All about paddles...
for pilots
for server admins
Hi there pilot!
Welcome again to paddles.contact
No matter what carrier based aircraft you fly, no matter your skill, and not matter your goals, I hope all our tooling will help you push your enjoyment of DCS even further.
We've been building this website, server and analyser for the past months to bring all the data to you.
As mentioned before, all our gradings are done by our homemade algorithms. We'll explain further about those a little further down, but we want to make sure
it's clear we want your feedback and we want to improve. You think the Glideslope doesn't match the glideslope the ball puts you on? Let us know.
How it works
The graphs
The grading
How do get started? Just fly!
No installation, no long registration, not even checking in with the carrier before landing
Check with your favorite server admins if they support paddles.contact. (If they don't maybe convince them to ;) )
The moment you join a dcs server paddles will send a very specific ID to you.
You'll find it in the top right chat. (Tip: Click ctrl+shift to be able to select and copy the ID)
With this identifier you can register to view all your personal data in the dashboard section.
No worries about rushing to sign up, as soon as the server admins onboard your landings will be tracked.
So even if you only found out after doing 10 of the most perfect carrier approaches you've ever done, all that data will be visible after signing up.
I've been getting this question a few times, so I cannot state it enough. All is free
Donations (bottom right corner) are appreciated, but please do not feel obligated.
See your glideslope
See your approach path
Get usefull points of interest
See world information
See your grade and LSO comments
Our grades are calculated by our own algorithms independently from DCS! Even your Wave-Offs can be analysed
(No "no comms" anymore)
Get an easier to read explanation on the shorthands used by the LSO to make analysing your possible improvement easier
Click for previous
Click for Next
Grading. The hardest part of it all. Translating something quite subjective into hard numbers has been a challenge, but I'm very happy with how far we' come.
Feedback is always welcome, please let us know if you miss anything or if something needs to be changed.
In short, our grading is done with a lot of data and outside of the lua environment.
This means there is no real downside to go over data multiple times, retrospectively and do trend analysis on the full path flown.
The grading will (once fully finished), not only look at your deviations, but also at your general stability.
For instance, if you are a little high the model will regard it as less of an issue than when you are high, but want to compensate so bad you'll get low.
This is all quite standard to take into account for a human, for most automatic grading systems out there though those nuances are close to impossible.
we're however trying to get as close as we can and hopefully will get something that feels natural.
We already treat the grading models as a living and breathing thing. It gets constant updates, adjustments and every time we make changes all tracks previously flown will be regraded.
I cannot stress this enough, our grading will get better and better the more feedback we get.
Server admin info
Minimise the hassle
Hi there fellow server admins!
At TDCS we know how much of a hassle it can be to host your servers, install all the addons, manage your discord community and also make sure the performance is still good.
We wanted to take away as much of those troubles as possible right off the bat. For both users and server admins.
The only thing you as a server admin will have to do is install DCS-gRPC. A highly performant process that runs attached to DCS.
It's widely used already and their vision is to try and add as many tools as possible to it, so not all tools need to do their own tracking and polling of objects.
Tools already integrated were OverlordBot, but LotATC for DCS was for instance also looking to integrate as it would reduce the load on the server.
On top of these tool it's used by a lot of servers and we at TDCS have automated our server admin process almost entirely by using it.
Already have a LSO bot?
We are somewhat aware of other tools doing LSO tracking. In no way do we think we do everything better, but one thing we do is centralise it all. Out of the box integration with discord and even collecting all the landings for a registered pilot no matter what server the pilot flies on. Even if you like your product better it might be nice for your players that do fly on other servers as well to have your server be monitored. We can disable the discord integration if you want and only save it in our repositories so your users will still be able to see it all! In no way do we say you should throw away everything else, but even if you want to keep using your old solution there still are reasons to get your servers onboarded. (With minimal to no impact on your server)
After onboarding
Once DCS-gRPC is installed and you reached out to us to onboard (for free) the paddles server can connect to it and will start monitoring all carrier landings.
This was done so by design so there is a centralised place of tracking, grading, updating and also viewing the tracks.
If a pilot flies on community A first and then lands on a carrier in a mission with squadron B both landings will be displayed in the same dashboard in their profile.
On top of that it's one less service to maintain for you as a server admin.
Security
We understand the possible questions on opening up ports for paddles.contact to connect to DCS-gRPC and want to provide you with some additional information to make sure you're sufficiently satisfied.
IP Whitelisting in yoru firewall is supported and should be quite easy to do to make sure only the paddles.contact server can connect.
While DCS-gRPC gives a lot off possibilities in DCS, it does not provide access to your sytem. We recommend keeping "eval" disabled.
No scripts, files or other are injected by paddles.contact and it uses the plain DCS-gRPC installation which is fully opensource and maintained here: https://github.com/DCS-gRPC/rust-server