Releasing a new product is always scary. What will go wrong? What have we not tested that we should have tested?

Our First Bug Fix

We found a bug just after we released last week: The Explosion disables routes and other elements interaction that we shipped with Depiction on December 17th did NOT work in all cases. If you built a depiction with an explosion overlapping a Persons element, you got an alert that said:

"The ‘explosion disables routes’ interaction could not run, because: the ‘Destroy road network’ behavior expects its ‘Cause’ element to be a Road Network."

The problem was that the interaction was incorrectly written. How embarrassing.

We fixed this right away, so any installers downloaded since December 18th will have correct behavior. (If you have a purchased version with this old interaction in it, simply go to Window’s Start button, choose All Programs > Depiction Help > Depiction Update, and follow the instructions to get a free updated version of Depiction. If you are using the trial with this interaction in it, please download a new copy of the trial here. You can then use the Interactions control to remove the old interaction from your depiction, and add the new ones.)

Depiction as a Platform

This experience does illustrate how Depiction is a flexible platform for “What if?” simulations. Here’s how.

The original interaction said that if an Explosion element’s zone of influence intersects with the zone of influence of a RoadNetwork, People, Person, SkilledPerson, SpecialNeedsPerson, or Volunteer then apply the DestroyZone behavior to the element(s) that the Explosion overlaps. The DestroyZone behavior, however, requires that the effect be a RoadNetwork element – and this interaction’s Affected elements includes five elements that are NOT road networks. Oops!

The fix was straight forward: separate this interaction into two interactions, one for the road network and another for the people-type elements. That is what you’ll find in Depiction today.

Unfortunately, at the moment this fix requires special access to Depiction’s code. While Depiction’s Interactions control allows you to create new interactions by copying an existing interaction and modifying it, you can only change the Cause element and/or the Affected elements. You cannot change the behavior used by the interaction. We are working on making this possible so you can create completely new types of interactions. We also are working on a Software Developer Kit (SDK) describing how to extend Depiction to fit your needs. More later on these.

Cheers,

David Socha