How to use Specter

Quick start

1. Unzip the download somewhere you can write to — Documents or a games drive — and keep the whole folder together. See Installation.
2. Run specter.exe.
3. Paste your licence key into the box at the top right and click Activate. See Activating your licence.
4. Click Getting Started in the top bar and load one of the two bundled demo missions, or use Load ACMI / drag & drop to open your own Tacview recording.
5. Start at Action Briefing — it opens automatically after a load with the mission summary, your session grade, and a flow diagram pointing at the tabs worth visiting for that particular flight.

Installation

Specter is a portable Windows application — there is no installer. Unzip the download and run specter.exe.

What is in the folder:

System requirements

Activating your licence

Your licence key is emailed to you after purchase. It is a long string of letters and digits separated by dashes.

1. Copy the whole key — every character matters. Select the entire cell in the email; spacing, dashes and case do not matter, a missing character does.
2. Paste it into the Licence Key box at the top right of the window and click Activate.
3. You should see 👑 PRO ACTIVE appear immediately.

One licence covers one PC. If you replace or rebuild your machine, email contextgovern@gmail.com and the key will be released for the new computer.

Running without a key puts you in FREE TRIAL MODE: replay loading works, but premium presentation features are locked until you activate.

Your first debrief

Specter does not replace Tacview — Tacview records the flight, Specter analyses the recording afterwards. The workflow is four steps:

1. Fly with Tacview enabled. DCS writes a .acmi recording to your Tacview folder in Documents on every flight. Nothing to configure. Zipped .zip.acmi files work too.
2. Load the file. Click Load ACMI, press Ctrl+O, or drag the recording onto the window. Specter parses the telemetry, sanitises broken tracks and detects every event before the first screen appears.
3. Read what it found. The Action Briefing tab opens with the mission summary, your session grade, and the detected events — launches, kills, merges, overshoots, defensive breaks — each with its geometry.
4. Study the engagement, then export. Open any event in the 3D Kill Cam, check the shot against its engagement zone, and export a written after-action report for your flight.

No recording of your own yet? The Getting Started tab offers two bundled demo missions, Operation Iron Curtain (a 4v4 BVR intercept) and Operation Steel Rain (SEAD and strike against an IADS), plus one-click access to the Sensor Sandbox.

Loading recordings

Specter reads standard Tacview ACMI 2.2 files:

• .acmi — plain text recordings
• .zip.acmi — zipped recordings (extracted automatically)

DCS writes recordings to:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Tacview\

Three ways to open a file:

• Load ACMI button in the title bar
• Drag & drop the file onto the Specter window
• Associate .acmi with specter.exe and double-click recordings to open them directly

The tabs, explained

The left sidebar groups everything into four areas plus live mode. Keyboard numbers 1–8 jump straight to the main ones (see Controls).

Replay

Analyse

Debrief

Explore

C2 Live

Install the exporter once:

1. Copy SPECTER_Export.lua (from the dcs-export folder, or the SPECTER_Export.lua file in the download) to %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\SPECTER_Export.lua. For DCS Open Beta the folder is Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Scripts\.
2. Add one line to the end of Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Export.lua (create the file if it does not exist):

   local specter = loadfile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\SPECTER_Export.lua]]); if specter then specter() end

3. Restart DCS. Open the C2 Live tab in Specter and fly. Recording starts on the first packet — you do not have to press anything.

What gets recorded

From the first packet of a session, every frame is written to an ACMI file in Documents\SPECTER\Recordings\ as it arrives. The C2 tab shows the filename, its size on disk, and how much mission time it holds.

That is separate from the live window — the few minutes of telemetry the map and 3D view keep in memory so they can draw a trail. The window is bounded, because 20 updates a second held forever would eventually exhaust RAM. The recording is not: it is bounded only by your disk.

The script chains to whatever was registered before it, so it works alongside SRS, DCS-BIOS and Tacview without breaking them. It sends 20 updates a second and caps at 120 entities per update, so it costs almost nothing in frame rate.

Servers that delay their own Tacview feed

Many public servers delay or restrict their server-side Tacview export, usually by ten minutes, so nobody can use a live feed of the whole server to find opponents. It is a real anti-cheat measure and worth respecting.

Specter's export is a different thing, and the difference is worth being clear about:

• It reads your own DCS client, through the same public Export.lua interface that SRS, DCS-BIOS and Tacview's own client-side export use.
• It therefore sees only what your client already has — objects within 100 nm of your aircraft, which is what the server has already chosen to send you. It cannot reveal anything your client was not given.
• Nothing is transmitted anywhere. The data goes to a UDP socket on your own machine.

Controls & camera

Camera (3D views)

Playback

Tab shortcuts

Terrain & theatres

Specter renders the ground from real elevation data, so the ridgeline that masked your radar is the ridgeline that was actually there. Seven theatres ship with the download: Caucasus, Syria, Persian Gulf, Nevada, Marianas, Normandy and The Channel.

Six more are available separately: Afghanistan, South Atlantic, Iraq, Kola, Germany Cold War and Sinai. Download the .terrain file you want, drop it into data\terrain\ next to the executable, and restart Specter. Nothing else to configure.

Settings & performance

Open ⚙ Settings in the title bar. Everything saves automatically.

Use the viewport filters (Air, Gnd, Msl, Sea) to hide what you are not studying — a large mission can hold thousands of objects.

Updating

Specter updates itself. When you start the app it quietly checks a signed manifest on the Specter website. If a newer build exists, a green Update to vX.Y.Z button appears in the top bar:

1. Click the update button. Specter closes, hands the job to the bundled specter-updater.exe, and relaunches you on the new version automatically.
2. Or update by hand at any time by double-clicking specter-updater.exe — it prints what it is doing.
3. Your settings and licence are untouched — updates only replace the executable.

Do not delete specter-updater.exe — it is what makes future updates work. A log of every updater run is kept at %APPDATA%\Specter\updater.log.

See the Updates page for the current version and release notes.

Troubleshooting

The ground is flat, or there is no map

The theatre's elevation file is not installed. Check data\terrain\ for a .terrain file matching your mission's map, and see Terrain & theatres. If it is present, you probably moved specter.exe out of its folder — unzip the whole folder and run it from there.

The terrain is too dark or washed out

Settings → Cinematic: raise Terrain brightness, set Haze strength to 0, or raise Terrain exaggeration to make ridgelines read more clearly (it never changes a measurement).

It runs slowly

Turn Cinematic mode off (the biggest saving), lower MSAA, shorten the Trail window, and use the viewport filters to hide what you are not studying. Large recordings take a moment to parse the first time — the status bar shows progress.

Aircraft look too big or too small

Settings → Tactical → Mesh scale.

Playback is choppy

The recording is sparse — few position updates per second. Use the Upsampler, or record with full-detail Tacview telemetry.

My licence key will not activate

• Check you copied the whole key. Spacing, dashes and capitals do not matter; a missing character does.
• "Already activated on another computer" — one licence covers one PC. Replaced or rebuilt your machine? Email us and we release the key.
• Make sure you are running the version you downloaded, not an older copy from a previous download.

Live telemetry never arrives

• Confirm the line is in Export.lua, directly in Scripts\.
• Check the port: Settings → C2 port must match SPECTER.port in the script.
• Allow Specter through Windows Firewall when prompted (it uses a local UDP socket).
• Check Saved Games\DCS\Logs\dcs.log for lines tagged SPECTER. None means the script is not being loaded.

Getting help

If something is not working, the log file tells us far more than a description can. It records your graphics hardware and what happened when a recording was opened:

%APPDATA%\Specter\specter.log

Paste that path into Explorer's address bar, or use Settings → Reach Out To Us → Open folder.

• Discord — join the server
• Email — contextgovern@gmail.com