tools. The program version lives in one place in app.py and is served from /api/config: hand-written in the HTML it had stayed at 1.2 while the program moved on for months, and it is now also the way to know which version is running on the server without logging in (1.13.1 today, with a tag on every push that ships something).

Users, roles and sections instead of a single password. Three levels: admin opens everything, user operates and uploads files in the enabled sections, visitor only looks. The role says what you can do, the list of sections says where, and keeping them apart avoids inventing a new role for every exception. Passwords are written nowhere, only the scrypt hash, and a missing user and a wrong password give the same answer in the same time. A user can be tied to an operator session: opening GCI, ATC or ACIS with no parameters redirects to that session's token. Token links keep opening as visitor, because that is how the group hands the tools around, and breaking it to tighten permissions would be a bad trade.

The debrief in 3D, with four cameras and the theatre's ground. Free, Follow, Action (frames only the aircraft alive at the scrubber instant, with a four-mile floor, because two half-hour tracks make an engagement tiny) and Cockpit, the only one in true perspective: the attitude is the recorded one, in a turn the horizon banks as it banked then, which is why the scene does not rotate with the mouse. Missile and bomb trajectories were already in the file and are coloured by outcome. Under the routes sits the real terrain, from the same elevation model ACIS and GCI use for radar masking; the ACMI does not say which theatre, so it is found from the centroid of the routes. With "Scene" the ground units, flares, chaff and bursts appear too: 150 KB on a 1.5 MB report, because thirty points each are enough for the forty vehicles that actually move.

The summary split by side, friendly fire made visible, gun kills read rather than guessed. Adding the two sides together, every kill is also somebody else's loss and the K/D always came out around one: there is now a card per side, and the side is the ACMI's Color, not its Coalition, which depends on who exported the file. Blue on blue was invisible by construction; the wingman is now looked at too, with half the radius and the rule that if an enemy is among those who hit, the kill is his, and friendly fire sits in its own list without entering the kills. Recent files do carry the shells (1310 in the sample), so a gun kill is no longer estimated from two aircraft being close: the round is followed. Rounds with no aircraft behind them are ground fire and are shown apart. Labelled ground kills, ground units filterable by type, a two-aircraft comparison with square-root range scale and aspect, an altitude profile, a link to a moment, and a sample mission for whoever arrives without an .acmi.

Installation and security: the DCS sandbox stays closed. The mission script no longer opens sockets: it queues the packets and a hook in the GUI environment collects them and sends them over UDP, the same road SRS and Tacview take, so MissionScripting.lua is no longer touched (earlier versions asked to desanitise it, and the JATF server refused, rightly). install.bat installs the DCS scripts, finds Saved Games where it is not usually kept, and works without git. An https mode with the certificate in the tracker or Caddy in front. Transponder and IFF come from SRS, as LotATC does, because DCS does not expose them to scripts; AI units declare theirs in the unit name with the same syntax, and the squawk shows on the GCI, on the ACIS, on the ATC strip and in the Live popup.

The application hosting the tracker gained a fifth tool, the Briefing Builder, which compiles JATF briefings starting from the mission's .miz file. The tracker itself is unchanged: it remains post-flight debriefing over ACMIs, and the two tools share the application, the server and the login, not the data.

Step-by-step install guide for self-hosting the tracker: Python and Flask on Windows, LAN startup, changing the admin password and publishing to the Internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel, with the app configured behind a proxy (secure session cookies, HSTS) and a minimum security checklist for public exposure.

Integrated into the site's DCS World Tools page. Remote access via virtual machine with authentication.

Rate limiting on ACMI uploads and API endpoint protection. Upload cap at 100 MB input, 512 MB decompressed.

First working version: ACMI parsing, pilot stats, kill ranking, route map.