NetLogo 7.0.1 Released
Uri Wilensky
Dear NetLogo users,
The Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling at Northwestern University is pleased to announce NetLogo 7.0.1, available for free download from our website. This is primarily a release to fix bugs that were uncovered after the release of NetLogo 7.0.0, and to make a few changes to the interface and bugfixes to file-io. We also bundled the “NetLogo Launcher” which enables Mac users to launch multiple NetLogo models at once (Windows and Linux users can already do this by default).
We recommend that users of NetLogo 7.0.0 upgrade to 7.0.1.
All changes are listed below.
Please send your feedback to ccl-fe...@ccl.northwestern.edu and bug reports to bu...@ccl.northwestern.edu, or contact us on the NetLogo Forum.
Bundled software to open multiple instances of NetLogo on Mac
- A NetLogo Launcher app is now included on macOS to allow opening multiple instances of NetLogo simultaneously (on other platforms, you can already open multiple instances of NetLogo by default)
Small interface changes
- Plots, monitors, and output widgets are now slightly lighter grey in light mode.
- Disabled buttons now have slightly darker text (for increased contrast) in light mode.
- NetLogo Desktop will now export the latest version of NetLogo Web
- The most notable change to NetLogo Web is that it now sends anonymized usage data to our Google Analytics
- The amount of data tracked by this is very minimal, so we ask that users please leave it enabled so that we can better understand how self-hosted NetLogo Web models are being used. However, note that the functionality can be disabled by appending ?disableAnalytics to the URL
- Primitives for writing text to files were always overwriting the files, rather than appending to them
- Running Grammarly on a Mac could prevent using the 3D View
- Monitors that were displaying numbers in scientific notation were showing an extra "0" at the end
- Monitors were switching to scientific notation at 10,000,000 instead of at 9,007,199,254,740,993 (253)
- The "Reload model on external changes" functionality was not watching all of the files that it should have been for the full duration that it should have been
- The "Reload model on external changes" functionality could sometimes trigger the display of multiple redundant "Are you sure you want to open a different file?" dialogs
- The "Reload model on external changes" functionality could sometimes raise unnecessary exceptions
- Internal `lastModified.txt` file handles were being inefficiently left open
- NetLogo would sometimes suggest importing an extension immediately after having imported it
- The color theme was defaulting to "light", rather than checking the system's default theme
- Some modal dialogs were being hidden behind other windows
- macOS and Windows were using incorrect file icons for `.nlogo` and `.nlogo3d` files
- macOS was consistently producing more than one "Print" dialog at a time (yes, as in: printing to paper)
- Tabs for `__includes` files were wrongly being foregrounded when reopened
- Tabs for `__includes` files could not be zoomed when popped out into separate windows
- The "Auto-indent" setting was not applying to secondary code editors (e.g. inside of widget "Edit" dialogs)
- `self` and `myself` were reporting incorrect values inside of `carefully` blocks
- Mathematica Link was setting the wrong location to look for NetLogo extensions
- Patches could wrongly persist in stored patchsets after calls to `resize-world`
- The internal optimized form of `any? <breed>-on` was was producing incorrect results
- Printing anonymous procedures to strings (e.g. with the `word` primitive) was over-eagerly eliding parentheses that are actually necessary when calling primitives that don't take a fixed number of arguments
- The Command Center would display illegible gobbledygook on Linux if the output line was wider than 32767 pixels
- The colors of square brackets had poor visibility in dark mode
- Auto-saves of the "File > New" model were never expiring
- "Headless" versions of NetLogo could not open NetLogo 7-formatted BehaviorSpace experiments
- NetLogo would give up on trying to open documentation if it lacked a connection to the internet, instead of falling back to using the copy of the documentation that comes with the NetLogo installation
- Some "help" dialogs were being placed in the wrong location on the screen
- Brackets were being visually matched in editors, even when the containing editor was not foregrounded
- The icon used in the compiler error banner was needlessly low-resolution
- Note widgets were failing to correctly wrap text when rendering in the standard (i.e. non-Markdown) mode
- The Extension Manager could sometimes fail to load the list of extensions properly
- BehaviorSpace was refusing to validate or save any experiments that referenced special variables (e.g. `world-width`, `random-seed`)
- BehaviorSpace could open dialogs at wrong locations and sizes
- BehaviorSpace (pointlessly) allowed pausing after the final run
- NW Extension: Graphs were not always retaining their ordering when they should have been
- Vid Extension: Native library files were not being properly cleaned up when "temporarily" unpacked
- Vid Extension: Would crash when loaded headlessly
- Vid Extension: Could not use webcams on macOS versions before 14
- `set-patch-size` wrongly allowed values of 0 or less
- Opening a new file while focusing a text input could cause an exception
- Extension Manager downloads didn't raise errors when they should have
- Single-line text fields did not respect undo/redo
- When converting models from the old file format to the new format, slider widgets could sometimes lose their default value
- Agent monitors could sometimes render at too small of a size when the model's world was small
If You Encounter a Problem
We encourage users to report bugs, give feedback and ask questions through the NetLogo Forum. Alternatively, you can report bugs to ccl-...@ccl.northwestern.edu and any other feedback (including issues with the documentation) to ccl-fe...@ccl.northwestern.edu. We encourage users who encounter a bug to consult this wiki page which lists current problems as users report them to us and offers advice on how to alleviate or work around them. The NetLogo FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) also contains valuable information.
Other Known Issues
This list below contains several issues known to us at the time of the release of 7.0.1. We aim to fix them in a future release.
- CJK characters do not display properly in code editors on Windows
- When running a BehaviorSpace experiment from the GUI or from the command line, memory is not cleared at the end of the experiment which can cause memory issues. For now, we recommend closing and reopening NetLogo between uses of BehaviorSpace.
- Some Users continue to have problems initially launching NetLogo in Mac OS Sierra, High Sierra, Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey. More information (including a partial workaround for the problem) is available here. We don’t yet know if this issue persists in NetLogo 7.
- The Arduino extension doesn't work properly in Windows 10 under 64-bit NetLogo. It does work properly running under 32-bit NetLogo. We recommend that Windows users who want to work with the Arduino extension install the 32-bit version of NetLogo.
- Once a user opens a model that uses the Arduino extension they must quit NetLogo before next opening a model that uses the Arduino extension.
- Repeated zooming out can cause drawn lines to vanish from the view
The issues below are particular to the vid extension:
- If the extension crashes while the code tab is popped out, the code tab will not be usable again until NetLogo is restarted.
- The extension will crash NetLogo if you use vid:camera-open or vid:camera-select and then start a different program (like Zoom) and use the same camera. If you start the other program first and then start NetLogo things work better, but there are still many reports of problems on macOS. We're investigating the issues.
- On macOS the extension produces videos that don't play properly in Windows (the same video plays correctly on a Mac, however). It appears to play videos created by other sources properly.
Credits
NetLogo was designed and authored by Uri Wilensky, project leader and director of the CCL. The current core development team includes Jason Bertsche, Aaron Brandes, Omar Ibrahim, Jeremy Baker and Isaac Brown. Seungyeon Kim was the main graphics designer for the Graphical User Interface changes for NetLogo 7. Major contributions in the past were made by Seth Tisue, Bryan Head, Esther Verreau, Robert Grider, Ben Shargel and Nicolas Payette. Many others have contributed greatly. HubNet was jointly designed by Uri Wilensky and Walter Stroup.
We also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of: Dor Abrahamson, Fernando Alegre, Jason Alt, Gabriella Anton, Umit Aslan, Zeina Atrash, Gordon Bailey, Connor Bain, Eytan Bakshy, Matthew Berland, Stephanie Bezold, Paulo Blikstein, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Dirk Brockman, Meridith Bruozas, Rodrigo Cadiz, Ivan Ceraj, Charles Chen, Eric Cheng, Jarva Chow, Sugat Dabholkar, Rumou Duan, Jared Dunne, Geoff Garen, Jeremy Glassenberg, Katie Goodrum, Steve Gorodetskiy, Bryan Guo, Can Gurkan, Eric Hao, Ed Hazzard, Arthur Hjorth, Carrie Hobbs, Nathan Holbert, Omar Ibrahim, Abbie Jacobs, Wendy Johnson, Nathan Jones, Jacob Kelter, Hyungsin Kim, Jayun Kim, Woo-young Kim, Daniel Kornhauser, Sergey Krilov, Dr. Setsuya Kurahashi, Eyal Landau, Victor Lee, Reuven Lerner, Sharona Levy, Silvia Lovato, Kit Martin, Geoff Mathews, Spiro Maroulis, Dhrumil Mehta, Nate Nichols, Kritphong Mongkhonavit, Ben Neidhart, Michael Novak, Kai Orton, Yevgeny Patarakin, Christina Pei, Daniel Perlovsky, Lorenzo Pesce, Francisco J. Miguel Quesada, Bill Rand, Ben Rafshoon, Charly Resendiz, Andy Russell, Phil Saltzmann, Andrei Scheinkman, Pratim Sengupta, Ben Shapiro, Gagandeep Singh, Firat Soylu, Mike Stieff, Scott Styles, Celina Troutman, Josh Unterman, Aditi Wagh, Akarshit Wal, David Weintrop, Baba Kofi Weusijana, Michelle Wilkerson, Julio Patron Witwytzkyj, Nate Wong, Philip Woods, Christine Yang, Dr. Takashi Yoshida, Tianyu Xia, Jack Zhu.
The CCL gratefully acknowledges three decades of support for our NetLogo work. The original support came from the National Science Foundation -- grant numbers REC-9814682 and REC-0126227. Further support has come from NSF REC-0003285, REC-0115699, DRL-0196044, NSF-ITR-0326542, DRL-REC/ROLE-0440113, SBE-0624318, EEC-0648316, IIS-0713619, DRL-RED-9552950, DRL-REC-9632612, DRL-DRK12-1020101, IIS-1441552, CNS-1441016, CNS-1441041, CNS-1138461, IIS-1438813, IIS-1147621, DRL-REC-1343873, IIS-1438813, IIS-1441552, CNS-1441041, IIS-1546120, DRL-1546122, DRL-ITEST-1614745, DRL-1640201, NSF STEMC-1745938. NSF STEMC-1842374, NSF STEMC-1842375, NSF DRL-1842374, NSF-BSF-2240216, and NSF-POSE-2303582. Additional support has come from the Spencer Foundation, Texas Instruments, the Brady Fund, the Murphy fund, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, and the Northwestern SESP Venture Research Fund.
Uri Wilensky
Lorraine H. Morton chaired Professor
Northwestern University