swarm-960513, first public beta!

[Nelson Minar]

A nifty new version of Swarm is available, swarm-960513. With this
release we've put Swarm out to the general public. We're also all
going away to Alife V in Japan for a week or two. Please, if there are
any questions to swarm-support you know how to answer, jump in and
answer them while we're gone.


Here's an overview of changes:

   The major news is Swarm is now available to the general public! We've
   gotten Swarm into shape enough: in particular, we think we have the
   major design issues settled and enough functionality to be useful. As
   part of the public release, Swarm is now released under GNU licensing.
   
   A major functionality change is in the way that applications are
   started up. The old hacked up scheme of doing everything in main() is
   gone, replaced with a spiffy system involving nested swarms. Briefly,
   you create a model swarm to encapsulate the model (all the model
   schedule code from old applications) and an observer swarm to handle
   display. Changing your applications to work in the new scheme is a
   fair amount of work, but well worth it. In particular, it allows batch
   mode execution, an early example of which is available in heatbugs.
   
   Swarm now requires the latest version of libBLT, BLT-2.1. See the
   install documentation for a location. This moves us into using more
   standard software: next goal is to move to tcl7.5 and tk4.1.
   
   Most of the libraries were upgraded. Some of the major changes:
   
   activity
          bug fixes for nested swarms, better control of running activity
          structure, schedule nesting for multiple time scales
          
   collections
          bug fixes, changes to map structures
          
   tkobjc
          BLTGraph is now much neater. Preliminary Canvas encapsulation
          
   swarmobject
          Major new functionality for probing, including MessageProbes,
          improved user interface, customizable probe maps, drag and drop
          on objects, etc.. Averager and ActiveGraph now inherit from
          MessageProbe, DataPipe is gone. probeDisplay generation has
          moved to the probeDisplayManager. New visible Swarm class.
          
   simtools
          New support for batch mode. SimControl has turned into
          ControlPanel and GUISwarm. SimParameters is gone, replaced by
          probes on swarms.
          
   neuro and ga
          moved to user contributed libraries.