Please welcome the OMNeT++ 6.0 preview 15 release. This prerelease contains minor fixes and cleanups in preparation to the final 6.0 release.

Core:

  • Allow expressions in config option values to use NED operators, module parameters and other NED expression features. The immediate motivation was to be able use e.g. index in the display-name option, e.g.: **.app[0..3].display-name = "cbr-" + string(index)

  • The displayName field was moved from cModule to cComponent.

  • Result filters: The count and sum filter now record the initial zero value. This necessitated adding two methods to the cResultListener interface: added emitInitialValue() and callEmitInitialValue().

  • Result files now include two new result attributes for each item: recording mode (the item in the @statistic(record=...) list that produced the given result item), and module/channel display names (recordingmode, moduledisplaypath).

  • In result files, the “, vector” suffix is now suppressed from the titles of vector results (similarly also “histogram” and “stats”), as they simply echo the result item’s type. (They were there in the first place because recording mode is automatically appended to result titles @statistic(title=...) after a comma; it is now suppressed for the mentioned recording modes.)

  • SumPerDurationFilter: fix getSumPerDuration() behavior when invoked during warmup period.

Analysis Tool:

  • Added the possibility to organize charts into a hierarchical folder structure. This can be very useful if the number of charts in the analysis exceeds a certain number. Charts can be moved between folders using copy/paste. Note that .anf files that contain folders are not understood by previous versions.

  • The “Reset Chart to Template” operation now allows multiple charts to be selected.

  • New chart template: “Line Chart on Separate Axes with Matplotlib”.

  • New vector operation: timedilation (multiplies time with a constant).

  • Added a “Legend” page to the configuration dialogs of most chart templates. This page allows legend labels to be customized in several ways. Legend labels can now be specified manually, using a format string that may refer to dataframe columns as $name, $title, $module, etc. (content assist is available). For automatic legend labels, there is the option to use result titles (descriptive names) instead of result names, and module display name paths instead of plain module paths, where available. Finally, there is a possibility to perform a series of regular expression find/replace operations in the automatic or manual legend labels for fine tuning.

    Note that since charts in .anf files contain copies of their chart templates and not references to them, charts in existing .anf files need to be reset to their templates in order to gain the new Legend page (see context menu in the Charts page).

  • Automatic legend labels, axis and plot titles are now generated with a better algorithm.

  • Inside chart templates, there was an effort to structure charts scripts so that they have the structure of distinct result query, data preparation and plotting steps, where all three steps are ideally just one or two lines of code. To this end, several functions were factored out from chart scripts into utils.py: plot_lines(), plot_boxwhiskers(), pivot_for_barchart(), pivot_for_scatterchart(), get_confidence_level(), etc. plot_bars() was extended to accept a metadata df (for legend label generation), and it now expect the data df in transposed form.

  • There were several improvements in the extract_label_columns(), make_legend_label() and make_chart_title() functions (utils.py), to support improved legend label, axis label and plot title generation.

  • A distinct exception class ChartScriptError was introduced for errors that are to be displayed in the plot area without dumping the stack trace to the console.

  • Numerous bug fixes and smaller improvements. A notable bug fix is that of a crash due to errors in managing shared memory buffers used for communication between the IDE and Python processes of chart scripts. Numerous errors were fixed in chart image export (i.e. the Matplotlib emulation of native plotting widgets) as well.

Inifile Editor:

  • Config option values that contain expressions are no longer falsely flagged as errors.

  • The confusing “Unused entry (does not match any parameters)” warning that often appeared falsely for INET simulations due to deficiencies in analyzing the network structure has been re-worded to include the possibility that it is false, and has also been demoted from “warning” to “info”.

IDE:

  • Update to Eclipse 4.22, CDT 10.5 and PyDev 9.2. The private JRE bundled with the IDE has been updated to Java 17 LTS.

Sample simulations:

  • Fifo: Added a TandemQueues network, and related configurations into omnetpp.ini.

  • Resultfiles: Added the scalar and vector result files from the Fifo1 and Fifo2 simulations and the new TandemQueueExperiment.

Tools:

  • opp_charttool: Filtering options (-i, -n) were improved to allow multiple charts to be selected. The -i option now accept index lists and ranges too, not only single indices. The -n option was changed to use substring match instead of full match.

  • opp_charttool: Added the “templates” command which lists the available chart templates.

  • opp_test: The set of possible test outcomes has been refined. Possible outcomes are now PASS, FAIL, ERROR, SKIP and EXPECTEDFAIL. SKIP means that the test was not performed, because e.g. it would test an optional feature which is currently disabled; ERROR means that the test was not performed, because of an unrecoverable error (i.e. crash or exception). It is possible to designate a test case as an “expected failure”, by specifying %expected-failure: Description of reason in the test file. This is useful if we know that a certain test-case is correct, but it is not possible to fix it for certain reasons.

  • opp_run -v now outputs the system architecture OMNeT++ was built for (e.g. ARCH_X86_64 or ARCH_AARCH64).

  • On Windows and macOS, the directory names in the tools directory have changed to win32.x86_64 and macos.x86_64 respectively.

Build:

  • The content of the $PLATFORM makefile variable has changed. Until know, it contained the platform.architecture pair (e.g. win32.x86_64) which was misleading. From now on, Makefile.inc provides $PLATFORM (e.g. win32) and $ARCH (e.g. x86_64) in separate variables. makefrag files must be updated if $PLATFORM variable was used in them.

  • To build OMNeT++ with Akaroa support, WITH_AKAROA=yes must be specified in the configure.user file. The configuration script no longer tries to autodetect Akaroa without the user explicitly requesting it.

Download it here.