Updated build available - 654
Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2015 1:51 am
Via email:
We've just uploaded a new Ventity beta (build 654) that extends the beta license through Jan. 2016.
Some of the bigger changes are documented in the Release Notes (see "What's New" in the Help system), but there are also many small usability improvements, particularly to things like diagramming. There's also one big change that the documentation hasn't caught up with. We now support compound keys to identify entities. This is important for data-driven applications. For example, in a product model, you could have Product entities identified by SKU (a unique key attribute), with other attributes describing their distribution presence in various markets, where a Market entity might be identified by country, channel and category.
In the beta, core language features and the basic user interface are now working well, but it's far from feature-complete. Our current goal is to get Ventity up to speed for the kind of modeling we (Ventana) do on commercial projects. We think we're close, but we still need time series data support, optimization, and some support for user interface building (sliders, buttons, etc.). We're very interested to hear what you would like to see next.
You can download a copy of Ventity from
http://vensim.com/ventity.html
Feel free to share the link with your colleagues. Download approval is now automatic and nearly instantaneous. Note that you don't have to fill out all the fields in the form.
If you're new to Ventity:
The Help system contains a lot of good "getting started" material, including a series of videos, which are also on Vimeo, starting with
http://vimeo.com/134983029
The Ventity support forum is up and running at
http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum/v ... c.php?f=48
Several people have asked us what's unique about Ventity. The really big change is that we've replaced arrays with lists of entities, identified by attributes. This confers several advantages. Detail becomes a property of entities, not equations, which makes it a lot easier to change. Entities are modular, so they're easier to reuse and share among teams. Entities can be created and deleted dynamically, so there's no need to simulate a lot of zeroes for things that haven't happened yet. Similarly, a list can represent a sparse matrix, so there's no need to clutter your model with zeroes for project phases that aren't prerequisites or relationships that don't exist among people. All this happens in a development environment with modern graphics and windowing.
There's an example of population cohort models in Ventity on the forum. This is an interesting topic that keeps coming up in a variety of guises (people, cars, cheese, and fish so far). Classic SD offers a variety of solutions to cohort and queue models that aren't very satisfactory: you either suffer from excess dispersion of ages, or do a lot of work to implement long aging chains with arrays, or use built-in functions that always seem to exclude the one thing you really need. Ventity provides a natural solution, because you can create and delete entities representing cohorts (or vintages or model years) as you need them. Within a cohort, you can have as many co-flowing attributes and other dynamics as you need. We think there's a lot of potential here.
That said, there are still some things that Vensim is really good at, like extreme speed, advanced algorithms and data connectivity, so we're continuing its development in parallel. We've been working on infrastructure for 64bit and Mac builds lately, which puts us on a solid footing for future upgrades.
We've just uploaded a new Ventity beta (build 654) that extends the beta license through Jan. 2016.
Some of the bigger changes are documented in the Release Notes (see "What's New" in the Help system), but there are also many small usability improvements, particularly to things like diagramming. There's also one big change that the documentation hasn't caught up with. We now support compound keys to identify entities. This is important for data-driven applications. For example, in a product model, you could have Product entities identified by SKU (a unique key attribute), with other attributes describing their distribution presence in various markets, where a Market entity might be identified by country, channel and category.
In the beta, core language features and the basic user interface are now working well, but it's far from feature-complete. Our current goal is to get Ventity up to speed for the kind of modeling we (Ventana) do on commercial projects. We think we're close, but we still need time series data support, optimization, and some support for user interface building (sliders, buttons, etc.). We're very interested to hear what you would like to see next.
You can download a copy of Ventity from
http://vensim.com/ventity.html
Feel free to share the link with your colleagues. Download approval is now automatic and nearly instantaneous. Note that you don't have to fill out all the fields in the form.
If you're new to Ventity:
The Help system contains a lot of good "getting started" material, including a series of videos, which are also on Vimeo, starting with
http://vimeo.com/134983029
The Ventity support forum is up and running at
http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum/v ... c.php?f=48
Several people have asked us what's unique about Ventity. The really big change is that we've replaced arrays with lists of entities, identified by attributes. This confers several advantages. Detail becomes a property of entities, not equations, which makes it a lot easier to change. Entities are modular, so they're easier to reuse and share among teams. Entities can be created and deleted dynamically, so there's no need to simulate a lot of zeroes for things that haven't happened yet. Similarly, a list can represent a sparse matrix, so there's no need to clutter your model with zeroes for project phases that aren't prerequisites or relationships that don't exist among people. All this happens in a development environment with modern graphics and windowing.
There's an example of population cohort models in Ventity on the forum. This is an interesting topic that keeps coming up in a variety of guises (people, cars, cheese, and fish so far). Classic SD offers a variety of solutions to cohort and queue models that aren't very satisfactory: you either suffer from excess dispersion of ages, or do a lot of work to implement long aging chains with arrays, or use built-in functions that always seem to exclude the one thing you really need. Ventity provides a natural solution, because you can create and delete entities representing cohorts (or vintages or model years) as you need them. Within a cohort, you can have as many co-flowing attributes and other dynamics as you need. We think there's a lot of potential here.
That said, there are still some things that Vensim is really good at, like extreme speed, advanced algorithms and data connectivity, so we're continuing its development in parallel. We've been working on infrastructure for 64bit and Mac builds lately, which puts us on a solid footing for future upgrades.