Re: [Swarm-Support] Taking screen shots and conducting experiments

[Steve Railsback]

steven brandenburger wrote:
> Hi
>  
> How can I take screen shots of experiments in swarm?

Well, you are familiar with Swarm's PixMap class? Here is some code that 
takes a picture of a raster window ("worldRaster" in this case) and 
writes it in a new file. You can put this method in your observer swarm 
and execute it every time through the schedule.

Then if you want you can make a GIF movie out of these snapshots- I use 
some shareware called GIF Construction Set, which you can find on the web.

If you skip the line: [pixID  setWidget: worldRaster];
then it will take a picture of the entire screen.

-(void) writeFrame {
  char filename[256];
  id pixID;

 sprintf(filename, "Frame%03ld.png", getCurrentTime());

 pixID =  [Pixmap createBegin: [self getZone]];
 [pixID  setWidget: worldRaster];
 pixID = [pixID createEnd];
 [pixID save: filename];
 [pixID drop];

}

An alternative, however, is software like "SnagIt" that will capture a 
movie of anything on the screen- you can turn its movie capture on, then 
start you model, and run it as long as you want. It's easy to make a 50 
mByte .avi file in no time.


> How could I conduct experiments with swarm....are there some web pages 
> that expand on this....

Not sure what you mean...how to design experiments? Software to 
automatically run scenarios and replicates?

Steve R.