Version 4.5 Beta

The Flexsim 4.5 beta has finally arrived! You can download it from the User Login section of the flexsim.com website under Downloads.

Be sure to check out the Installation section on the left side to get information concerning known issues and how to install multiple versions of Flexsim4 on the same computer!

There is a minor known issue with upgrading old Flexsim4 installations to the Flexsim 4.5 Beta. Read the instructions on the Installation section and it explains how to fix it! If you get an error message about FlexsimDBExport.dll and are confused how to fix it, you must have forgotten to read the known issues!

You will need a Flexsim 4.5 version code from the website in order for your program to run properly. This can be obtained through the License Activation section on the left side. Be sure to select "Flexsim Beta 4.5" from the dropdown list to get the correct version code!

Please test your 4.32 models and any new features. The list of new features in 4.5 can be seen in the Release Notes section.

Also, the help documentation in this beta release is unchanged since 4.32. It is not updated for 4.5 yet. This Beta test is to test the software itself. We are still working on finalizing the documentation. The final release of 4.5 will include up-to-date documentation and any bugs that we discover and fix during this beta testing period.

Any questions/comments/concerns can be sent to [email protected]

Happy beta testing! Thanks to all who participate for helping make Flexsim better for us all.

A while ago I wrote a nonrecursive array heapsort, but I didn't post it on the forum because it was just too slow in Flexscript. Flexsim 4.5 uses bytecodes similar to Java's for interpreting its Flexscript, which is much faster. I've attached the code for a user command and a graph of the execution time vs array size. As you can see, Flexscript is now over 8 times faster in this case. Way to go Anthony!

Could you attached the What's New for Version 4.5 over here?

I wonder if the problem of graphic crash has been solved in this version. In the current version, the display of the model got haywire when the flowitem bin is opened and when 2D images are clicked on.

David

That issue is fixed in 4.5. Not everything that is fixed or changed is documented in the What's New because hundreds of things have been fixed or improved as documented in the full development list found in the Development List (link removed).

Here is an example of how the OnStateChange attribute works in the 4.5 beta.

This will not work with Flexsim 4.32.

Phil,

Great that you implemented it! This is going to make live a lot easier in a number of situations.

But why isn't this a normal trigger? And certainly in the BasicFR and BasicTE it looks like a very logical extension?

Steven

The variable is more for developers than for regular modelers. That's why it isn't in the objects' GUIs. It is a good point that the BasicFR and BasicTE could probably use it in their GUI. Maybe we'll put it there in the future.

It may confuse the average modeler to put it with the normal triggers and cause them to try to model something in a manner that could probably be done much cleaner and easier in another way. Flexsim's objects are already complicated enough for the new user. For the advanced user who needs this sort of functionality because they've exhausted all other ways, putting a node in the tree of their object isn't too difficult.

Thanks Phil for having this most important wish from our personal German development wishlist become true for Xmas

cu
Ralf
aka Ralle

Phil,

2 more questions:

1 In vista we have all these nice icons in the popup menu, but in XP I don't see them. Is this correct and is this only a vista feature?


2 I have now already seen 2 or 3 times that windows are grouped together with a tabcontrol (so the ortho view and the tree view togher in one window). Is there an easy way to do a thing like that or did some copy pasting in the tree?

Regards,

Steven

Hi Steven,

For the tab control you can find how to do it in the release note in the download section for Flexsim 4.5 Beta (User Login).
If I remember right, have 2 windows open one for the ortho view and one with the tree.
Drag the tree window over the ortho window, when over ortho window stop the dragging and wait until you see a black border, now release the mouse button.
It should now be 2 tabs in your window.

Hope it helped you some.

Lars-Olof

Hey Steven,
In answer to your question on the menus, we found that the menu drawing functionality worked different in Vista than in XP. In XP, if you want to add images to the menus, either you have to draw them yourself, or you get an extra column on the left of the menus (one column for images, one column for checkmarks), which looked weird, and it caused issues with the text not showing properly in the menu. In Vista they're easier to add and still have just one column. Anyway, instead of going through all the effort of drawing the menus ourselves, we figured since people will eventually move to Vista (although very slowly), we'd just show the images in Vista.

Anthony,

Thanks for the answer. As you noticed we are somewhere in between XP and Vista. So commercial screenshots will have to be made in Vistan then

Steven

Flexsim-Development-Team,

Thank you for v4.50 BETA and the upcoming v4.50.

Special thanks for putting in the OnStateChange Trigger and some more features I had on my wish list.

I did some testing with one of my “bigger”models and run the model for a year.
In v4.32 the run took 1951 seconds (so around 32 minutes).
In v4.50 the run took 764 seconds (so around 12 minutes.
This is quite some difference and shows that you really speed up Flexsim. Thanks!
By the way, I already thought that 32 minutes are not bad for a years run, but 12 minutes is quite something. And this model is not optimized on speed issues yet.

Anyway, thanks again and I keep testing.

I just tested copying and pasting of tables, within a table but also to Excel. Also entering data in the table seems to be improved a lot.

This was a long lasting wish from my side that is granted. Thanks

Steven

Steven,

As you've probably discovered by now, all the "document" windows (e.g. ortho, persp, tree) can be dragged into one another, as is also the case with "palette" windows (e.g. View>Modeling Utilities...)

One thing I like to do is customize my workspace and then save it as my default in File>Global Preferences>Environment. If you're in a session and Window>Close All, then you can recall the new default workspace with Window>Open Default Workspace.

If you ever get annoyed with windows accidentally being dropped into another window as a tab, you can turn that feature off in File>Global Preferences>Environment>Disable window tabbing.

Cliff

Hi,
I tested the Beta now for a while. Many nice new features in the GUI. Hopefully many bugfixes...

I found two small things which might be improved in the final version:

1. In the systemconsole errors are still referenced by numbers and are not directly readable. (you changed this for the 'profile tasksequence' command but not for the system console).

2. If you customize the buttons for the menu (e.g. you add a 'Compile modell' button to the menu bar, they all look the same and can´t be distiguished. I think there are some icons missing here.

It would be nice if you could improve the Flexsim Charts tools a bit, in regards of finding objects you want to analyse. In big modells it take a while to search out the right objects from the long object lits. Maybe add a search search by name option, sort them alphabetically... e.g.

Why can users see the bytecode in the tree? Is there anything I can do direcly in the bytecode? I thought it is some kind of step between machine code and flexscript?

Did you improve the debugger? There are some messages which gave me a hard time like 'Null is not a Dispatcher' which does not contain any references to the source of the error, exept from that I have to check all objects which dispatch tasks...

Nico,
On the bytecode question, initially I thought we'd make the bytecode invisible to the user. However, there is one advantage to leaving it, namely, when a flexscript exception is thrown, it will print out the line number in the code, as well as the instruction number, where the exception happened. If the line has a lot of function calls in it, then we thought that it might also be helpful if the user could look in the bytecode and see exactly which instruction (which exact function call) caused the exception. And no, there's not really anything you can do to change the bytecode. It's just a "viewer" so to say.

Hey Everyone,
We just posted a 4.5 Beta 2 to the user login, so if you are willing to take a look and do some testing, we'd appreciate it. You should be able to just install this one without having to uninstall the previous beta (but copy your 4.32 directory if you haven't yet and still want to use 4.32). This release involves a lot of bug fixes from the previous beta (if you sent us bug reports, please double-check that they are indeed fixed, and thanks), and a few small additions, including:
- support for png files in icongrids and panels
- easier mouse manipulation of objects inside of rotated objects
- a "drawsurrogate" attribute that will draw a space of objects as if they were inside an object, yet have the clicking be applied to the main object, and without that space actually being within the content of the object (for statistical purposes).
- an experiment report preferences dialog where you can specify more detail regarding what you want reported.

There are still a few documentation pages that need to be updated, but for the most part, this is a final release candidate. We hope to have the actual release out sometime in early-to-mid January.
Thanks,

Does anyone have any problem with extracting the contents of Beta 4.5 downloaded zip file? I have tried so many times now, and each time the download seems to be happening properly and the file size of 32mb seems to be there. Yet when I attempt to open the zip file, it throws an error.

Want to know whether it is just my machine.

The beta2 version should be 39.8 MB (41,803,776 bytes) so it does sound like there's a problem with your download.