ACT Guide

ACT overview

Here are some links used through this guide:

• ACT Website
• ACT Download page
• Direct ACT download link
• TSWACT addon

What is ACT?

Before installing it, you should know what it actually is.

ACT, Advanced Combat Tracker, is a standalone program that will parse a game’s combat log to extract statistics about your encounters with game’s creatures.

This implies several things in order to have it working:

• ACT must run when you play
• It has to know where to look for the combat log
• It has to learn how to parse the combat log

Concerning the reporting part, ACT has a fairly flexible output system. It can draw graphs, export statistics to a database or an HTML page, display some information in real time and all kinds of things like that.

How could it do that all?

Actually, it does not. Although it has a strong set of features on its own, it was designed for EverQuest II only. Later, it gained support for plugins in order to work with more games.

There are two “kinds” of plugins: parsing plugins and generic plugins. Several parsing plugins are available on the download page, which are also available directly from the Startup Wizard as we’ll see later.

ACT and The Secret World

As you probably guessed now, using ACT with TSW will require a parsing plugin.

There is also the TSWACT addon that aims to integrate ACT and TSW better. It will allow you to one-click show the HTML report. It will also help ACT determining the combat’s end, which may be tricky in some situation from the combat log only.

Quick install guide

Enabling the combat log

By default, TSW does not create a combat log for ACT to parse. You have to enable it each time you run the game.

To achieve that, you will need an auto_login script file, that is run every time you choose a character. Here is the typical content for this file:

delay 5000
/logcombat on

This file is to be placed in the “Scripts” folder in your TSW installation directory. You can safely create it if it is missing.
Create the file as a simple text file (e.g. using Notepad) and name it « auto_login » (without quotes).

If your game is launched already, you can just type the command before installing ACT. If not, just launch the game and connect a character to create the log.

For the record, here are the corresponding commands for the other client’s languages:

English client

/logcombat on

French client

/compterendu on

German client

/kampfaufz an

Installing ACT [skip this step if you have ACT installed already]

Click this direct download link

or go to the download page and choose “Advanced Combat Tracker – Setup”. Once download, just launch it to install ACT.

Installing the TSW parsing plugin

On first run, ACT will prompt you with the startup wizard. If you used ACT already, this wizard is available via a button in the “Options” tab, under the “Miscellaneous” option group.

1. Click “Next”
2. Click “1: Get avalaible parsing plugins”
3. Wait for the dropdown menu to fill up, then select “(63) TSW Parsing Plugin”
4. Click “2: Use this plugin”
5. Click “Next”
6. Say “No” (we will not use ACT with EverQuest II)
7. Navigate to your game’s installation directory and select the file which name starts with “CombatLog” (if you have several one, look at the remaining name part, it is a date date, just select the most recent one)
8. Click “Next”
9. Configure these options if you want, then click “Close”

Configuring ACT