VISOR_B — Battle Retelling: DayZ fight replays in 3D

The short version

VISOR_B is battle retelling: it rebuilds a fight from the server’s own records and lets you watch it on a map and in 3D.

What a retelling is

A VISOR_B retelling is a reconstruction of a fight, not a recording of it. Nothing here was filmed.

DayZ has no demo or replay format. There is no file the game can save and play back, and no mod can add one — so “watch the fight through the player’s eyes” is not something that exists on any DayZ server, ours included.

The kill cam players keep asking for does not exist in DayZ for the same reason. A retelling is the nearest thing to one: after the hold below, the fight you died in is watchable on the map and in 3D — every side of it, not just through your killer’s eyes.

“How did I die?” is the question a retelling answers best. Open your fight once the hold passes, find your last minute, and watch it from any side: where the shot came from, how the other player moved, and what you never saw coming.

What we do instead: the server already writes down every hit, with the position of both players, and we additionally record where people stood and which way they faced. A retelling is that list of numbers, drawn. Everything you see — the movement between the shots, the poses, the buildings, the ground — is our drawing of measurements, produced after the fact by a program that was not there. That is why we call it a retelling: the fight is told again from the records, not played back.

Treat it as evidence in the way a plotted flight path is evidence: the positions and the times are real, the picture around them is our best reconstruction.

A note on the name: VISOR_B is also written VISOR B, and older mentions call it BZA VISOR — that first name is why this page lives at /bza_visor. It is all one technology.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, both from our own server:

1. The server’s admin log. DayZ itself writes a line for every hit and every kill: who, whom, which body part, how much damage, which weapon, and how far apart the two were. This is standard server logging, not something we added.
2. Our own recorder. Server-side technology that samples position, facing, stance and health while a fight is happening, so the movement between the shots exists. It starts recording when shooting starts and stops 45 seconds after it ends. It runs on the server only — nothing is installed on your machine and nothing is read from it.

The two are joined by time. Server log timestamps are in the server’s own timezone and everything you see on the site is shown on that same clock, so a retelling and a log line always line up.

When a retelling opens 5 hours

A fight becomes watchable 5 hours after its last shot, not before.

This is the rule that keeps the feature from becoming a cheat. A retelling is a map of where people were, what they were carrying and which way they were walking when it ended. Served live, that is reconnaissance: die, alt-tab, watch which way the man who killed you went, and go back for him with the answer. The delay is what makes it a record of the past instead of a scope on the present.

Until then, the site tells you that a fight of yours was recorded and when it opens — and nothing else. No location, no opponents, no events.

Admins are exempt, and we would rather say so here than leave it as a quiet exception. A report about someone cheating is only worth filing if somebody can look at it the same evening. Admins can open any fight immediately; players cannot, including their own.

Who can watch what

Your Steam ID and your name

Your SteamID is never sent to another player’s browser.

Inside a retelling every player is a random identifier that means nothing outside our database and cannot be turned back into an account. The server log’s own player id is not sent either, even though it looks anonymous: it is a hash of the SteamID, and the whole SteamID space is small enough to check exhaustively, so publishing the hash would be publishing the number with extra steps.

Nobody else’s nickname is sent to your browser either. In your own retelling you appear by name and everyone else is labelled Player A, Player B and so on. The labels are made up for that one fight, so the same person is not the same letter in the next one, and they are drawn from the anonymous identifier — the name is not hidden in the page, it never leaves our server.

Admins see the real names, for the same reason they are exempt from the hold: a report has to be actionable. Reporting needs no name from you — the button sends the anonymous identifier and the admin queue resolves it.

On this public page nothing is real: the demo fight’s players are relabelled Survivor A/B/C and their identifiers are made up.

What a retelling does not show

Some of this is deliberate and some of it is simply not recorded. Either way, do not read anything into an absence.

The base rule is the important one, so to be explicit: a retelling cannot be used to find, scout or plan a raid on anybody’s base, because no part of a base is in it. Where a wall stood, a retelling shows open ground and a player walking around something that is not there.

The world you are looking at

The buildings, ground, trees and characters in a retelling are stand-ins built by us for the reconstruction. They are not the game’s art and they are not meant to match it.

A separate pass measures the map around the places fights happen — where each object is, how big it is, and how it is turned — and the viewer draws simple shapes at those measurements. The result is close enough to recognise a street and understand who had cover from whom. It can also look quite unlike the game: a barn is a barn-shaped box, a pine is a pine-shaped one, and anything our scanner has never measured is missing entirely.

The character models are our own too. They are there so you can tell three people apart and see which way somebody is facing — not to depict what that player was wearing.

So: use a retelling to answer where was everyone, and when. Do not use it to argue about what a wall looked like, whether a bush would have blocked a bullet, or exactly where somebody’s arm was.

This is an alpha

VISOR_B is new and under active development. Expect it:

• Fights can be missing, cut short, or split into two.
• Movement can be missing entirely — then you get the shots and the map, with nobody walking between them.
• Parts of the world can be absent or in the wrong place, and the 3D view can look wrong in ways the 2D map does not.
• The 3D view needs WebGL and a reasonable amount of memory. On older phones it may run badly or not start at all — the 2D map works everywhere.
• It can be switched off, or break for a while, without notice.

None of this affects the game itself: the recorder only reads and writes its own data, and if it fails, it fails on the website.

Tell us when it happens. There is a feedback box at the bottom of your own fights page, and it sends the fight and the exact moment you were looking at along with what you write. That is worth more than a description of a fight nobody can find.

Reporting a player

Reports are filed from inside the retelling, which is the point of putting the button there: the report carries its own evidence.

1. Open the fight and move the timeline to the moment in question.
2. In the player list beside the scene, press Report on the player.
3. Pick a reason — cheating, ghosting or stream sniping, team killing, abuse in chat or voice, exploiting the map or a bug, or something else — and describe what you saw in your own words.
4. Send it. The fight and the exact timestamp you were watching go with it, so an admin opens your report and lands on that frame instead of asking you when it happened.

You must be signed in, you cannot report yourself, and you cannot file the same report twice in one fight. There is a daily limit per account so the queue cannot be flooded. Reports are never deleted, including dismissed ones — who files them matters as much as what they say, and a pattern of false reports is itself something admins act on.

Filing a report does not guarantee a reply. Anything that needs discussion happens in our Discord.

How long it is kept, and how to opt out

Combat records and movement samples live on our own server, are used for retellings and moderation, and are not shared with anyone or used for anything else. They are wiped along with everything else at each server wipe.

If you want your fights removed, or your name replaced with a placeholder in retellings other players can see, ask an admin in Discord and we will do it. There is no automated way to do it yet.

BZA Chernarus 1PP is an independent community server. VISOR_B is our own technology and is not a Bohemia Interactive feature. Nothing on this page is an official DayZ capability.