Reading a scenario without opening XVR
A previous post looked at what is actually inside an XVR OnScene .xscn file: a zip archive wrapped around one very large XML document. Knowing that is useful. Reading 200,000 lines of it to answer "which casualties are in this scenario?" is not.
The XVR Scenario Viewer does that reading for you. Drag a scenario onto the page and it tells you what is in it, in about a second.
Getting started
Open commandgridtools.com/xvr/ and drop one or more .xscn files onto the drop zone, or click Choose Files. There is no sign-up and no account.
Your scenarios are not uploaded anywhere. The page itself is served from the web, but the unzipping and parsing all happen inside your browser — the tool makes no network requests with your file, and the scenario never leaves your machine. That matters when the scenario contains real addresses or real premises.
What you get
The viewer reads snapshot.xml and sorts everything into tabs. Only the tabs that have content appear, so a small scenario shows fewer than a large one:
- Events — the instructor's event list
- Task Logic — deployments and subtasks, the options an operator gets on a selected character
- Personnel, Vehicles, Objects — everything placed in the scene
- Triggers — what fires, and what it fires
- Casualties — victims and their condition
- Sounds, Groups, Metadata
Each tab has a search box, which is usually the fastest route to an answer. Searching the Personnel tab for BA across a folder of scenarios will tell you in a minute whether your naming convention actually held.
Exporting to Excel
⬇ Export Excel writes the whole scenario out as a spreadsheet, one sheet per category. This is the feature people end up using most. A workbook can go in a lesson plan, be handed to a colleague who does not have XVR installed, or be diffed against last year's version of the same scenario.
When a file will not open
If a scenario has been corrupted, the viewer says so and offers 🛠 Repair & download. It fixes the two damage signatures we have actually seen in the wild — duplicated XML declarations and empty-namespace attributes — and gives you back a repaired copy as a new file. Your original is left untouched.
If the damage is something else, it will say that too rather than hand you a file that looks fine and is not.
Working offline
Training rooms are not always online. ↡ Download offline version gives you a single ~1 MB HTML file that does everything above with no internet connection at all. Save it to the desktop of an XVR machine and double-click it. The offline build is read-only by design.
The usual caveat
This is not an official XVR tool and it is not supported by XVR. It reads the file format as I have worked it out, and a future XVR release could change that format without warning. It only ever reads your original scenario — but back up before you start anyway, as you would with anything else that touches your library.