I think what would be helpful is if a veteran user of WWS could come up with a best practices type of post to help the uninitiated. Something along the lines of what do you change in your WTF folder for the combat log range, how often do you need to do this, do you rename each combat log and if so what is the easiest way to do so, etc.

I know that this info is already here on these boards in a myriad of posts but since this thread is specifically about WWS it might not be a bad idea to collate all that info here.

/combatlog is entirely external from the game's interface. Nothing you do to the interface will have any effect on what does and doesn't get recorded in the log file. It simply records everything you're in range of.

Sebudai can probably go into greater detail, but here's a basic rundown of what we do:

Before each attempt on a boss Sebudai drops a Sentry Totem. That way each attempt is separated by "Sebudai gains Sentry Totem." in the combat log, and that's a string that should never appear during an actual encounter. If/when the boss dies, the log will have "[Boss Name] dies." so you search from that, up to the last Sentry Totem gain, and that's your log.

Anyone else who was logging mails their section of the log to Seb, he deletes Rikktor's log immediately, then runs the WWS parser, saves it locally, uploads both the wws-history and the new wws-YYYYMMDD-HHMM folders to our server and that's it. Actually all you really need to upload from wws-history is the updated .xml file in that folder, I believe, but whatever!

Unfortunately the hosted version of WWS is rapidly becoming a lot better than the "local" version, because I would really prefer to have all our logs on our own server, with the History index like we have now.

Owned.

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...171#post331171

At the time of this error, Rikktor was using a machine which was only getting 2fps, so it WWS could have had trouble syncing up the events (as they were recorded at different timestamps).

The local version has some ability to split logs.

On the Logs and Reports Panel, there is a Trim Logs option that when selected gives you a drop down of mobs in the combat log.

Trim logs : Trims the log data, by choosing to start and end the report when a given mob is first seen or last-seen

I haven't expriemented with it much yet so I don't know if it's the same logic as the hosted log version (I believe it's not). It may be good to minimize work on things where you are one shotting. However, for a log that contains multiple attempts on a boss, it sounds like it will lump all attempts into a single report, based on that description. I only briefly messed with this last night (coincidently I am just now starting to set up our Web Stats as well)

I'd really have to test. Has anyone tried this feature and have more detail? I didn't have a log that contained multiple attempts on a boss (or anything that would mirror that in a combat log).

Great tip. I've been thinking about finding some ability i never use normally and try that. Mind Vision would work if i didn't use it to annoy our rogues so much.


How long range on the combatlog do you people use? And how many logs?

So, the in-game combat log range modifications that various mods do (SWStats and Deadly Boss Mods come to mind) have no effect on the range of /combatlog? Nor the setting in config.wtf? If this is the case, syncing logs becomes mandatory on fights with long ranges - Gruul, in particular.

How important is time skew? If one person's log is a few seconds off, does this effect things much? How many people do you usually have logging? If their local performance is crappy, are log entries dropped?

The idea with the sentry totem as a marker is a really good idea. I'll have to find something equally obscure to mark my own logs with - underwater breathing probably is a good bet.

How often does the combatlog get flushed to disk? I have this crazy idea to install cygwin and ssh on my WoW computer to feed the combat log to a second machine so I can offload parsing. Even if it's not quite realtime, external scripting tools combined with a marker as described above will make splitting the log much easier.

Yes, it works very well when you're one-shotting stuff. Even when you're not, it saves you some trouble--you don't have to find the exact beginning of the kill attempt (or whichever attempt you want to post), just locate the 5-minute gap in the action for rezzing/rebuffing, and chop somewhere in there.

Only upon logout as far as I know. Cygwin wouldn't be needed, writing a tail like program that even splits upon getting a certain line is trivial.

I've run parses without logging out like when we're flying from Gruul to Magtheridon I'll get the Gruul parse done.

You can force a garbage collection (/script collectgarbage("collect")), which will flush the log to disk. However, it'd be really nice if WoW closed the filehandle when you disabled logging, or allowed a destination argument for /combatlog.

For those that use FuBar, I believe PerformanceFu allows you to force a garbage collection with a left-click.

I just played with this feature today. Basically, for 1-shot boss kills, it's great. For multiple attempts, though, you're gonna have to hack up the logs yourself. For example, last night it took us 3 tries to down the Curator (insert laugh track here). I trimmed the log by setting both To and From to "The Curator". The resulting parse shows me dying twice, not DPSing like 60% of the time, Curator Hateful Bolting everyone, etc. Since the fight is fresh in my mind, I can work through the weirdness and see what happened. But going back to this log in a month would be completely worthless.

I love Tsigo's post about "marking" attempts with a spell you'd never use during a raid. Very clever solution! Here's hoping Blizzard eventually throws us a bone and at least unlocks the file when we're not logging, but for now, that tip makes it doable if tedious.

Ah, so the log range matters, but things like SimpleCombatLog changing the formating won't. Makes sense. For now I'll use DBM's "maximum" range setting. Does anyone know what the max range is, btw? DBM and SWStats have 150; a thread in this forum suggested 200. Any consensus on how far we can go with this (and have it matter)?

Oh, I know it's trivial. I just want to do it, remotely, in a more familiar programming environment, that of my main Linux workstation. The idea is to open up an SSH session and 'tail -f' the combatlog and feed that into a parser that can more easily split up and archive the logs. I can do this all in Windows, but I don't really want to alt-tab.

Interestingly enough, I think you can also truncate the combatlog while WoW has it locked: I opened it in notepad and summarily deleted all the text, then saved it. Back to file size of zero. However, I think WoW keeps logging at the position it seeked to, leaving a couple of megs of zeros at the start of the file.

Thanks for the tip about garbage collection forcing the log to flush. That'll be handy for "Start Log" and "Stop Log" macros for me.

Yeah, I used to relog to save it. This will be handy. Will a reloadui also work?

Couldn't you just rename the combat log file after each attempt?? Or would you need to logout/login for a new file to be created by the client? If that's the case would just copy/pasting and then flushing the combat log not work better?

The file isn't written until /console reloadui or the garbage collection trick.

I tried /console reloadui and than copying the log file and renaming attempt1BossX. It worked, but really easier to place a start/end mark and parsing it that way. (I use ice armor as a mark)

If I expect to be one-shotting most things, I'll just make one big log, and then crop out any wipes afterwards by hand and use the built-in "trim" feature. If that sounds like too much of a pain, I'll relog quickly after a fight and rename the file.

Finally, we've found a use for the NE priests's racial "elune's grace" ! Time to move it into one of my action buttons ! :-D

On a serious note, having started to use this tool frequently now and it is really a very good tool to see what happens(happened) and where we can improve. And getting annyoed by having the need to split manually too.

What I do now is I start recording at a boss with /combatlog. Upon kill or wipe, I stop with /combatlog, alt-tab out and copy & paste the logfile, which creates a copy of it. Then I open the log with notepad, go to the end and then scroll fast up to find the jump in date/time (ie the gap between two attepmts, since the log contains all attempts/bosses for the night, unless you close the game client and move/delete the log manually each time). Then I mark the lines there with shift-cursor up a few times, then a CTRL-SHIFT-HOME which marks all the text from there up to the start of the file. Hit delete, remove emtpy line, safe the file. Voila, only one attempt/kill per log-file.

All this is easy and fast done, though it is a bit tedious. I'm seriously thinking about trying to catch BigWigs custom events, since I think it does send Bossengaged, Bossdown and Wipe syncronization tokens. If I can catch these fine and get timestamps in a custom addon, I can do a simple program that runs through and splits at these timepoints automagically.

That all said, I'd like to have the current hosting server features of wws in the client version, especially the last few log entries before player death is very useful.

I actually just entered once /combatlog gruul-attempt2.txt to see if it picks it up. It has no effect in the client, unfortunately. Would definitly be nice. Someone go and bug Slouken

I take it you have to do a reloadui or garbage collection before you alt tab?

No. I cannot confirm the observations above that it doesn't get written until GC. I does for me. It does not write immediately, there is a buffer, but after a fight or wipe there's always data in the file for me, with a running game client and no prior gc or reload ui from me. I do also run with addon memory usage set to "0", ie infinite which is default and forced in wow come patch 2.1.0.

I guess what you need to do is force a buffer flush/write - or simply wait until that is done automatically. I did check if I got the end written in the file. On a kill that's usually a lot of mana ticks through BoW and such. Note that I only do log in 25man instances. I'd guess that it simply has enough events to cause frequent buffer flushes.

I also did have another person log during our last gruul. If I add in his logs, the values change by less than 1% so I'm feeling fairly good with only my data parsed. I guess having a very good connection helps. Log of course extended to 200 yards (actually I don't even set it back to normal values)

Had some time, so worked out a small program that splits the CombatLog while running when receiving a marker spell.

The program follows the end of the log, so it creates split log files while WoW is running. The moment it receives your marker spell it splits off and creates a new file to continue logging in.

You can change marker.txt to the spell it should split on. Be sure to not include newlines or spaces at the end, and type it exactly as it appears in the WoWCombatLog.txt.

Start WoW, and start logging (/combatlog). Then start CombatLogSplitter, a new file called SplitLog1.txt should appear. As soon as data appears in WoWCombatLog.txt it should also be added to SplitLog1.txt. Once it receives your marker line, it will close SplitLog1.txt and open SplitLog2.txt.

Be sure to test with decent amounts of data and give it some time. Buffering is done by all parts of the process and not everything will appear straight away.

If anyone finds this useful, or the idea good. I could work this out a bit more and add some options.

[edit]New version in this post:
Combat Logging and multiple fights
[/edit]

I think it's a great idea. I'll give it a whirl on our next raid and let you know how it goes.

And thanks for including the source code. With the amount of keyloggers floating around these days, no one in his right mind is going to run a random WoW-related binary