Newsletters
After action for the PoC
After having worked on Tactical Paddles for a good half year now (on and off) I can say I'm happy to say I started it.
Feedback has been positive and some communities fully adopted it even in its very raw state.
It's good to mention Tactical Paddles has been in a very raw state.
Everything you see is a first implementation, with adjustments during initial testing.
Thanks to Fox3's adaptation and mouth to mouth advertisement it grew and we are happy to report that we are tracking over 40 DCS servers already.
With a little luck a very major revision is on the way next week already!
Updates and news
Making sure everybody is up to date with the latest and greatest updates of paddles this "news" page has been created.
I'll try and somewhat regularly give updates on development, ideas and will try and get ideas and feedback.
We'll see how this goes and is received.
Grading
Grading was done based on documentations with input from testers (very valuable to mention)
Little thought was put into useability for now from a user perspective in the grades itself.
It was about making sure comments were consistent and complete.
Paddles was eager to mention every little detail you did wrong.
It wasn't giving feedback, it was roasting it felt like sometimes, which may have caused some bad feeling from the users towards the service.
Of course, paddles.contact was always meant to be a learning environment as Tactical DCS is known for.
But we first had to know what Paddles was capable off. We know now. It's a lot.
The comments themselve seem accurate, especially for the F-18.
The discrepency between the F-14 and the wrong ball feedback DCS is causing some confusion sometimes
Please know that the ball in DCS seems to be configured for the F-18. With the F-14 being quite a bit longer it generally will need a higher ball (in DCS) to be guided on to the #3 wire.
So the algorithm is undergoing a big makeover. Lots to be changed and improve to make it what it needs to be.
Both a challenge and a guidance tool for anyone landing on a carrier!
Hopefully V2 (Coming SOON) will be closer to what we all want!
Wire catching
We made it a goal for paddles not to be reliant on DCS. The DCS comments and wire can only be extracted when all comms are done correctly.
This can be a PITA and Tactical Paddles does not care for it. We like it ziplip anyway
So at Tactical Paddles we trained a model to detect which wire is the most likely to have been caught.
We know it makes mistakes because there's a lot of parameters that go into it, but overall it's quite good.
It can continuously improve, so we'll try and keep training it!
Engagement
Grading in itself is not engaging. You doing something without a back and forth doesn't get you back in.
We are however planning on making things a lot more interesting. Greenieboards have been teased for a while now.
But something that will come first will be Carrier Qualification (CQ) currency.
Keeping up to date and challenging yourself to be consistent and get the safest recovery streak possible.
Of course the biggest part of the engagement comes from you!
The players. Helping eachother satisfy paddles.
Doing trend analysis on your own landings together with a buddy can be a great way to share tips.
On top of this Tactical Paddles will focus on giving "tips" more in the future based on tendencies and trends
Feedback system
Tactical Paddles is a community project. I, Dutchie am maybe a singular developer, but the project only succeeds and can become great if we all want the best for paddles.contact.
Feedback, discussions and ideas are always welcome!
Don't hesitate and open a forum post in the Tactical DCS discord in the paddles-contact forum.
Donations
I want to take some time to thank everyone for the donations made through "buy me a coffee".
Tactical Paddles is free, but hosting it costs money. Don't worry, that's not your problem.
But all the tokens of appreciation are received very very well!
So thank you all!
I promise I've definitely needed the coffee while working on the v2 version of the grady.
paddles.contact performance
After the PoC I'm happy to say that all the services (both tracking and webservices) have been working very well.
However, it isn't a true PoC if there wasn't stuff that I wanted to improve.
There has been some servers that sometimes got their tracking skipped. This is something that shouldn't happen.
In the near future there should be a more rigid system in place, but that will take a little bit.
Most important is that it is noted and hopefully I'll be able to get a more rigid sytem in place that brings more control and visibility to the server users as well.
On top of this, the website itself has to be improved.
Sometimes it can be a little slow due to the queries running a little long.
Some technical debt that will easily be fixed.
DCS-gRPC rust-server
The rust-server from the developers at DCS-gRPC has been detremental in getting paddles online.
Sometimes it caused a little confusion.
Errors thrown that were not breaking, some DCS bugs that were thought to be the rust-server (none were the case) and performance issues.
All and all after investigating it all the rust-server seems extremely stable, performant and easy to use, without any reason to think differently
A huge thanks to the developer at DCS-gRPC to make this possible.
For now it will keep being the DCS Server program that makes paddles possible.
Bye
Thank you all for being part of this!
I'm not done by a long shot, so don't hesitate to reach out with anything!
Greetings,
Dutchie!