Re: ABM toolkits

[Miles Parker]

At the risk (well, certainty!) of committing a shameless plug..

>Considering it is Java, graphics in Ascape seem, for lack of a better
>word, `tight'.

Thanks, I'm really glad someone noticed, because I spent way too much time 
getting this right...and yea, Java makes it hard.

>Finally, Repast has a nice multilayer raster display, where you can
>turn different layers on and off.  (In heatbugs, for example, you can
>see the bugs, the diffusion space, or both.)

We also support this (just double-click on the view, and then click the 
checkboxes to turn layers [actaully, different drawing methods] on and off, and 
to move them up and down the display hierarchy) though not quite as obviuously 
in heatbugs for implementation (laziness) reasons. The long house valley model 
is a good place to try this. Which brings up the most missing feature..usage 
documentation! The one thing we are missing right now vis. Swarm & RePast is 
the ability to probe individual agents in the GUI..For our needs the realtivly 
simple rule scheduling is a stilll a good fit, but we may have to make that 
more sophisticated at some point as well, esp. for, to use Marcus's well stated 
term, non-'temporally-flat' models. But we haven't yet found a model where we 
need this.

Anyway there is a lot of redundency, but also unique advantages and good 
features in each..imagine if we could do one big code-merge at some 
point...<cue John Lennon..> Speaking for myself and off-the-cuff...I think 
diversity is important, but the tension is that we're wasting time having so 
many essentially parallel tracks.

best,

Miles



Miles T. Parker
Software Engineer
The Brookings Institution  1775 Mass. Ave. NW  Washington, DC  20036
http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/models/ascape
mailto:address@hidden  voice 202.797.6136  fax 202.797.6319


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