Armada 1 Logging

Star Trek: Armada is of course a software product and as such it also has some built-in means of logging things going on. Some of them can be found by carefully looking at the files delivered by the game. Others are not quite visible. Here are some means of activating/using logging in Armada.

One method that is definitely not obvious, is the ATVI mechanism. When placing a file named ATVI (no extension!) in the root folder of a Star Trek: Armada installation, its mere presence will activate some logging. The contents of the file are of no relevance, so an empty file will already do the trick.

If you want to deactivate the ATVI logging, simply delete the file or rename it.

There will be different kinds of files showing up in the folder Logs, some of which are not always created:

• The usually created log files written by this mechanism will be named by the pattern log_<user name>_(<date>)_(<time>).txt. They contain general log messages, like engine physics flags, DirectX messages or internal warnings, such as missing sprite names. They are very similar to what is described in section Default Logging. Main difference is, that the naming is different and the files persist.
• De-Sync-Logs are named by the pattern SYNC__<hex digits>__LOG___<number>_OG___<number>_<user name>_(<date>)_(<time>).txt (or similar). They are usually empty (0 bytes), so the intended purpose of these files is yet not quite clear.
• De-Sync-Dumps are named by pattern SYNC__<hex digits>__DUMP__<number>_<user name>_(<date>)_(<time>)

These files will remain afterwards, in contrast to the standard log file logfile.txt, that will be overwritten by each new instance of Armada.

Armada does by default already log to the file Logs\logfile.txt. The amount of log output can be influenced by altering the Logfile.cfg file in the root folder of the Armada installation. Everything with a semicolon (;), pound symbol (#) or slash (/) in front of it will be considered a comment and the rest of the line is ignored. By this means also a number of logging options are deactivated by default. Removing the comment symbol activates a specific logging option.

Some options are not meant for Armada, but for one of it's predecessors. Do not use/activate those.

The default options (active in the unmodified stock game) are the following:

• Fatal,
• Error,
• Warning,
• LogClasses,
• Diagnostic and
• PHYSICS.

Note: The logfile.txt will be overwritten by Armada if it already exists. So information is not kept. Each new instance of Armada will remove the old log contents and write its own instead. This is one of the main advantages of the ATVI approach above: Each file has a unique name and is therefore kept.