MWorks 0.8 released

April 27, 2018 Posted by Christopher Stawarz

 

MWorks 0.8 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Note that MWorks now requires OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” or later. In addition, the MATLAB tools now require MATLAB R2015b or later.

For a full list of changes in this release, please see the release notes below.

MWEL

MWorks Experiment Language (MWEL) provides a user-friendly, programming-language-like alternative to the XML-based experiments created by MWEditor. It is designed to be read and written via a text editor and is optimized for conciseness and clarity, with minimal syntactic “noise”.

At runtime, MWEL experiments are translated into MWorks’ XML, after which they are parsed and executed in exactly the same way as traditional, XML-based experiments. This ensures that equivalent experiments written in MWEL and XML perform identically.

For more information, see the MWEL reference.

Core

Expressions

  • Added several new functions: display_bounds, filenames, py_call, py_eval, osname, size, and type

  • rand can now be called with no arguments

  • Long function names now include underscores between words (e.g. nextframetime is now next_frame_time). For compatibility with existing experiments, the old, underscore-free names are still available.

  • String/string and list/list addition is now supported. In both cases, the result is the concatenation of the operands.

  • Range expressions can now include a third term (step)

  • Fixed bug in evaluation of dictionary literals

Paradigm Components

  • Added goto transition

  • Issue a real error message when a task system state has no transitions

  • Fixed bug that caused replicated protocols, blocks, trials, and lists to always have default selection parameters

Actions

Visual Stimuli

  • Stimuli are now rendered at the full resolution of the display (by default; can be disabled in #mainScreenInfo)

  • Stimulus display now performs color management (by default; can be disabled in #mainScreenInfo)

  • Most stimuli with a color parameter now accept an arbitrary expression for each color component

  • Many stimuli now support fullscreen drawing

  • Most stimuli with x_size and y_size parameters now allow one of them to be omitted. The missing dimension is set to the value of the provided one.

  • Added redraw_on_every_refresh parameter to stimulus display device

  • Improved appearance of several stimulus types

  • Stimulus display no longer issues “updating main window display is taking longer than two frames” errors, as the warnings controlled by #warnOnSkippedRefresh are more accurate and informative and can be disabled if desired

  • Drifting grating

    • Now computes grating and mask values dynamically on the GPU (instead of using pre-computed values stored in textures)

    • All drawing parameters can now be changed at run time

    • Added color parameter

    • Added compute_phase_incrementally parameter

    • Gaussian mask normalization can now be disabled

    • Fixed bug in application of masks when x_size and y_size are not equal

  • Frame list now ensures that ending and ended are set only once in a given play-through

  • Text

    • Added text_alignment parameter

    • Fixed scaling on Retina displays

  • White noise background

    • Now generates noise on the GPU

    • Added grain_size, grayscale, rand_seed, and randomize_on_draw parameters

I/O Devices

  • Most I/O devices now have an autostart parameter. If this is set to YES, the device will start I/O automatically when the experiment starts running.

  • Added support for EasyEye devices

  • EyeLink no longer sends periodic sample acknowledgements to the tracker, as they aren’t useful and can eventually fill the tracker PC’s hard drive

  • Firmata

  • Mouse input parameter mouse_down is now optional

  • NIDAQ

    • Added analog_read_timeout parameter

    • Compiled plugin no longer links to a specific version of NI-DAQmx Base

  • Requests sent via an Open Ephys Network Events Client now fail immediately when not connected to an Open Ephys network events module

  • Added support for RCB-LVDS devices

Other

  • Added support for resource declarations, which allow an experiment to declare explicitly the supporting files it requires (instead of letting them be inferred from component parameters)

  • Added Python file resources, which evaluate Python code when the experiment loads

  • Added #stopOnError system variable

  • Variable declarations may now omit the type parameter

  • Added support for type="any" to variable_assignment

  • Errors raised during experiment loading now include source location when possible

  • Removed debugger-related variables and associated functionality, as they just weren’t very useful

Applications

Client

  • Now uses localhost (instead of 127.0.0.1) as the default server address

  • Eye window

    • Now handles fullscreen stimuli

    • Fixed terrible drawing performance under macOS 10.13

  • Reward window now issues an error message if reward variable is not found

  • Variables window

    • Now supports changing the data type of a variable’s value even when the old and new values compare equal (e.g. 1 to true)

    • Fixed crash-inducing bug

Server

  • Now uses localhost (instead of 127.0.0.1) as the default listening address

  • Display parameters shown in preferences window are now accurate even when those parameters are missing from setup_variables.xml

Python and MATLAB Tools

  • Python mworks package now supports Python 3.6 (in addition to Python 2.7)

  • Removed methods for running and stopping the application main loop from the Python conduits. (They were intended for use with matplotlib, but matplotlib already provides equivalents.)

  • Added MATLAB functions getCodec and getReverseCodec

Documentation and Examples

  • Extensive expansion of user manual

  • Added some new example experiments (and removed some old, unhelpful ones)

  • Converted RSVPDemo to MWEL

  • Fixed some issues in RSVP_analysis.m

Internals/Development

  • With the exception of some Mac-only I/O devices, MWServer has been ported to iOS

  • Reworked all stimulus-drawing code to be compatible with OpenGL 3.3 Core profile and OpenGL ES 3.0

  • Removed GLEW and shader classes

  • Replaced numeric ScheduleTask priorities with abstract TaskPriority enum class

  • Reworked thread priorities to align better with those of system-created threads

  • mprintf and friends now support arbitrary-length messages

  • MWComponents.yaml files now specify allowed_child instead of allowed_parent and can include platform support info

  • Refactored Xcode configuration files into variants for different platforms and target types

  • Fixed some memory leaks

  • Upgraded to new versions of several supporting libraries:

    • boost: 1.62.0 ➞ 1.66.0
    • zeromq: 4.1.6 ➞ 4.2.3
    • msgpack: 2.0.0 ➞ 2.1.5
    • cppunit: 1.13.2 ➞ 1.14.0
    • matlab-xunit: 4.0.0 ➞ 4.1.0

  • Removed several supporting libraries that are no longer used (libpng, jpeg, tiff, and DevIL)

  • Removed network stream support from Scarab

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