Creating traces: result recording or event log?

[Rens van der Heijden]

My use case is the following: I want to make a trace (id, position, speed, direction) of all vehicles in my simulation (which is based on VEINS), with additional metadata attached to it (such as the contents of a neighbor table). The main purpose is to create visualizations using an external tool, but I think this can also be very helpful in debugging certain applications.

I've been reading the result recording & analysis section of the OMNeT++ user manual ( http://www.omnetpp.org/doc/omnetpp/manual/usman.html#sec401 ), and one thing is thoroughly confusing to me -- the distinction between output vectors and scalars. Before I started reading, my understanding was that I can use scalars to produce a single output value, while I can use vectors to collect arbitrary information from the simulation for later analysis. However, the description in the manual seems to imply that I can only use vectors to compute means, counts, min/max and other aggregate statistics.

Is the result recording mechanism the right mechanism to use for my use case, or should I instead use the event log?