What's new in Simile v4.8?

Released 22nd January 2007

Simile 4.8 has been released in order to provide support for new hardware and operating systems. It also adds some powerful new features, and includes changes to the user interface code to improve response times when editing very large models. There are also a large number of bug fixes. Here is a list of some of the more significant improvements that have been made over Simile v4.7:

Model code generation

• Modellers can now incorporate their own c++ code and shared libraries in Simile models, using a simple interface specification.
• To enable extrenally sourced code to work better with Simile data structures, c++ arrays in Simile code now use element 0 as the first element (index 1). This also saves memory.
• Mortality was wrong in population models running with independent shorter time steps. Fixed.
• Array assignments are handled more efficiently in the generated code.
• Using the same macro function (e.g., delay) several times in an equation could cause evaluation errors. This is now fixed.

Platform-specific issues

• Native model execution is now possible using the included compiler under Windows Vista.
• We have fixed a problem that caused the menus to fail to display promptly under MacOS.
• The MacOS release now includes binaries for both Intel and PowerPC hardware, and models can run natively on both types.
• The MacOS version would sometimes lose the last digit of the model execution parameters or some of the helper setup information when saving a model package; this is fixed
• The "Window" menu entries did not raise their coresponding window on x86-64 Linux; now at least they lower all the others.

Diagram editor improvements

• The hourglass always displays when Simile is busy doing something.
• More clicking on the digram while Simile was busy would cause errors; these are fixed.
• Sometimes when dragging, the selection would keep following the mouse for a while after releasing. This only happened under Windows and is fixed.
• Preferences now includes a 'quick drag' mode which turns off full display updates while dragging the selection. This reduces the delay.
• Setting, dragging and clearing the selection is faster and neater.
• Pasting the selection into a submodel could occasionally cause the submodel to lose its properties. Fixed.
• Some operations involving saving submodels and reopening them as toplevels could give rise to an 'invisible' red component that stopped the model running and would only show up after changing the view detail level. These are fixed.

Equation handling

• The equation parser is now much better at telling you if you are doing something bad with explicit intermediate variables, e.g., giving one the same name as an input parameter
• The delay() function was not consistent with how Simile generally does things, since it delays its input by the given number of time steps and hence behaves very differently when the time step is changed. Two new functions, const_delay() and var_delay() have been added, which delay a value by the given number of time units. delay() has been kept for legacy models but is now deprecated.
• User-defined functions caused problems if they had no arguments; these are sorted, and examples are provided of how to define and use functions and macros with no arguments.
• A new function, at_init(), has been added, which returns as a constant the value of its argument when its parent model was last initialized or reset.
• Equation parser is now much better it distinguishing between square brackets used to delimit an explicit array and those used to identify an array parameter

I/O Tools

• The helper application interface now includes a function for getting model data as a bitmap file image. This makes the grid display tool very, very much faster. Also, saving its image now works.
• If you reset the model immediately after clearing the helpers, they do not add a new colour for each plot to the legend for the new run, since the previous ones have not been used.
• X-Y Plotter tool can now be saved and restored properly when it is displaying components with spaces in their captions
• Sliders now have popup messages to show which variable parameters they control.

Miscellaneous

• Model windows and (under MacOS) dialogue boxes would occasionally appear partly or totally off the screen and be impossible to exit. This too is fixed.
• Hitting 'undo' halfway through a two-click operation no longer litters the screen. Also, two-click ops used to reset the cursor style to default, but no longer.
• Simile now has a new mechanism to tell if an instance of it is already running when launching. This should fix problems where it could not start because something peculiar had happened to the last instance.
• You now see a warning if you type "0" in the "Current time" window to reset the model -- this actually steps the time to 0 without resetting.
• Many even more minor bugs have been fixed, including removal of several irrelevant error messages. 58 enhancements and fixes in all.

Download Simile Version 4.8 now.

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