DCS World Track files.... Glitchy?

So I know everyone's excited about the F-16 Viper dropping today, but I have a concern...

I've been saving a considerable library of track files to post online one day, and felt today was the day.

So I went into track replay in DCS World aaaaannnnnnd... wth? These are all glitchy. ALL of them from Jan of 2018 to today. Wrong HUD modes, crashing into the ground after takeoff, firing guns at a MiG that's off to the right of my canopy bow, missiles firing when my target is behind me.... the list of boogers goes on.

Is this common?

Yes, very. Never really worked the last 40 years.
All in line with the general DCS experience of multiple small and annoying setbacks if you are of a creative mind recording flights or building lots of missions (and God forbid, you add lua code to your missions).
You shouldn't really do anything but fly online airquake using DCS (and throw money on your screen in excitement when a new beta module drops)

That's not really what tracks are meant to be. Any time they change something in the AI, flight model, missile guidance, etc. the track will start to behave differently. A track can only be expected to replay correctly with the software version it was recorded with. And even then, DCS has limitations on how strict its determinism is. Making a computer simulation of this complexity 100% deterministic is next to impossible so very long tracks or tracks of very complex missions almost certainly break at some point.

So we can just replace that quote paragraph with "It's borked, won't be fixed and there is no intent to fix it either". Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The truth is that a replay file should absolutely be possible to show very long tracks of complex missions. If ED weren't so incompetent in their strategy, then their methods of bug identification, patching, integration and bug-fixing with subsequent software release wouldn't be so shockingly bad. It's amazing that there are so many good examples of this in both gaming/simulation and commercial software that ED still continue to fumble around and simply refuse to learn from all the mistakes they've made over the years.

Here I was thinking that the track files were was just a video compression file like mp4 etc and the replay track was like any other software video player. I find it interesting if what Sobek says is how the track play back works

A track is a set of inputs and a mission file. It records what all the players did, everything else is the simulation running according to these inputs. If at any point in the simulation something is not perfectly similar to the recording, the track will play out differently. To illustrate this, you can stop the track at any time and take control of the unit it was recorded from, at which point it just turns into a normal single player simulation.

Track replays are DCS' own minigame, try 100 times, if they replay what you actually did in mission; Success! The probability of that however is very low. It adds a great extra difficulty level to those hardcore fans who only want best of the best. You're not real DCS flyer unless you have replayed at least one track correctly. As said before this can be difficult task but it really adds to immersion of how difficult real flying can be. Also there's no points for second place, when the game crashes, you're done. You can then restart and try again and become better pilot.

Sorry if this has already been stated, but the chances of a track working between versions are rare if there was anything significant done to the module in question, tracks from almost a year ago, I would say no chance, again in most cases. Internally a better replay system is a noted big feature request, while many short less complex tracks are usually decent, people want more out of them, I am not sure what the answer is to that, but I know it's on the team's plate to figure out.

Nope, not a super great answer but all I have right now.

Some tips:

Don't fast forward a track
Don't jump around to different views at least in the first couple minutes
The longer the track, more likely it is to go off the rails
Modules under heavy development you can count on the tracks being trashed by an update that changes a lot.

Alright. Thanks for all the input.

So basically, save the tracks but check/record them before upgrading.... got it.