IL-2 Campaign Tracker and Campaign Service Record

[Arrow_1974]

@AcesDarthBubu
Thanks for the files. I revised the input prompt for the LLM and also revised the mission debriefing.

Accurate Loss Causes in Mission Narratives

You pointed out that squadron mates lost to mid-air collisions or engine failures were being described as "shot down" in the narrative — which was factually wrong. This has been fixed.

The parser now classifies the specific cause of each aircraft loss:

• Shot down — destroyed by enemy gunfire
• Mid-air collision with an enemy — both aircraft destroyed simultaneously
• Mid-air collision with a friendly — two squadron mates collide (the two patterns from real flight logs are both detected)
• Friendly fire — destroyed by a friendly aircraft's guns
• AA fire — brought down by ground-based anti-aircraft fire
• Combat damage / crash — took hits and subsequently burned or crashed
• Mechanical loss — aircraft lost with no enemy involvement (engine failure, accident)

The AI narrator now uses the correct cause when describing what happened to each pilot in the flight. A collision will be written as a collision. An engine failure won't be dressed up as enemy action.

As always, stories are generated on demand — this only applies to newly generated chapters. Existing cached stories are not affected.

Feedback welcome, especially if you encounter a loss type that's still being misclassified.

Alex, aka Arrow_1974

Here the latest download link: IL-2 Tracker v. 2.2.7

[AcesDarthBubu]

You sir is a wizard of your art. Thank you for such a quick fix. Will test it out.

[JG123410]

Just wanted to post back and say thanks for this utility. It really has been a game changer for me. 😀

I'm hoping the topic may get pinned so more folks can see this.

 

Edited May 19 by JG123410

[AcesDarthBubu]

Hello @Arrow_1974, tested all good. So far all the events stated in the story matches what transpired in game. Your story generator is guard railing the LLM pretty well, no hallucinations whatsoever. 

I think at the current state it's safe to say it's at a tip top state. 

If you would want to enhance it further, the things I see that could perhaps further enhanced are:

1. Include narrative mentioning the events that happened to the escorts (being escorted - bombers or escorting the pilot). At the moment, all escort missions are listed as successful. 

2. The structure of the generated story. Sometimes the story skip  ahead mentioning the accolades or the transfer of fellow squadron pilots before mentioning the pilot's return flight from mission. Which is bit odd from the flow of the narration, but not an issue. 

3. The event in game that happens during the return flight are being described happened before reaching target area. Not sure how easy to capture this, perhaps the waypoint (waypoint 3 ?)reached in log can be used to determine whether the flight is enroute to target or back from target. 

These are the points i think i can see as opportunity to enhance if you decided to. 

Anyway, really enjoying this mod. Keep up the good work and thanks again. 

Edited May 21 by AcesDarthBubu

[Arrow_1974]

@AcesDarthBubu:
 

Thank you for the detailed feedback — very well observed. Here's where things stand:

---

1. Escort mission outcomes — partially implemented

This is now addressed, but with an important limitation depending on how you play.

Career mode: The tracker now reads the mission type directly from the career database. When it detects an escort sortie (escorting bombers, attackers, or transports), it counts all aircraft in the escorted formation from the flight log and passes that data to the story generator — how many aircraft were in the formation, how many returned, how many were lost. The narrator will now reflect whether the escort succeeded or failed, rather than always describing it as a clean success. Note that escort formation outcomes are only included for missions you personally flew — missions on the same day that the squadron flew without you are summarized separately and do not include escort formation detail.

Campaign mode: Campaigns do not have a structured mission type database the way careers do. There is no reliable way to automatically detect that a given campaign mission was an escort sortie versus a free hunt or a patrol without either parsing the mission briefing text (fragile across different campaigns and languages) or guessing from aircraft mix (unreliable). For now, escort context is a career-only feature. Campaign stories will continue to describe escort missions without formation outcome detail.

---

2. Story structure — implemented

The story generator now follows a strict chronological order: pre-mission → outbound flight → combat action → return flight → post-mission events (promotions, awards, transfers, losses). Promotions and awards cannot appear in the narrative before the pilot has landed. This applies to both career and campaign mode.

---

3. Outbound vs. return flight events — not implemented

This one is genuinely difficult. IL-2 flight logs do not record a "target reached" event. Waypoint data exists in mission files but is inconsistent across mission types and custom campaigns, and correlating a specific event timestamp with "before target" versus "after target" would require assumptions that could easily produce incorrect results — which would be worse than the current behavior.

This remains on the list as a future enhancement if a reliable approach can be found, but I did not want to rush in a solution that occasionally gets it wrong.

---

As always, these improvements apply to newly generated chapters — existing cached stories are not affected unless you delete and regenerate them.

Here the latest download:
Campaign Tracker v. 2.2.8

Here an example:

Edited May 22 by Arrow_1974

[AcesDarthBubu]

Thanks again @Arrow_1974 for this wonderful mod, again the level of immersion provided by it greatly enhances the official career that the game provides. Without this mod, career gameplay eventually becomes bit too routine and robotic. 

Take for example, the last mission I'd participated was intercepted by a flight of 109s. During the engagement there is a 109 chasing my squadron mate ahead of me. I was behind the 109 and tried to chase, but was too late to prevent the 109 from shooting down my squadron mate. Seeing the spits ahead riddled with bullets and eventually goes down in flame. This scene was in my mind, and when the story generated, told of the name of the squadron mate that shot down by the 109 and the emotion of what 1 would experienced aftermath. It resonated so well with what I experienced in game. Superb.

3rd and 4th paragraphs of the story generated are the part that packs a punch. 

On a side note though, casualties from 2 sorties (1 from player's flight and 1 without) gets lumped into 1 and described to happened during the sortie that player didn't participate. Just another observation I noticed. 

 

[Arrow_1974]

Hey everyone,

A few improvements to the AI story generation have just landed. Here's what's new:

Weather API circuit breaker & persistent cache

The weather enrichment feature (which feeds real historical meteorological data into mission chapters) now handles API outages more gracefully. Previously, if the weather service was unreachable, every single mission in a story generation run would attempt a network call, stall for a timeout, and log a warning — multiplied across hundreds of missions this was slow and noisy.

Now, the first failed API call flips a session-wide circuit breaker: all further weather lookups are skipped immediately rather than retried. This means a single network hiccup no longer drags out the entire generation run.

Additionally, successful weather lookups are now written to a local disk cache that survives server restarts. Previously, the in-memory cache was rebuilt from scratch every time the service started, re-fetching data that was already known. The disk cache eliminates redundant API calls across sessions.

Campaign stories now use the mission briefing text

When generating story chapters for campaign missions, the generator now extracts and uses the free-text description from the mission's .eng briefing file — the narrative text the campaign creator wrote to set the scene for the player.

This gives the AI access to the mission's intended atmosphere, tactical context, and objectives as the campaign author described them. The LLM uses this as source material (not a verbatim quote) to enrich the narrative with the purpose and setting that the campaign creator had in mind. Missions that previously felt generic can now reflect the specific scenario they were designed to portray.

@AcesDarthBubu: Casualties correctly attributed to the right sortie

When the player's squadron flew multiple sorties on the same day — one with the player and one without — losses from both sorties were sometimes being described as if they all happened in the mission the player didn't participate in.

The root cause was that the AI wasn't explicitly told which casualty source belonged to which sortie. The story input contains two separate data sources: squadron_context (losses from the player's own mission) and inter_mission_activities (losses from concurrent sorties the player sat out). The AI was conflating them.

The prompt now makes this distinction explicit: losses in squadron_context are narrated as casualties within the player's own sortie; losses in inter_mission_activities are narrated as concurrent activity happening elsewhere that day. They are no longer merged into a single event.

As always, if you regenerate an existing chapter it will pick up all the above improvements automatically. No manual cache clearing needed for the story side.

Here the download link:

Campaign Tracker v. 2.2.9

Work on version 3.0.0 is underway. The headline feature is an in-app update system built into the Settings Manager: rather than uninstalling and reinstalling the entire mod, only the files that have actually changed will be deployed — similar in principle to how JGSME handles mod file management. More details to follow as development progresses.

[Arrow_1974]

Hey everyone,

Version 3.0.0 of the Campaign Tracker is out. This release focuses on making updates easier to install, and improving the PDF campaign summary. Here's what's new:

---

Built-in Updater in the Settings Manager

The biggest quality-of-life change: you no longer need to run the full installer just to update. The Settings Manager now has an Updates tab where you can install a new release directly from a .zip package.

How it works:

1. Download the update zip from the releases page
2. Open IL2_Settings_Manager.exe → go to the Updates tab
3. Click Select Package, pick the zip, and hit Install

The installer shows a progress bar and handles everything — locales, configs, DLLs, the works. Files that get replaced are automatically backed up as timestamped zips in a backups/ subfolder. If you ever want to roll back to a previous release, the Restore Backup… button lets you pick any of those archives and restore it — so you're never locked into the latest version if something doesn't work for you.

One edge case: the Settings Manager can't replace its own .exe while it's running (that's a Windows thing). So if the update includes a new IL2_Settings_Manager.exe, it saves it as a .pending file and applies it the next time you start the app. You'll see an orange "Restart & Apply" banner at the bottom — just click the button and it handles the rest automatically. After restarting, a green "Updated successfully" banner confirms everything went through cleanly.

Going forward, most updates will be rolled out as lightweight zip packages installable directly via the Updates tab — only the files that actually changed, nothing more. A full setup installer will only be released for major versions that require it (new dependencies, installer-handled registry entries, etc.). So from here on, updating should take about 30 seconds rather than running a full install wizard.

---

Air Kills by Aircraft Type in Campaign PDF Reports

The campaign PDF summary now includes a dedicated Air Kills by Aircraft Type section. Instead of just a total kill count, you get a breakdown of every aircraft type you've shot down across all missions, with totals per type and a grand total.

One caveat worth mentioning: the grand total in this section may occasionally differ slightly from the authoritative kill total shown elsewhere in the report. Aircraft type detection is based on parsing the mission logs, and while I've done my best to classify everything correctly, there will be edge cases where a type is misidentified or missed. It shouldn't be off by much if it happens at all, and it doesn't affect any other part of the tracker — the main kill counters remain unaffected. Think of the by-type breakdown as a useful overview rather than a hard audit figure.

---

Bug Fixes

A few things that have been quietly annoying:

• Fixed: Bailout missions where the pilot landed in no-man's land (between influence polygons) were previously logged as "MIA (Unknown)." They now correctly show as "Bailout (Survived)."
• Fixed: Fire and environmental damage events (AType:2 with AID:-1) were incorrectly tracking the fire as the "last damager," which in some edge cases resulted in wrong kill attribution.
• Fixed: An issue in the kill parser where the same Target ID could be reused during a mission, causing late kills to see the wrong object type.

---

As always — thanks to everyone who's been reporting issues in the thread. Keep the reports coming.

Happy flying! ✈️

 

Download-Link: Tracker version 3.0.0

Edited May 24 by Arrow_1974
Download-Link corrected

[kraut1]

1 hour ago, Arrow_1974 said:

Hey everyone,

Version 3.0.0 of the Campaign Tracker is out. This release focuses on making updates easier to install, and improving the PDF campaign summary. Here's what's new:

---

Built-in Updater in the Settings Manager

The biggest quality-of-life change: you no longer need to run the full installer just to update. The Settings Manager now has an Updates tab where you can install a new release directly from a .zip package.

How it works:

1. Download the update zip from the releases page
2. Open IL2_Settings_Manager.exe → go to the Updates tab
3. Click Select Package, pick the zip, and hit Install

The installer shows a progress bar and handles everything — locales, configs, DLLs, the works. Files that get replaced are automatically backed up as timestamped zips in a backups/ subfolder. If you ever want to roll back to a previous release, the Restore Backup… button lets you pick any of those archives and restore it — so you're never locked into the latest version if something doesn't work for you.

One edge case: the Settings Manager can't replace its own .exe while it's running (that's a Windows thing). So if the update includes a new IL2_Settings_Manager.exe, it saves it as a .pending file and applies it the next time you start the app. You'll see an orange "Restart & Apply" banner at the bottom — just click the button and it handles the rest automatically. After restarting, a green "Updated successfully" banner confirms everything went through cleanly.

Going forward, most updates will be rolled out as lightweight zip packages installable directly via the Updates tab — only the files that actually changed, nothing more. A full setup installer will only be released for major versions that require it (new dependencies, installer-handled registry entries, etc.). So from here on, updating should take about 30 seconds rather than running a full install wizard.

---

Air Kills by Aircraft Type in Campaign PDF Reports

The campaign PDF summary now includes a dedicated Air Kills by Aircraft Type section. Instead of just a total kill count, you get a breakdown of every aircraft type you've shot down across all missions, with totals per type and a grand total.

One caveat worth mentioning: the grand total in this section may occasionally differ slightly from the authoritative kill total shown elsewhere in the report. Aircraft type detection is based on parsing the mission logs, and while I've done my best to classify everything correctly, there will be edge cases where a type is misidentified or missed. It shouldn't be off by much if it happens at all, and it doesn't affect any other part of the tracker — the main kill counters remain unaffected. Think of the by-type breakdown as a useful overview rather than a hard audit figure.

---

Bug Fixes

A few things that have been quietly annoying:

• Fixed: Bailout missions where the pilot landed in no-man's land (between influence polygons) were previously logged as "MIA (Unknown)." They now correctly show as "Bailout (Survived)."
• Fixed: Fire and environmental damage events (AType:2 with AID:-1) were incorrectly tracking the fire as the "last damager," which in some edge cases resulted in wrong kill attribution.
• Fixed: An issue in the kill parser where the same Target ID could be reused during a mission, causing late kills to see the wrong object type.

---

As always — thanks to everyone who's been reporting issues in the thread. Keep the reports coming.

Happy flying! ✈️

 

Download-Link: Tracker version 3.0.0

Hi Alex, thanks very much for the new version.

Just one question: I have clicked on the link and downloaded the file :

IL2_RankMod_Installer.zip

that contains 1 exe:

Is this the new version? I ask only because of the name.

Edited May 24 by kraut1

[Arrow_1974]

@kraut1 Hi Jens,

Oops - wrong link. I corrected it. Please download again.

Edited May 24 by Arrow_1974

[AcesDarthBubu]

Hello @Arrow_1974, somehow when i first start with the 3.0 tracker, it's looking for the old 2.2 ML exe file.

I need to manually run the 3.0ML exe file to run the tracker for the 1st time to overcome the issue. 

FYI

Edited May 25 by AcesDarthBubu

[Arrow_1974]

@AcesDarthBubu
Sorry - I forgot to adjust that.

2 possibilities:
#1. Rename the exe in your tracker installation path to IL2_CampaignTracker_v3_ML.exe

or
 

#2. Download and install again.

Fixed tracker version 3

 

Edited May 25 by Arrow_1974

[JG123410]

Thank you for all these improvements!!

[Arrow_1974]

[Update] v3.1.0 — Career Book Generation

Hey all,

v3.1.0 is out, and the headline feature is something I've wanted to add for a while: AI-generated career books.

Note: You need v3.0.0 installed before you can update to 3.1.0. If you're on an older version, install 3.0.0 first.

Once updated, you'll find a new button on the career detail page that generates a full PDF document covering your pilot's entire service history. Think of it as a personalized wartime memoir — prologue, one chapter per theatre, epilogue, and a stats appendix at the end.

The theatre chapters are built on top of the AI mission stories your career has already accumulated. The LLM reads through all the individual mission accounts for that period and distills them into a single cohesive narrative — finding the dramatic thread, the turning points, the weight of losses. Your actual rank progressions, squadron, kill counts, and decorations are all woven in where they belong.

Award citations

There's an optional feature on top of that: AI-written formal military citations for each decoration. The kind of language that would have actually accompanied the award — appropriate to the country, rank, and period. These slot in below each theatre chapter in chronological order.

You can toggle citations on or off in the Settings Manager under the AI/LLM section.

What you need

• v3.0.0 installed first, then update to v3.1.0
• An LLM API key set up in Settings Manager — OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible provider works
• AI mission story generation enabled, so the book has material to work from

Generation takes a few minutes for a full career, a bit longer if citations are enabled. Once generated, you can export the PDF as many times as you like — regenerating will produce a completely new book.

Hope you enjoy it — would love to see what books people get out of their careers. Let me know your thoughts/experiences with this new feature.

Attached is a book example of my test career.

P.S.: The original pdf generation is still available.

Download v3.1.0 here

career_82_book_20260526_210627.pdf

Edited May 27 by Arrow_1974
Screenshots added, example pdf book added

[Varibraun]

12 hours ago, Arrow_1974 said:

the headline feature is something I've wanted to add for a while: AI-generated career books.

I look forward to giving this a try...thank you Arrow for ALL of your work!

[Varibraun]

@Arrow_1974 I may have missed it, but what is the General Setting => Generate AI Award Citations?

Also, I just generated a Book for a relatively new (Iron Man, so not sure how long he will last) pilot with 11 missions that is attached below in case you want to see what Claude-Sonnet-4.6 is doing with it.  I am still playing around with some of the different LLMs. 

This is another very nice immersion feature for those who enjoy it - thank you! 🫡

 

career_67_book_20260527_181543.pdf

[Arrow_1974]

@Varibraun

Quote

I may have missed it, but what is the General Setting => Generate AI Award Citations?

The Generate AI Award Citations setting controls whether the app generates individual award citations for each decoration your pilot received.

When enabled, the LLM writes a short formal military citation for every medal — the kind of language that would have actually accompanied the award at the time, tailored to the country, rank, and combat context. Citations show up in two places: on the career detail page next to each award (look for the small chevron), and in the career book below each theatre chapter, listed in the order the awards were received.

One thing to be aware of on first use: citations are generated in the background the first time you open the career page with this setting enabled. The chevrons won't appear straight away — just open the page, let it run for a moment, then come back and they'll be there.

When the setting is off, the career detail page works as normal and the book still generates fully — prologue, theatre chapters, epilogue, stats appendix — just without the citations. Useful if you want faster generation or a cleaner read.

Edited May 28 by Arrow_1974

[VISHNU]

Hello @Arrow_1974, I've had a rough week, how to we extract this new version?

 

[Arrow_1974]

@VISHNU

ok - here we go again:

first you need to download and install 

Tracker v3.0.0

if you haven’t done that yet.

then open the settings manager (control gui - settings) and go to the update tab. Select the downloaded update zip (Update 3.1.0) and press install. That’s it. But I’ve already explained that in the previous posts 😉. 

[Arrow_1974]

A Friendly but Important Request Regarding Support for the Campaign/Career Tracker

Hi everyone,

First of all, I’m genuinely happy to see so many people using and enjoying the Campaign/Career Tracker. The amount of feedback, ideas, bug reports, and discussions around it has been fantastic.

That said, I need to ask for your cooperation regarding support requests.

Before posting questions, please follow these steps:

1. Read the README (in your language first!)
The tracker comes with a detailed README available in multiple languages. I invested a significant amount of time to make it as comprehensive as possible, and many common questions, setup issues, troubleshooting steps, and feature explanations are already covered there.

2. Read through the latest comments in this thread
A lot of questions have already been answered — often multiple times. Please take a few minutes to skim recent posts before asking something. There is a good chance the answer is already here.

3. Contact me only if steps 1 and 2 did not solve your issue
Of course, if you genuinely run into a problem that is not covered or you are stuck after doing your due diligence, feel free to reach out. I will still do my best to help.

However, I want to be transparent and set expectations:

This mod was developed entirely in my spare time. While AI helped accelerate the coding parts of the development, I still invested hundreds of hours of my own time to make this project possible — coding, debugging, artwork, testing, translations, documentation, installers, feature development, and maintenance. Also the pro-subscriptions for Chat GPT and Anthropic’s Claude need to be mentioned. They are not for free….

I do not charge any money for this project and I am happy to share it with the community for free. In return, I simply ask that users respect that effort by doing some basic troubleshooting and research before posting questions that have already been answered in the README or in this thread.

I hope you understand, and I appreciate everyone who takes the time to help keep support manageable.

Thank you for the support and for making this project worthwhile.

– Alex

Edited May 29 by Arrow_1974

[VISHNU]

20 hours ago, Arrow_1974 said:

@VISHNU

ok - here we go again:

first you need to download and install 

Tracker v3.0.0

if you haven’t done that yet.

then open the settings manager (control gui - settings) and go to the update tab. Select the downloaded update zip (Update 3.1.0) and press install. That’s it. But I’ve already explained that in the previous posts 😉. 

...ummmm...ok?

[AcesDarthBubu]

Just had time to fly a few sorties. Seems 2 issues came back with the v3.1 release. Misclassifications of AI deaths (collision and self inflicted crash) are indicated as being shot down, and AI casualties happened during player's flight are mixed up as being happened during AI only sortie still happening.

Will test out the career book. Thanks 

Edited May 31 by AcesDarthBubu

[Arrow_1974]

@AcesDarthBubu

I will come up with a solution.

stay tuned

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Great Battles SP Campaign Tracker — Update 3.1.6

Hi everyone,

this update mainly improves the AI Stories system and fixes several generation issues.

AI Stories: better structure

AI Stories are now grouped the same way as Mission Debriefings:

Theatre of Action → Date → Chapters

Each level can be expanded or collapsed. The tracker also remembers the current expand/collapse state when you generate or delete chapters, so the list no longer resets after every action.

New: separate AI-only squadron mission chapters

The tracker can now create short chapters for missions flown by the pilot’s squadron when the player pilot did not personally fly.

Previously, these pure AI squadron missions were woven into the storyline of an actively flown mission on the same day (and could cause some inconsistencies in the narrative). They now receive their own separate, shorter story entry instead. These chapters are written from an airfield/commander perspective, not from the cockpit, and are labelled “Did Not Fly”.

Since pure AI-flown missions do not have a flight log, these chapters can only use the data available in cp.db: participating pilots, kills, losses, mission type, and similar career database information. This also means that some details cannot be known. For example, an AI escort mission can report what the database recorded, but not how well the escort actually performed (which is different to escort missions the player actively flew).

To avoid flooding existing careers, these chapters are only generated when you actively regenerate a relevant date or delete an already existing AI-only/gap chapter.

Fixes

• Multi-mission days now regenerate properly in one click instead of one chapter at a time.
• Partial generation failures are now shown clearly in the UI, for example when one chapter succeeds but another fails due to an API/LLM issue.
• Deleted legacy gap-day chapters now regenerate as individual per-mission chapters.
• Gap-day handling now works correctly across all generation paths.
• Air kill data is now taken from the detailed sortie kill columns instead of sometimes outdated rollup values in cp.db.

As always, feedback and bug reports are welcome.

Installation link: Update version 3.1.6 (you need to have at least version 3.0.0 installed to be able to update to v3.1.6)

[Arrow_1974]

Please download and install v 3.1.6 again (use link from previous post above). 

Two root causes were fixed:

1. Narrative memory isolation between same-day chapters — when generating a batch of chapters, the story memory from chapter 1 is no longer fed wholesale into chapter 2 if they share the same date. Only the list of already-used chapter titles carries over (to prevent title duplication). Each chapter now draws its narrative context from its own mission data, not from what was just written about the mission that preceded it.

2. Personnel transfers gated to the last sortie — squadron arrivals and transfers that happened on a given day are now only included in the context of the day's final sortie, exactly like awards and promotions already were. Previously they appeared in every sortie's context for that day, causing the LLM to mention new arrivals in both chapter 1 and chapter 2 of a two-sortie day.

Sorry for the inconvenience

Edited June 3 by Arrow_1974