LsoBot

A log scrapper for DCS World that checks for new carrier landing grades made by humans and sends them to Discord. LsoBot is a Powershell script that runs at regular intervals using Powershell's scheduled job function. It then formats its results and sends them to Discord via Discord's webhook API.

By running as a scheduled job, LsoBot runs silently in the background on Windows and it will persist between reboots. It has no dependencies that do not already ship with modern versions of Windows.

Installation

Requirements

• Powershell 5.1 - This is installed by default on Server 2016-2019 and Windows 10.
• Administrative rights to register the Event Log Source, however normal operation does not require admin rights.
• Manage Webhooks rights on the Discord server to create the webhook

A note on admin rights

Specifically, the Register script needs administrator rights to run this line:

      New-EventLog -LogName 'Application' -Source 'LSO Bot'

All this does is allow LsoBot to write to the Windows Application log by creating a Source for it to write to.

Creating a Discord Webhook

1. Select the settings gear for the channel you want LSO grades to go to.

2. Select Integrations

3. Click Create Webhook

4. Name the webhook whatever you want and give it a picture if you'd like.

5. Copy the Webhook URL and save it for the next step.

Setup LSO Bot

1. Open LsoBot.ps1 and update the following variables:

      $logpath = The location of your dcs.log. Defaults to $env:USERPROFILE\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta_server\Logs\dcs.log
   
       $hookUrl = The URL for your Discord webhook
   

2. Place LsoBot.ps1, LsoBot-Register.ps1, and LsoBot-Deregister.ps1 on the DCS World server in a folder. Recommend: C:\Scripts or C:\LsoBot or something similiar in the root of C:\ or in a common scripts folder.

3. Open LsoBot-Register.ps1 and update $filePath to the location of LsoBot.ps1. Defaults to C:\Scripts\LsoBot.ps1

4. Open Powershell as an Administrator

5. Change directory to the folder used above. e.g. cd C:\Scripts

6. Run .\LsoBot-Register.ps1

   • You should receive a response indicating that a Powershell scheduled job was created.

7. Land on the carrier and each trap should result in a message to the Discord channel with the webhook.

8. If you need to stop the bot from sending messages to Discord, run .\LsoBot-Deregister.ps1 from Powershell.

9. To start LSO Bot again, simply run .\LsoBot-Register.ps1. You do not need to run as administrator on subsequent runs.

Limitations

• The message displayed in Discord is different than the one the client gets on screen. This is a DCS problem, as the logged grade is different than the displayed grade.

• Currently LsoBot runs every 60 seconds and only checks for the latest landing within the last 60 seconds. This means that if n+1 aircraft land within any given polling period, only the last landing will be recorded and sent to Discord. This will be updated in the future.

• In theory, having a comma (,) in your display name could cause LsoBot to cut your name out of the message.

Event Log Reference

LSO BOT writes to the Windows Application log when it starts, stops, or encounters some errors:

Informational

1 - LSO Bot has started

2 - LSO Bot has stopped

100 - A landing event was detected, was formatted correctly, and was sent to Discord successfully.

Errors

400 - After finding a landing event and stripping the pilot and grade of unecessary characters, one or both were a blank object. This happens on some runs if the server has restarted and dcs.log contains no landing grades. This particular condition is checked for at beginning of the script run, so if this error actually triggers it's also possible a regex or split step failed and vaporized the whole string.

401 - After finding a landing event and stripping the pilot and grade of unecessary character, one or both contained a date in ####-##-## format. This is a test to make sure the regex steps occurred properly. Due to DCS not including the pilot name when an AI lands, this will always happen as the string split that deals with removing text before the pilot name will fail, leaving the whole log message. This error is included in case it is clear that the bot failed on a human landing.

402 - The dcs.log could not be found. Check that the correct log path is called for.

403 - The invoke REST API method failed connecting to Discord and a network connection could not be made. Check the hook URL first, and also make sure that the Webhook actually exists in Discord.

404 - The invoke REST API method failed connecting to Discord but for some other reason than a net connection issue.