We’ve been hard at work on the Ventity 2.0.1 release and wanted to highlight some of the new and improved features – it’s actually a significant upgrade – more of a “2.1” than the version number indicates.

We’ve rebuilt the autocomplete text prompts in stocks, flows, auxiliaries and actions to list the variables linked on the diagram first, before continuing to populate the list with the same suggestions based on what has already been typed in the equation. The auto-prompt can be used as a quick, easy way to look up various functions available in Ventity without first opening the Help, by simply typing the first few letters of the function you’re looking for and letting the autocomplete fill the list of available options. This also includes helpful icons listed on the left of the autocomplete text box which will let you know at a glance if the suggested prompt is a variable, reference, macro, function, or table function.

Above: a flexible project model that builds 3 houses, or 2 or 1, or an airplane, just by switching the data.

New table functions have been added to allow for a much broader range of controls for the built-in look-up tables in Ventity, and Macro commands for Smooth, Delay, Trend, Forecast, Net Present Value (NPV) and NPVE have all been added. Together, these allow for a much broader range of controls and we’ve excited to see how they help our users to build better models in Ventity!

Another new function we’d like to highlight is ActiveInitial. With this new function, like its counterpart in Vensim, you can establish default initial values for complex expressions to break simultaneous equation loops. This is useful for determining, in a model of a chicken laying an egg and the egg growing into a chicken, that the chicken does in fact come before the egg.

We’ve added Vensim Model Import to aid in recreating Vensim models in Ventity. For more information on this feature and some tips for re-designing a Vensim model in Ventity, check out our blog post here!

Finally, we’ve added Save Period (like its counterpart SAVEPER in Vensim, but more flexible). With Save Period, you can adjust the time period for when the model records results independently of the time step of the model itself, or only save results for a certain period during the model’s run. Save Period also allows you to save results directly to disk (in a variety of formats), circumventing saving to memory first which means the only limits of the model run size are on your disk space. As with Savelists, you can specify separate settings for sensitivity runs. None of these selections will affect the model’s results, but reducing the amount of information saved will reduce the time it takes to run, especially for larger models, dramatically.

As always, you can see a comprehensive list of the new features and changes in the release notes in the built-in or through the online documentation.

Get a new license here, or download an update for your current copy.

Questions? Visit us in the forum or email us. Want to take a fresh look? Email us and we can extend your expired trial license.