Introduction
All changes to IC3 since its initial release are described here.
- IC3 may be installed with a Japanese, Korean, Simplified
Chinese or Traditional Chinese language user-interface.
- IC3 now ships with version 4.96 of the Hasp dongle driver, for
compatibility with the data-execution protection feature of
certain processors that is available starting with
Windows XP SP2.
- Improved performance of uploading and downloading data over FTP.
- Scala products now recognize new storage devices added after
startup (e.g. USB memory keys, or new mounted network drives).
- Since Windows Update must be accessed via
Internet Explorer, the installer no longer uses the
system's default browser to visit Windows Update.
- IC3 may be installed with a French language user-interface.
- Fixed a problem for older installations that have been updated
to Release 7 or newer, where messages written to the Windows
Event Log were not completely shown.
- If the top level contents file for a published script was
corrupted, the script transfer software would not always be
able to overwrite it with a new copy. This could occur during
any script transfer, including publish, download by player, or
transfer within NetManager.
- Workaround for FTP servers that claim they support resumed
download but actually send the entire file again (or otherwise
resume from the wrong place). The resulting file would be
corrupt and is now discarded, and the download is retried.
- Fixed a case where an FTP server disconnect was not being
correctly handled by the FTP client. This could cause
misbehaviors such as the next job sent being discarded.
- Per Microsoft recommendation, on Windows XP Service Pack
2 and newer, the installer now configures the Internet
Connection Firewall so that IC3 products have the access
they need to continue to work.
- The watchdog that monitors various Scala products now
distinguishes between these three incidents:
- Abnormal termination during startup.
- Abnormal termination during regular operation.
- Abnormal termination during shutdown.
by reporting a distinct error for each. This can be useful for
trouble-shooting.
- Fixed a problem first seen in Release 7 where an FTP
transfer could fail to time out.
- Starting with Release 7.1, Scala has improved its product
version numbering. We now use "7.1" where before we would have
used "7a". Most releases will use two numbers, but an interim
(hotfix) release would be "7.1.1", "7.1.2", etc.
- For all Scala products, the product version and release
information is now written to the log at startup, and whenever
a new log is started after midnight.
- You can scroll to specific entries in the version list in the
Options dialog using the keyboard.
- Fixed a rare case where a UTF-8 or Unicode file would not be
recognized as such.
- Fixed some rare crashes involving very long file names.
- Hitting the Escape key while the splash screen is up
will now stop the application from starting up. This can be
useful, for example, on systems that auto-start the Player but
no Scala key is connected.
- Fixed a problem that in some cases could cause FTP data transfer
to be unusually slow.
- Scala configuration files are always saved in ANSI
(legacy-compatible) format unless they contain values that can
only be represented in Unicode. In that case, Unicode UTF-8 is
used.
- FTP transfers of international filenames are supported by using
UTF-8 features present in many modern FTP servers, including
the Scala-Direct FTP server. If the FTP server does not
support UTF-8, Scala falls back to the ANSI codepage.
- The OK button on the File dialog is now
ghosted when no filename is selected or when visiting a folder
where files cannot be read/written.
- Fixed a "DLL initialization" error dialog that could occur
during uninstall.
- On certain XP systems, the Scala key would not be recognized
quickly enough at bootup. We now wait longer for the key to be
recognized.
- Fixed some potential crashes using long file names.
- All relevant and useful MMOS.INI settings are now
documented in the IC3 Advanced
Configuration Options document, as is the use of
ScalaIntegration.dll.
- Sometimes an FTP server fails to confirm that an uploaded file
has been received completely (various causes, at least some of
which are legitimate). But when this happens, Microsoft's
Wininet FTP client can hang for an unreasonable amount of time
waiting for a signal that will not come. We now abort after a
reasonable short interval.
- Improved handling when concluding an FTP file transfer —
we now recognize and handle certain failures that went
unnoticed before.
- The installer now creates a Start Menu shortcut to the
Logs folder, to simplify locating the IC.log files for
trouble-shooting.
- Various features that send email (Publish to Email,
NetManager health monitoring problem notification, and
Broadcast Server email reports) has been made to work with
Netscape mail.
- Transfer of health monitoring log files, job command files, and
job response files should be somewhat faster in some cases.
- Certain versions of IIS do not correctly handle file names
containing certain high-ASCII characters. The script transfer
engine used throughout the InfoChannel network now knows how to
work around this issue.
- When specifying a customization using MMOS.INI, if the last
character of the value was a backslash but the value was
enclosed in quotes, a literal quote was read instead of a
backslash. That is, if the value was:
Identifier = "D:\"
this was interpreted as D:" rather than
D:\ — this is now fixed.
- In IC3 (up through Release 4, but now fixed), when the
Scala installer installed the key driver, an additional driver
component was selected that should not have been. On
some systems, this additional component can cause
16-bit executables to fail to run. Since 16-bit executables
are quite rare these days, the problem can remain unnoticed for
some time. However, the Scala setup executables are 16-bit
executables, and on such systems they will no longer run --
they will appear to do nothing, or unpack and do nothing.
To correct this problem, you need to uninstall then
correctly reinstall the key driver. The key driver
installation program is called HInstall.exe and
can be found in the folder where your Scala product was
installed, which is often something like:
C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>
Where C: is the drive the product was installed
to, and <Product> is one of
ICDesigner3, ICDesigner,
ICPlayer, NetManager,
NetManagerEnterprise, or
ICBroadcastServer.
Proceed as follows:
- Remove the key driver by entering this command in the
Start Menu Run... dialog:
(but use the correct path for your system)
"C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>\HInstall" /r /kp /alldrv
- Reboot the computer.
- Re-install the key driver by entering this command in the
Start Menu Run... dialog:
(but use the correct path for your system)
"C:\Program Files\Scala\<Product>\HInstall" /i /kp
Another approach is described in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q254914.
- Release 4 introduces major changes to how media is stored
and sent when scripts are published or transmitted. This
provides many great improvements that should be of interest in
small or large networks.
- Many improvements in data transmission speed.
- Many improvements in data transmission robustness (handles more
errors, retries in more places when appropriate, and general
improvements due to battle-testing).
- Fewer copies of each file are made as the data is moved from
ICDesigner through the network to the ICPlayer.
- If the same file is used by several different scripts, it is
now only sent and stored once.
- If you republish under a new script name, any files that were
already used by the old script are no longer re-sent.
- Publishing gathers files much faster than before, and doesn't
consume huge amounts of disk space.
- If the Publish location is in a sub-folder of the NetManager
workspace location or remote workspace location, and you
use the same user account to access it from Designer and
NetManager, we now avoid an additional file copy. This
specific setup is the new default when IC3 Designer and
NetManager are installed on the same machine.
- If you install IC3 Network Manager, IC3 Designer, and IC3
Player on the same machine, new default settings make it very
easy to set up and go. All products now come with default
settings that support this simple configuration.
- In NetManager's System Settings, added a feature for
automatic retrieval of billing logs. You can enable this
feature and specify N, the number of days worth of logs
that should be retrieved from the players and placed in the
Transmission Workspace Location, in the folder
Receive\Billing\playername . Every night after
midnight, the players will compress and upload any of the last
N days worth of logs that are not yet on the server. If
there are no logs on the player for a past day, an empty log
will be uploaded, so on the server we know there are no logged
events (as opposed to a log delivery problem). The player will
delete any logs older than N days.
On the player, the mmos.ini setting
SSHEALTH_BillingLogUploadDelayHours=h
governs when the player performs the log upload. The player
will hold off for a random amount up to h hours after
startup or midnight, then connect to upload logs.
The billing log retrieval will also retrieve log files whose
name looks like:
billYYYYMMDD_anything.log
which can be used for automatic retrieval of custom log files
as well as or instead of billing logs.
- Added a Resubmit Failed Jobs feature to the
Job Status view. You can select one or more jobs in
this view, then click Resubmit Failed Jobs. This will
resubmit the jobs in question to those players that did not
successfully receive the original job. Players that
successfully received the original job will not be targeted by
the resubmit.
(Any modifications made to the job since it originally ran
will not be used. That is, the job that is resubmitted matches
the definition of the original.)
- When viewing large log files, the response time of the
Log Viewer is more than ten times faster.
- In System Settings, the new Passive-mode FTP Enabled
option tells NetManager to use passive-mode FTP, which is
sometimes needed to traverse a firewall.
- In NetManager Enterprise, when you are using broadcast servers,
you can now specify Use Point-to-Point Connection even for
Broadcast Players when you define or edit a job. This
causes the job to use the point-to-point connection you can
specify for each player, rather than the broadcast connection.
- When the broadcast priority feature of Hughes package delivery
is enabled, then a selector allows control over the priority of
the resubmitted job. The default priority for resubmitted jobs
is controlled by adding this to your MMOS.INI:
SSERVER_HNSDefaultResubmitDeliveryPriority=n
where n can be 0 (low priority), 1 (medium priority), or 2
(high priority).
- If you set the mmos.ini keyword
SSERVER_EnableIPMulticastSettingsOverride=1
then you can specify three additional data items per Broadcast
Server, namely:
- Group IP Address
- Multicast Interface Address
- Maximum Transmission Speed
These effectively override the matching settings within the
Broadcast Server, allowing the user to create multiple virtual
Broadcast Server entries within NetManager, each pointing at
the same physical Broadcast Server, but having unique values
for the above properties.
- NetManager Enterprise can now officially be used
console-style. This is essentially a single-user version of
NetManager Enterprise, allowing functionality such as
groups and broadcasting. Add this to your MMOS.INI:
NETMANAGER_EnterpriseOnConsole=1
then invoke the NetManagerConsole.exe application after
starting the NetManager engine.
- The Problem Notification Email Address can now contain a
list of comma-separated email addresses.
- Fixed a bug in Player and NetManager which prevented Chinese
and Korean installations of Windows from interoperating with
installations in other languages. For new networks, the fix is
transparent. However, for existing Chinese or Korean networks,
there are two options:
The installer will detect affected systems and warn the
user.
The NetManager Install Software Update command will
automatically add the MMOS.INI keyword to any affected
player because in this case it is certain that the legacy
option is desired (otherwise the player will become remotely
broken).
- In NetManager Enterprise, if the user with View/Modify access
logged out, sometimes the next user could not log in with
View/Modify rights. This is now fixed.
- When the built-in FTP server rejected a connection due to too
many simultaneous connections, it would respond in a way that
would tell the FTP client not to bother retrying. This is now
fixed.
- Reserved characters can no longer be typed into the Player
name, Job name, etc., fields. (Previously, they were silently
converted to underscores.)
- Fixed layout problem due to length of the translation of the
Log Out text in the French version of NetManager
Enterprise.
- Fixed a rare crash that could occur when submitting changes to
the database.
- When using the Wait option for the
Run Command task, the wait value is shown in the
Jobs overview page and in the task list in the
Edit Job page.
- Fixed a NetManager Enterprise bug introduced in
Release 7.3 where trying to view the players in a group
would list only those players not in that group.
- Fixed a bug in the top-level Job Status View where the
refresh of this page could prevent the user from reaching the
Job Status Details page or from performing Clear Job
Status.
- When the Job Status View and the Job Status
Details pages update, they no longer scroll to the top and
repaint.
- Very significant user-interface performance improvements in
NetManager, especially for large networks.
- Very significant performance improvements in the Network
Manager engine, especially for large and busy networks. Things
are much faster, and various degradation-over-time problems
have been fixed.
- When an abnormal termination, failure to start, or failure to
shutdown is detected, the correct message is now logged.
Before, part of the message said "<<No Catalog
Entry>>".
- If you leave the Job Activity view visible, it no longer
grows without bounds. Older activity entries are eventually
aged off the top.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.2 where the system
priority of NetManager threads was slightly lower than
intended.
- User activity within NetManager is now logged to IC.log and to
the Activity view. Also, startup and shutdown are explicitly
logged.
- Workaround for an Internet Explorer bug where IE could
crash in the Edit Job page when adding a task from
a long list of files. As part of this change, handling a long
list of files is much faster.
- When adding a task that needs a file from a Publish Location,
and only one such location is defined, it will be pre-selected
for you.
- If you change the Inactivity Timeout in NetManager
Enterprise, such changes now become effective immediately.
- The Network Manager engine may be run as a service, using the
SrvAny.exe tool.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.2 where NetManager did
not create the Receive\Transmission\Responses folder, so
players were unable to upload their job responses.
- New Multithreaded FTP Enabled option on the Edit
System Settings page allows NetManager to make multiple
simultaneous FTP connections. This can increase efficiency and
is generally a good idea unless your FTP server needs you to
limit the number of connections.
- The Run Command task has a new option to Wait for
Completion. This tells the player to wait for the command
line to complete before performing the next task in the job.
You can also specify the Maximum Wait Time, after which
it will give up and report an error.
- NetManager has a new Job Status view, showing the
progress of each job that has been triggered. At a glance, you
can see:
- Job Information showing the Time and
Name of jobs that have been triggered.
- An indicator icon as follows:
- A green circled checkmark, for jobs that
completed 100% successfully.
- A yellow warning icon, for jobs that
completed, with some failures.
- A green arrow, for jobs that are still in
progress, with no failures.
- A green arrow plus a yellow warning icon,
for jobs that are still in progress, with some
failures.
- In Progress information for each triggered job,
showing the number of players for which:
- the job is still being prepared on the Server
- the job is Queued waiting for the player
to collect it
- the job is actively being processed by the Player
- Completed information for each triggered job,
showing the number of players that completed with
Success or Failure.
- The Total Players addressed by this job.
Clicking on the Job Information for a particular job
lists all the players of that job, and the specific status
information for each.
- NetManager has new icon imagery in Health Monitoring:
- A green circled checkmark, for players that are in
contact with NetManager and have no errors (healthy
players).
- A yellow warning icon, for players that are in contact
with NetManager and have reported errors (sick players).
- A red circled X, for players that are not in contact
with NetManager and are overdue to report in (dead
players).
- The Player Health Log Viewer has been reworked to
be much much faster, especially for large logs. (Column
sorting and paging have been removed.)
- You can now Enable Resume Upload Support for the Network
Manager Transmission Workspace and for the Broadcast
Server folders.
- Somewhat faster communication from the Network Manager engine
to the Network Manager console. Enterprise Edition is also
slightly faster when communicating to the browser.
- Hitting Enter in various input fields now consistently
accepts the form, as if OK was pressed.
- On the New Player and Edit Player, page, added
help to the Broadcast Connection selector.
- A running copy of NetManager now remembers the
Auto-Scroll? setting per-user.
- On the New Job /Edit Job page, fixed the help
text on the <- Add button of the Tasks
box.
- Fixed a bug where the list of logs in the Log Viewer was
not always correctly sorted.
- Fixed a bug with Install File, Install System
File, and Remote Software Update, where in rare
circumstances sending such a job to broadcast players could
fail to create a needed folder.
- In the Job Activity View, manually triggered jobs are
now also in bold (like schedule-triggered jobs are).
- When installing NetManager Enterprise under
Windows 2003 Server (or other systems with newer
versions of IIS), the installer now registers NetManager
Enterprise as a web extension. (In Release 7, this needed
to be done by hand.)
- All date display and entry in NetManager now respects regional
settings for year/month/day, month/day/year, or day/month/year.
- NetManager Enterprise can now be installed on
Windows 2003 Server.
- NetManager uses the new built-in FTP client, for better
performance, robustness, and logging. With this new client,
NetManager automatically supports Resumed download when
possible.
- The automated email notification features of NetManager no
longer rely on the default mailer (Outlook, etc.) because of
various problems with that solution. Starting with
Release 7, these features require you to specify the mail
server and authentication settings to use, in NetManager's
System Settings page.
- When viewing activity pages, or when in chat mode,
Internet Explorer and the NetManager Console no longer
make the periodic "ticking" sound.
- If you Edit Player in NetManager, and make changes
without changing the password, the player's password could
become corrupted. This is now fixed.
- Clicking OK in NetManager's System Configuration
page with an illegal value for Network Manager Workspace
Location now correctly restores the previous value rather
than leaving the user stuck.
- Fixed a problem where rescanning a publish location in
NetManager could show old data due to caching by the browser.
- Shift-clicking or using the context menu to select Open in
New Window generally would lead to an error message.
Therefore these operations are now prevented.
- Enter in the multi-line text boxes now processes the
form rather than inserting a newline character.
- You can now bookmark the main NetManager page.
- Clicking on an error in the Player Health would not jump
to the correct page inside the log viewer.
- Fixed a bug where if you created a player group with invalid
characters, you could not edit or delete that group.
- If a job schedule was set to trigger "every month on the 31st",
this would generate errors for months with only 30 days.
- Very significant speedups for systems with large numbers of
players.
- When NetManager Enterprise was not installed at the root of the
web server, the header of the Health Details page would
sometimes refresh incorrectly. This is now fixed.
- The Health Details page was always resetting the number of
records viewed. Now fixed.
- Network Manager now integrates the functionality of an FTP
server (Server-Direct FTP). Although a separate
FTP server on the same or different machine is supported
exactly as before, it is no longer necessary.
Using the Server-Direct FTP offers several
advantages:
- Simpler NetManager configuration. Various settings are
automatically established when
Server-Direct FTP is used.
- There is one less thing to administer. You no longer
need to separately administer your IIS, Apache, etc. FTP
server.
- FTP status and activity logging is integrated into
NetManager's logs, and appear in the Job Activity
view in blue. Players log in to
Server-Direct FTP using their player names,
for even clearer logging.
- Since Server-Direct FTP does not use a
general purpose FTP server, various security
restrictions are applied automatically, such as
disallowing anonymous access, restricting file access to
designated directories, etc. Various attempted security
breaches are clearly logged.
- Note: When using Server-Direct FTP, if
you are also using IIS you will need to reassign one or
the other's FTP command port.
- On the System Settings page, the choice of connection
type is now labeled Send and Receive Data Via, and the
choices are:
- Server-Direct FTP: Use NetManager's built-in FTP
server for sending data to and receiving data from players.
- Custom: This choice disables NetManager's
built-in FTP server, and lets you send data to and
receive data from players using other mechanisms.
The Custom choice can be used for any of the
following circumstances:
- Use a shared folder to send and
receive data.
- For Network Manager Workspace
Location, specify the path to a folder
for NetManager to use as its workspace
location.
- Select a Transmission Workspace
Location type of
Shared Folder.
- Enter the shared folder path to access the
Network Manager Workspace Location.
This may or may not be the exact same path
you typed for the Network Manager
Workspace Location, but:
- It must ultimately point to the same place.
- It must be a shared folder path that is valid for
both the players and NetManager itself to access.
- Use an FTP server running on the NetManager
machine or elsewhere on the LAN, to send
and receive data. (E.g. use Microsoft IIS,
or a third-party FTP server.)
- For Network Manager Workspace
Location, specify the path to a folder
on the FTP server for NetManager to use as
its workspace location.
- Select a Transmission Workspace
Location type of FTP.
- Enter the URL,
User Name, and Password
for FTP access to the same folder.
- Use an off-site FTP server to send
and receive data.
- For Network Manager Workspace
Location, specify the path to a folder
for NetManager to use as its workspace
location.
- Select a Transmission Workspace
Location type of FTP.
- Enter the URL,
User Name, and Password
for accessing the off-site FTP server.
In this case, Network Manager automatically
copies data back and forth between its local
workspace location and the off-site FTP server.
In Release 5 and earlier, this choice did not exist
— effectively it was always Custom, and supported
the same circumstances described above.
(The group of settings governing how to send and receive
data only needs to be specified in NetManager — there are
no corresponding Player settings because NetManager
automatically tells the players how to send and receive data.)
- In the New Player / Edit Player page, the
choice of point-to-point connection is labeled Send Job
Commands Via, and the choices are:
- Local Computer (Tutorial): Signifies this player
runs on the same machine as NetManager, and is used for
the tutorial set-up. (Only one tutorial player is
permitted, so this option does not appear if a tutorial
player is already defined.)
- Player-Direct FTP: Signifies that the job
commands are pushed to the player's integrated FTP
server.
- Custom: Lets you specify either the FTP URL or
the shared folder path to where the player's job
commands should be sent.
In Release 5 and earlier, this choice did not exist
— effectively all players were Custom.
Regardless of which mechanism you choose, the
InfoChannel Player Configuration for that player should
be set to match.
- On the System Settings page, the Network Manager's
Host Name field is now part of the Transmission Engine
Options because it is no longer used just for health
monitoring.
- On the System Settings page, the Activity Logging
Detail choices are now:
- Errors and Problems Only
- Low
- Normal
- Diagnostic
This is more accurate, and consistent with the Player settings.
- On the System Settings page, the Heartbeat
Interval and Minimum Alert Interval are now
expressed in minutes for simplicity and consistency. (Any
previous settings are rounded to the nearest minute, with a
one-minute minimum.)
- On the System Settings page, the setting that controls
the number of players from which NetManager automatically
requests logs when a problem occurs is now called Maximum
Player Log Retrieval on Same Error.
- The Player Health tab is now the first tab under
Manage, to correctly reflect its importance.
- The Player Health details pages now includes an
indication of whether the graphical engine on the player is
actually playing. An icon that resembles a screen with the
ICPlayer "arrow" indicates that the graphical engine is
actually running. A blank screen icon indicates that the
player's network engine has detected that the graphical engine
has stopped. (Any Release 5 or older players show no icon
in this column.)
- The problem descriptions on the Player Health details
pages now include the date and time of the most recent
occurrence.
- The autoscroll function of Job Activity page only
scrolls to the bottom when a new event actually appears.
- Various checkboxes within the Player Health section now
have tooltips.
- The Player Health: Whole Network page has been improved
so that status updates appear in real-time without a full page
refresh. Thus the Auto-Refresh? Refresh Now
button is no longer needed and has been removed.
- When looking at a player's log in the Log File Reader,
messages from the Player's network engine say
netic
in the Source column, while messages from the Player's
graphical engine say runic.
- The Job Activity page has been improved so that activity
updates appear in real-time without a full page refresh.
Thus the Auto-Refresh? and Refresh Now
buttons are no longer needed and have been removed. If the new
Auto-Scroll? checkbox is checked then the page always
scrolls to show the newest entries.
- Errors and log events that occur early during NetManager
startup were not appearing in the Job Activity page.
This is now fixed.
- In the New Job and Edit Job page, the
user-interface for entering tasks has been simplified. Instead
of a separate Send Content Task and Maintenance
Tasks box, there is now a single Tasks box with the
following command choices:
- Send Main Script
- Send Content
- <More Commands>
Picking <More Commands> extends the command list
to include all the maintenance commands.
- The Send Main Script task now filters the file list to
only only shows files with the .scb extension.
- The Install Software Update task now filters the file
list to only only shows files with the .cab extension.
- Various fields that can contain large amounts of text now use
multi-line text-input controls.
- The transmission of heartbeats from Players to NetManager has
been made more efficient and more robust.
- Fixed potential hang/crash upon NetManager shutdown.
- The initial window height of the Network Manager Console is no
longer too tall for 800x600 displays.
- Automated email notifications no longer trigger the Outlook
security dialog that asks:
A program is trying to automatically send e-mail on your behalf.
Do you want to allow this?
- Buttons in the header area were sometimes not removed when you
navigated to a different page. For example, the
Show: Cleared checkbox from Health Monitoring could
be seen in the header for the Players page.
- If the engine for the NetManager Standard Edition is restarted,
the NetManager Console will return to the home page. (The
Enterprise Edition already did this.)
- The Download Retry Maximum Timeout can now be raised to
9999 minutes, rather than the old 60 minute limit.
(This setting is the maximum length of time a player will retry
a job if another job is pending behind it.)
- Fixed a rare crash during job activity.
- If you selected Clear Log on the
Job Activity view in NetManager, sometimes no
further activity was shown until you quit and restarted the
network engine. (Job activity was still occurring, it just was
not shown.) This is now fixed.
- If the TCP port for Network Manager health monitoring were
scanned or if there were certain types of connection problem,
then all future player health reports could have been blocked
until the Network Manager engine was stopped and restarted.
- If Trigger At Time was used for a job to set up several
triggers that differed only by day of the week (i.e. same time,
month, etc. but on different weekdays), then only one trigger
would occur. Now fixed.
- If the Retrieve Files job command had to retry
because it did not complete the first time, the retry could end
up failing for no reason. This is now fixed.
- If the Install Software Update job command
fails due to a bad username or password for the player (or if
the chosen account lacks administrator privileges), the error
message specifically refers to that as a likely cause.
- The Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files
job commands now work if the player's Point-to-Point Connection
path used a drive-letter. (This typically only affected the
tutorial's Sample Player.)
- Usability improvement in the New Job and
Edit Job pages: in any of the areas that allow
information to be added to the job (Send Content Task,
Maintenance Tasks, Players not Targeted for this
Job, Trigger At Time or Trigger When File
Changes), if a value is selected or changed without being
added to the job then the user will get a warning confirmation
dialog when selecting OK.
- When starting NetManager for the first time, the health
database file does not yet exist. However, NetManager
was reporting this as a Server HealthDatabase.xml file
not found and file is corrupt error in IC.log
and into the Job Activity page. This is now fixed.
- In rare cases, health monitoring could sometimes show a partial
log entry for the most recent entry. This is now fixed.
- If NetManager Enterprise was run but IIS was not found, the
program would crash during exit. This is now fixed.
- In rare cases the player count on the health monitoring pages
could be slightly off. This is now fixed.
- Starting with Release 4, we introduced a
new format for how the files belonging to a script
are arranged, different from the old format used in
SP2 and earlier. In Release 4, if the NetManager
downloads to its workspace a new format script
having the same name as an old format script that
it already had, some of the files would end up in the wrong
place, which ultimately leads to the player not finding the
files it needs. (If the script was re-sent, things would
correct themselves.) This is now fixed.
(R4)
- Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files now
put the retrieved files or folders at the root level of the
player-specific sub-folder of the
Receive\Content
location, rather than creating a series of sub-folders that
mimic the original path on the player. (This change was in
Release 4 but did not get documented at the time.)
- In NetManager, any job whose trigger explicitly included the
month of October did not work. This is now fixed.
- The timeout when Network Manager tries to retrieve player
logs was too short for some cases, causing retrieval to fail
when it shouldn't have. The timeout value is now more
reasonable.
- If NetManager is using a modem to dial out, and you send jobs
to multiple players, only the jobs for the first player would
usually get through. This is now fixed.
- Fixed a problem where viewing logs from within the
Player Health tab could fail on certain Unix-based
FTP servers.
- Various internal changes for the new way scripts are laid out,
versionated, and sent.
(Note: Jobs that trigger when the script changes will now only
trigger when the script is republished using Release 4 of
ICDesigner.)
- For security, Network Manager now "seals" the transmission
documents that are sent to players. Once a player has received
a valid sealed transmission it will no longer accept non-sealed
transmissions.
- New strategies prevent wininet "transfer in progress" error
12110.
- Formerly, once a script and its media were successfully
transferred, we "trusted" that the media files remained there.
We now handle if some of the media files are for example
deleted or lost.
- Better handling when transferring a script whose name is the
same except that it uses upper- and lower-case letters
differently from a previous version.
- Catch and handle observed exceptional cases where the script
appeared to be successfully transferred without errors, but
certain files remained missing.
- Faster file transfers to FTP destinations.
- Faster FTP folder scanning.
- Fixed a problem seen publishing large files to a local IIS
server where IIS server apparently received the FTP commands
out of order.
- File transfers work to the root directory (files with no path.)
- Aggressive handling of "connection reset by host" errors
(wininet error 12031) by reconnecting. This problem was
observed to plague certain FTP servers, and is now handled.
- Now sends content and files directly from the source folder if
no broadcasting is involved, and if the content is published in
a folder that is reachable via the remote workspace path, and
if the local and remote workspace folder are the same folder.
Otherwise content is copied to the server workspace folders.
Now sends content and files directly from source folder if the
source folder path is in the "remote" folder workspace path.
This will work even if the server local and remote workspace
are not the same folder, but only for point to point. For
broadcast the files still need to be downloaded locally so they
can be added to the broadcast package file.
- FTP file transfer includes a workaround for an issue that
affects certain FTP servers (IIS4 and possibly others) where
after deleting a file, it still appears to be present for a
while. This could have resulted in a variety of "access
denied" or other hard-to-explain errors.
- The directory caching of the Serv-U FTP server can return
incorrect results. Scala recommends this feature be disabled.
However, if this is not possible you can enable a workaround by
adding this to your MMOS.INI:
WININET_EnableServUDirectoryCacheKludge = 1
(The workaround will hurt media transfer performance.)
- The Network Manager home page and System Settings page has
a link to an on-line tutorial. As well, you can reach this
tutorial by clicking on the Network Manager logo in the
upper-left corner.
- NetManager standard and NetManager Enterprise support player
health monitoring.
- If an error occurs on a player, the Network Manager server is
quickly notified.
- Players send a heartbeat message at a configurable interval, so
that the Network Manager can notice if a player becomes
non-responsive.
- From the Network Manager user-interface, you can:
- See an overview of the entire network. Players with
similar problems are grouped together.
- See the status summary of every player, or of each
player affected by a particular problem.
- Retrieve and examine logs for individual players.
- Mark problems as resolved.
- The Scala log, as well as the Windows application and system
logs can be retrieved and examined.
- Automatic nightly retrieval of logs is supported. NetManager
keeps an archive of recent logs.
- When a problem occurs in a healthy network, NetManager can send
an email alert to an administrator.
Error message reports have been augmented with a
Problem text and code. Although the Error specifies
what exactly failed, the Problem tells you the outcome and
consequence of the error, to let you determine its severity.
As an example, an error might be "file not found", but the
Problem caused by that error is "The script did not play
correctly."
The Problem scheme is used as the primary grouping and
sorting characteristic in NetManager's health monitoring views.
We may in the future add additional support information, for
example, steps an operator can try to address specific
problems. In coming releases we will also define more Problems
and categorize more errors into Problems.
- NetManager Enterprise now has broadcast options, for talking to
IC3 Broadcast Server.
- The left-side frame now has two tab panels, clearly separating
the Management controls from the Configuration
controls. Home and Logout buttons have been
redesigned.
- Network Manager now automatically cleans up expired files and
scripts in the workspace folders.
- New Install Software Update job command, for
sending Scala-supplied updates or hotfixes directly to a player
for unattended installation and upgrade.
- New Abort Jobs in Progress job command.
- Retrieve Files command now supports wildcards and
recursion into subfolders. Delete Files now also
supports the ? wildcard (The * wildcard was
already supported.)
- Retrieve Files, Delete Files,
Install File, and
Install System File now support Scala
assignments in paths (things like Logs:,
ScalaProgram:, and so on.)
- The Activity page shows more and better detail, including
player download progress information, and more color-coding.
- Ability to sort jobs, players, errors, etc., by column.
- Configurable User Inactivity Timeout. (Set to zero to disable
auto-logoff).
- Various improvements to user-interface, progress message, and
error message wording.
- If a FTP server running on "this" host allows
anonymous connections, we report an error at startup and
periodically thereafter, because this is a potential security
hole.
- Certain Network Manager System Settings changes need to be
communicated to the player. If you submit changes to any of
those settings, you get a reminder dialog that you need to send
any job to all players for these changes to take effect.
- New configuration setting to control "Minimum Time to Keep
Workspace Files".
- Retrieve Content and Retrieve Files now
put the retrieved files or folders at the root level of the
player-specific sub-folder of the
Receive\Content
location, rather than creating a series of sub-folders that
mimic the original path on the player.
- Fixed crash if UNC paths were entered using forward slashes only.
- Much faster point-to-point delivery of transmission directive
files.
- Fixed Delete Group problem.
(Enterprise Edition only)
- Fixed problems refreshing in the chat window.
(Enterprise Edition only)
- Fixed inactivity timeout problem that prevented the tab frame
from reappearing, after editing a record.
- Fixed a spurious error when cleaning up files if the local and
remote workspace folder are the same.
- Fixed various JavaScript errors seen on some systems when
submitting/reloading databases, or triggering jobs manually.
- Fixed a problem when using the browser Back button to return
into Network Manager Enterprise Edition from other web sites.
(Enterprise Edition only)
- The Network Manager Standard Edition console requires that any
proxy server be bypassed for local requests. The Console now
detects this condition and and requests to correct it (as a
condition of continuing.)
(Standard Edition only)
- Limit the number of transmission directive files that can be
backlogged for UNC or Win32 drive letter path delivery.
- Delete Unused Content no longer fails if a script links
to a missing piece of linked content.
- File names with closing brackets are no longer erroneously
rejected.
- Fixed some issues when installing the Network Manager web
relative to the root of your web server. There were issues
with the home directory name, and with re-installing.
- If exceptionally long error messages were logged, the software
could crash.
- Sometimes, when a script upload should have succeeded, it would
instead fail with an error "no more files".
- After a script upload, we now do an extra check that all files
made it. If somehow a file is missing in spite of the checks
we already have, we now signal an error and mark the
destination location as incomplete, so the operation can be
retried.
- Fixed a bug that required an ICPlayer or ICDesigner key to also
be attached to the Network Manager machine in order for it to
process jobs.
- If you save database changes then immediately trigger a job, it
was possible for the job to run with the old database values.
Now fixed.
- Now when a player is disabled, future jobs will not be
transmitted to the player.
- Network Manager now notices player response files more quickly.
- Now detects and reports errors if the remote receive/logs
folder does not have write access.
- The default activity log detail level is now MODERATE, instead
of MINIMUM.
- In certain cases, error dialogs from within Network Manager
were coming up blank. This is now fixed.
- In the New Player / Edit Player page, the option formerly
called
Player's Connection to its Job Folder
is now correctly called
Network Manager's Connection to This Player's Job
Folder
- The Skip Locked Files option for the Delete Files job is
removed. Files that cannot be deleted because they are locked
are reported as an error.
- Various clarifications in the Network Manager configuration
page:
-
"Workspace Location on the Server" is now
"Network Manager Workspace Location"
-
"Players' Connection to Workspace" is now
"Transmission Workspace Location"
-
"Back-Channel Timeout (Hours)" is now "Player
Response Timeout (Hours)"
- Network Manager Console window now remembers whether or not it
was maximized.
- Sometimes, ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES (Windows error 00000012) was
being reported. This is not a true error and will no longer
generate any entries in the logs.
- NetManager Enterprise Edition installer now lets you install
the web folder anywhere, and lets you request a virtual
directory be created for it.
These changes affect both IC3 Designer and IC3 Player:
- Python is a popular and
powerful programming language that can be used for advanced
scripting through IC3's Windows Script support. We now
include an installer for Python as part of Designer and Player,
and on the Support CD.
- Added a workaround for frame-synchronized display updates, to
benefit certain ATI systems and for VIA S3 systems. The
traditional approach used to work well but broke down on ATI
Radeon-based devices with recent drivers. On such systems, the
drivers end up consuming excessive CPU which badly impacts
performance. The VIA S3 chipset always had this issue.
To enable the workaround, add the following to your
MMOS.INI file:
XDRAW_SimulateFullScreenVBlankFlip=1
A companion MMOS.INI setting can be used to fine-tune
behavior:
XDRAW_SimVBlankSleepThreshold=3
This governs how close to the estimated start of vertical blank
Scala switches to an accurate but CPU-intensive way of
waiting. Setting the number too high will use too much CPU and
affect performance. Setting the number too low can cause the
vertical blank to be missed, producing a visual stutter. The
default value of 3 milliseconds should be OK in most cases.
Note:: If you have previously set
XDRAW_AlwaysSingleBuffer=1 (the previous workaround),
remove that before trying this new option.
- The format of the Weekday variable of the
Timing EX can now be set to Use Windows Regional
Options, so that weekday names appear in the same language as
Windows.
- You can now add an optional IgnoreMissingDestination(On)
suboption to the GotoExpr() and UseExpr()
commands. This suppresses an error if the destination event
does not exist.
- New Movie.Duration() function returns the length of a
given movie file in milliseconds.
- Thai TIS-620 (Thai ANSI) fonts are once again supported. This
worked in Release 6, but required additional internal
changes due to Unicode support.
(Note that Thai Unicode fonts continue to not be
supported — you must use Thai ANSI fonts.)
- The installer now includes various fonts from the Bitstream
Vera family. Bitstream Vera Sans is the new default
typeface in Designer.
- Fixed a caching bug whereby if you reuse a versionated picture
or sound file while you're still using a copy, it might not
pick up the changed version.
- Fixed a crash observed when certain wipes were used on top of a
MovieClip or TextCrawl.
- Player used to record a harmless but confusing error message
to the Windows application log that said
RunIC.app -Embedding is not a valid Win32 application.
This is now fixed.
- Fixed a rare crash that could occur when the subscript ended,
if a TextCrawl was on the last page of that subscript.
- Fixed a potential hang when playing a script with multiple PNG
files on a multi-processor or hyperthreaded system.
- Certain video decoders don't respond to stop time requests in a
timely manner, which causes the desired End Time
setting to be ignored. We now detect and handle this, for the
case where Overlay is off. (The detection is not
possible when Overlay is on.)
- If when playing a streaming video, you encounter an error that
The operation could not be performed because the filter is
not running, this can be resolved by setting the
MMOS.INI keyword:
DSHOWRENDER_IgnoreIncompleteStateChange=1
(We may enable this by default in the future)
- The mouse pointer becomes visible when a page has buttons.
Fixed a bug where the mouse pointer would in some cases fail to
disappear after moving to a page with no buttons.
- Fixed a rare bug in 3D wipes seen in some cases when a piece of
the element was seen "edge-on".
- When re-activating a global crawl that uses a cued expression,
the crawl would sometimes not request more text. This is now
fixed.
- Fixed a problem where playback of streaming video could hang if
Windows Media Player had been set to "work offline".
- Targa file format support now includes images with
alpha-channel.
- Improved word-wrapping rules for Korean Hangul text.
- The Escape key has been made more responsive on slower
systems under heavy load.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 where Movie
backgrounds with overlay on could be delayed in starting.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.2 where video
playback could use excessive CPU, sometimes leading to audio
stutter.
- Fixed a major glitch when starting to play certain WMVs as
movie backgrounds with overlay off.
- Increased smoothness of playback in some cases.
- Fixed a bug on certain systems where a movieclip with outline
enabled would not play.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.1 where certain AVI
files with Overlay on would not play.
- Improved the tuning of IC3's internal thread priorities for
even better smoothness of video playback and global crawl.
- Fixed some glitches with back-to-back movie and streaming video
playback seen on various systems.
- Fixed some potential and rarely observed crashes with movie and
streaming video playback.
- Playback of WMV files as a local Movie or
MovieClip uses a more modern Microsoft component to read
the file.
- When playing back a streaming video from an ASX/WMX file, we
now support the case of a byte-order-mark in that file.
- Fixed a deadlock seen in some cases when using WinDVD4 to play
video.
- Scala scripts with text-entry buttons now support Asian
text-entry during playback within IC3 Designer and
IC3 Player. If Scala is running in a window, then the
full IME is available. If Scala is running in full-screen,
then the helper windows are not available but the basic
functionality is available by keyboard. To force ICPlayer to
run as a borderless full-size topmost window on the desktop,
see the DESKTOP_Borderless, DESKTOP_TopMost, and
DESKTOP_CustomPosition settings in IC3 Advanced Configuration
Options.
- Improved word-wrapping rules to support intelligent line breaks
in Asian-language text. For all languages, some minor
improvements in word-wrapping behavior for punctuation-type
characters.
- The Sound EX has special logic to avoid re-playing
an infinitely-looping sample that is set to not wait. On the
player (or in Designer for the case where this event occurred
in a subscript), the sample was sometimes replayed, leading to
incorrect-sounding audio and eventual performance degradation
as the samples piled up.
- Playback of YUV-based video (including MPEG, MPEG-2, and
TV tuners) with overlay off is smoother on
systems with Pentium 4-class CPUs.
- On systems with both Designer and Player installed, Windows
Scripting again works in both products. (Starting with
Release 7, it only worked in whichever product was
installed last.)
- Scala now supports Windows Media streaming video. For best
results, Microsoft's Windows Media 9 should be installed.
- To create a streaming video page, from the
Main menu's Add pop-up, select
Add Streaming Video Page
- To create a streaming video clip, from the
Design menu's Add pop-up, select
Add Streaming Videoclip
To specify the video source, type in the URL of a Windows Media
stream. This can be:
- The http:// URL to a Windows Media redirector file
(which is typically a .wmx or .asx file)
- The mms:// URL to a Windows Media video stream
(which is typically a .wmv or .asf file)
- The http:// URL to a Windows Media video stream
(which is typically a .wmv or .asf file)
In most respects, playback of streaming video is similar to
playback of a local movie or movieclip file, and most of the
same options apply.
- Dramatically improved back-to-back playback of Movie
backgrounds, for the Overlay=off case.
- Removed a significant glitch in the global crawl that occurred
at the end of an Overlay=off Movie background.
- Global crawl is even smoother when other activity is occurring.
- New SYSTEM_ShiftThreadPriority setting in
MMOS.INI that can further improve global crawl
smoothness. See IC3 Advanced
Configuration Options for more information.
- The ScalaScript Search() function was broken in the
Unicode conversion of Release 7. Now fixed.
- Minor usability improvements in the popup-button list. In
particular, you can type the first letter of an item to
highlight that item.
- If you click on a value field or hit its hotkey, the value is
highlighted even if it is the special dash or infinity symbol.
This reminds the user they can type, or use the arrow keys to
select other values.
- Text elements with an Asian-language font plus a non-Latin-1
Latin font will now use the Latin font for any matching
national characters (e.g. Central European, Cyrillic, etc.).
- Fixed a bug where certain corrupt AnimGIF filescould cause a
crash.
- New MMOS.INI keyword
OPTIBASE_IgnoreHardware=on
When set, the Optibase EX will cleanly work in the absence
of the hardware. This can be useful when using the Publish
Server to publish scripts with Optibase events, using a
Designer that does not have the Optibase card installed.
- You can now specify any Unicode character by its hexadecimal
value within a ScalaScript string by using the ^uNNNN
notation.
- When a Return to Bookmark is encountered but there is no
bookmark to return to, the script reports an error and
continues, as documented. Formerly, the script would exit.
- The script engine now reports errors if any out-of-range
parameters are found.
- Text Crawls and Global Text Crawls in legacy scripts that used
non-default code pages are now loaded and saved with better
backwards compatibility.
- If you select an invalid port in the Serial EX, the
resulting error message is clear rather than confusing.
- Fixed a bug which in certain unusual cases could cause a
Movie background to be incorrectly offset.
- Asian Vertical Text is supported in Text elements,
Text Crawls, and Global Text Crawls.
- When an Asian-language font is used for a text segment, a Latin
font may also be specified. The Latin font is used for drawing
any Latin characters present in a mixed piece of text. The
syntax is:
... Font(typeface, size, Latin(typeface), ...)
Text Crawl and Global Text Crawl support an embedded tag
<latintypeface> to specify this Latin font.
- The Schedule EX now has an Options Menu where you
can set the starting day of week. This affects the
button-order in the Schedule EX menu, and also affects the
week-number calculations.
- Wipe speed used to only be an abstract number from 1-10. This
is still supported, but now you can also control a wipe's
actual Duration.
- Billing EX now supports custom log text. For an
event with billing enabled, if you enable the
Custom Log Text? checkmark, you can enter
arbitrary text on that event. The text you enter will get
emitted to the billing log at the end of the line.
- New ScalaScript variables containing various product version
information have been added:
- Scala.ProductInfo (e.g., "Scala InfoChannel Designer 3/2003-12-10 English")
- Scala.ReleaseInfo (e.g., "Release 7.1")
- Scala.BuildInfo (usually empty)
- Scala.Version (e.g., 307)
- Scala.Revision (e.g., 1)
- Scala.Build (usually 0)
- The Timing EX now supports various Windows date and
time formats and calendars, as can be specified in the Windows
Regional Options control panel. This provides
greater flexibility including support of various Asian date and
time formats.
- New player function Unicode(str), which returns
the Unicode-value of the first character of str.
- New player function Unichar(num), which returns a
string containing the character whose unicode value is
num.
- Queue EX supports the serial protocol of the newer Nemo-Q
queuing systems.
- The FileIO EX Open() function now supports an
Encoding option to select the text-encoding.
- Loading of script files and wipe files is now somewhat faster.
- Fixed the Close button in the FTP URL dialog.
- Fixed a crash involving certain wipes running in parallel with
a 3D-wipe.
- Fixed a rare crash with the Return to Bookmark
feature.
- Canceling the WinDVD install no longer hangs setup.
- Fixed a Sound EX bug where the right-channel sample
volume could be misread on certain systems.
- Fixed the CD.Prev, CD.Next, and
CD.LengthTrack commands.
- If full-screen playback is minimized and then restored, the
background is now properly refreshed.
- Fixed various problems with FileIO EX EndOfFile(),
Position(), and WriteChars() functions, and fixed
error handling in several other FileIO functions.
- Fixed a flash of green or black that sometimes occurred at the
end of a MovieClip or Movie that used overlay.
- When a background Movie with overlay started, the
beginning of the video was sometimes choppy (skipped frames).
Now fixed.
- In high-color modes, the overlay key color was supposed to be a
dark green, but a bright green was used instead. Now fixed.
- Fixed a bug where an MCI MPEG EX event with a
specific size could sometimes draw the key color outside the
specified rectangle.
- Fixed a flash of green color that potentially could occur when
using TVTuner clips or backgrounds with overlay.
- Fixed a bug that caused playback to appear to hang sometimes if
the Home or End keys were pressed.
- Fixed some problems with the new-for-Release 6a
XDRAW_CommitToVideoBufferWithCPU=1 keyword in
MMOS.INI: No longer clears part of the desktop to black,
and fixes potential crash if you drag the window during
playback.
- Fixed a bug where a line element would disappear if its left
coordinate was zero.
- Fixed an obscure rendering bug for rectangles that were only a
single pixel in size.
- Significant internal rework to improve graphical performance.
This is especially noticeable when using blending effects, and
on faster video cards. Overall, things run faster (some things
run very much faster). Certain specific
operations may be slower than in Release 5 — Scala
recommends you try a variety of scripts on representative
player hardware before upgrading your players in the field.
- Implemented "keep up" logic in the graphical engine. Motions
no longer slow down when the screen updates get too complex.
This generally produces a better overall appearance, plus
greater consistency from system to system. In many cases,
effects appear to run faster, because before they never could
keep up.
- InfoChannel Designer and InfoChannel Player now support playing
Macromedia Flash files as clips. Using a FlashClip is
similar to using MovieClips. However, a few options are
not supported, including rotation and flipping. Also, we
currently only support Flash clips, not Flash background
animations.
- InfoChannel Designer and InfoChannel Player now support one or
more Global Text Crawls, for crawling text during the
entire script (or during a group of pages). In Designer,
simply choose Add Text Crawl from the page's
Add pop-up, then select the Global? checkmark.
Global Text Crawl supports all the features of Text Crawl,
with the exception of element opacity, layering, bevel, border,
wipes, and the wait option. Global Text Crawl supports all the
different data source types (file, expression, or cued
expression), direction, rotation, etc. Global Text Crawl must
always have a backdrop color or image. As well, within the
ScalaScript all colors need to be specified in RGB syntax
rather than using pens from the page's palette. The
ScalaScript syntax for RGB colors is:
RGB($rrggbb)
and is used in place of
Pen($pennum)
where rr, gg, and
bb are the hexadecimal values of the levels
of red, green, and blue respectively.
(Note: RGB() can actually be hand-authored
for any color of any element, but is required for Global Text
Crawl.)
- Text Crawl and Global Text Crawl now support a wide variety of
embedded tags within the crawl data for controlling the
appearance of crawled text:
<typeface = "typefacename">
<typesize = "pointsize">
<facecolor = "#rrggbb">
<outlinecolor = "#rrggbb">
<shadowcolor = "#rrggbb">
<undercolor = "#rrggbb">
<face = "On|Off">
<front = "On|Off">
<outline = "On|Off">
<outlinethickness = "numpixels">
<shadow = "On|Off">
<shadowoffset = "numpixels_horizontal, numpixels_vertical">
<under = "On|Off">
<underposition = "numpixels">
<underthickness = "numpixels">
<underair = "numpixels">
<bold = "On|Off">
<bolddelta = "numpixels">
<italic = "On|Off">
<italicdelta = "numpixels">
<extragap = "numpixels">
Most of the above are self-explanatory. (Note that the four
...color options were added and documented in
Release 4, but are included here for completeness.)
For typefacename, specify the typeface
as generally seen in saved ScalaScripts, e.g.:
<typeface = "Arial (Western [])">
The <extragap> option specifies the number
of extra pixel rows of gap that should be added before the next
segment is crawled. This option is useful to increase spacing
when using scrolls (i.e. vertical crawls).
- The Loops setting for newly created Text Crawls and
Global Text Crawls now starts out at infinity.
- To disable CD-audio within the Sound EX, add
SOUND_DisableCDAudio=1
to your MMOS.INI file. In order
to play CD-audio, the Sound EX normally has to lock the CD
drive when playback begins, making the drive unavailable for
CD-ROM data use. This setting ensures the drive can always be
used for data, on systems that do not need CD-audio.
- When Clips, MovieClips, etc. are resized between
about half and double their size, a bilinear-filtered scaling
algorithm is used for improved appearance.
- In Release 5 and earlier, it was possible through obscure
ways to have a script that switched display resolution. This
is no longer supported.
- Alpha wipes for elements now correctly respect layers, and
animations play during the alpha wipe effect.
- Fixed a case of a corrupt file crashing the picture loaders.
- Alpha wipes now can be rotated in 90-degree increments.
- The ScaleTheWall and SmoothWall wipes may now be
applied to elements too.
- Global Text Crawl and Text Crawl support baseline
justification. This feature is not yet exposed in the
user-interface, and must be hand-scripted by adding:
Justify(Left, Baseline)
(or you can use Center or Right in
place of Left). In addition, you can add
Baseline(numpixels)
to specify the baseline's offset from the top of the element.
The primary purpose is to allow a baseline-aligned crawl which
is useful when using the <typeface> tag to
change typeface within a crawl, and to allow regular text
elements to be relatively positioned to baseline-aligned
crawls.
- The Global Text Crawl command supports the option
Active(booleanvariable)
to control whether this global crawl is visible. If the
ScalaScript or a VBScript or JavaScript changes the
booleanvariable to false, the global crawl
will be hidden. Setting the variable to true will cause the
global crawl to appear. This can be used to implement an
"emergency-only" crawl. This option is not yet exposed in the
Designer user-interface.
- Schedule EX events that were saved by IC200 with years
after 2002 now load correctly into IC3.
- Fixed various bugs in authoring and playback of buttons that have
Link Sizes enabled.
- The MCI MPEG EX Options menu has
been simplified because many options are no longer relevant.
Removed are:
- Display Mode
- Use 16-bit MCI?
- Disable DirectDraw?
- Disable DirectSound?
- Disable Double Buffering?
- Targa format image files were incorrectly being recognized as
video clips.
- An image file in one of the lesser-used formats (e.g. Targa,
TIFF) would only be recognized if it had one of the correct
common extensions for that file type. Now such files are
correctly recognized regardless of extension.
- Various improvements to the "script wipes" (Pushes, Reveals,
and Zooms), including:
- Various performance optimizations.
- Fixed some rendering bugs seen when at very high wipe speeds.
- Coordinates within wipe definitions can now use the full
32-bit integer range rather than just -128 through +127.
- When saving text elements with multiple segments, sometimes
sub-options were not being correctly saved. For example, if
two segments of text had different shadow opacities and shadow
depths, sometimes the shadow depth of the second segment would
be saved wrong.
- The DoubleVision wipe is no longer available as an
Out-wipe because it does not behave correctly when used in that
manner.
- For scripts that use keyboard navigation for buttons, the first
button on the page will now be initially highlighted.
- Now establish a black screen quite early during playback, so
that global crawls and TVTuner atoms have some place to
play before the first visible page appears.
- An update to WinDVD3 fixes a crash playing MPEG-2 files
or making thumbnails for them. This crash occurred on faster
Pentium 4 systems. See WinDVD 3 Can
Crash on Fast Systems for more details. The installers
will detect if the patch is not present on a system.
- If the Queue EX fails to obtain its serial port, it
would cause Designer or Player to fail to start. On the
player, this would typically cause the system to reboot. Now
an error is reported and the application continues.
- Upon installing Designer or Player, you now get a choice of
language:
- English
- English (UK)
- Central European
- Cyrillic
- Greek
- Turkish
- Hebrew
The language choice selects a suitable default typeface for
text elements and for the user-interface. For
"UK English", it also sets the default spelling-dictionary
for new installs. Finally, for all selections other than
"English", the first day of week is set to Sunday rather than
Monday. This affects the Schedule EX GUI and
alters the week-number rules used by the Schedule EX
accordingly.
- In the unusual case where the script's size is smaller than the
display resolution (or window size), MCI MPEGs were
relative to the screen/window origin, rather than the script
area. This is now fixed.
- Added several new wipes. Under the Push category, added
Clasp. Under the Zoom category, added
Clasp, CrossCheck, CrossCheck-Out,
MirrorMaze, MirrorMaze-Out,
MirrorMazeRing, MirrorMazeRing-Out,
Snails, Snails-Out, SqueezePlay,
Swarm, Swarm-Out, and Xoom.
- Scripts having the NoAuthor attribute on the top-most
cluster now load correctly (as they did in IC200), rather than
report an error.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 4a where given two
consecutive MovieClips that both used overlay, the second one
would not play.
- On systems with Windows Media Player 9, certain
WMV-format files would not play as video. This is now fixed.
- Fixed a crash involving TextFile EX. The most
common case was a player receiving a new script and restarting
while the TextFile EX was operating.
- Fixed a crash seen with certain 3D wipes in specific
conditions.
- Fixed a problem involving the MPEG EX or
Optibase EX that could occur when pressing
Cancel from the Options menu or from the
ICPlayer Configuration application, leaving the
application stuck with the CPU busy at 100%. In rare cases the
same problem could occur at startup of Designer or Player.
- When using the RandomOnce or RandomAlways wipes,
the starting selection is now properly random.
- Combining Mouse and Keyboard
Button Controls using the Input EX now
behaves correctly.
- Hitting the hotkey for a button leaves the button in
highlight-state. This is incorrect when the keyboard
navigation Button Controls are off. This is now
fixed.
- During playback, when a text-entry button has focus,
Alt-keys and the Enter key can now be used as
hotkeys by other buttons.
- Now the first text-entry button on a page begins with focus.
- Certain wipes would crash if their speed setting in the
ScalaScript was set to unusually high values.
- Fixed an occasional crash that could occur when using duration
timing.
- Certain JPEGs that are in fact corrupt but are generally
accepted by other image viewing applications now work in Scala.
- Certain MPEG-2 files have a "mid-stream format change" ensuring
their top-to-bottom orientation is correct. Such files now
play correctly in Scala.
- Fixes potential "pink flash" problem with movie clips.
(R4)
- Fixed potential deadlock in movie playback.
(R4)
- MovieClips with no in-wipe no longer appear to be "cut" in.
(R4)
- Fixed a problem where certain MPEG-1 clips would only play once
even when they were set to loop.
- Playing Movies and MovieClips using overlay did not work when
running on the desktop, with the desktop set to 15-bit or
16-bit color (i.e. 32768 colors or 65536 colors or "thousands
of colors"). This is now fixed.
- Preparing for playback of a movie is a bit faster, and starting
at the mid-point of a movie is somewhat faster. For MPEG-2
files, this effect is even more significant.
- Fixed a problem where an element having the "Cut" out-wipe
would not be removed from the screen.
(R4)
- If you tried to change the Timing EX configuration (time
formats, etc.), the configuration file that got saved was wrong
and caused all the Timing settings to return to the default
values. This is now fixed.
(R4)
- If the TextFile EX encountered a line longer than 1023
characters, it would return the first 1023, drop the next
character, and return the remainder of the line (up to 1023
more characters) as the next line. The TextFile EX no
longer drops the next character, and now handles lines up to
10K characters in length.
- The TextFile EX no longer generates an empty file when
playing a main script that contains a subscript that has a
TextFile atom whose specified text file does not exist.
- Elements containing extremely long lines of text no longer
crash.
- In order to best resolve some stuttering and other performance
and behavior problems when using the Optibase EX, we had
to switch back to techniques we used in the IC200 and
ICDesigner-1 versions of this EX. Unfortunately, this loses
the improvement in back-to-back performance we were trying to
achieve in IC3.
We hope to re-enable the back-to-back fixes in a future IC3
release. In the meantime, we can make available a version of
the Optibase EX with good back-to-back behavior, and good
performance. It is not fully battle-tested, and has a few
behavior quirks. If you need this version, and are willing to
satisfy yourself that it works well enough for your purposes,
contact Support.
- If the current page has an "Interrupt Exactly" schedule
entry, and the alarm for that entry is triggered, the page now
restarts. Before it would accidentally proceed to the next
page.
- Fixed rare crash with interactive buttons.
- The first Text Entry Field on a page now gets focus.
- Various internal changes for the new way scripts are laid out,
versionated, and sent.
- The naming scheme used to handle multiple versions of content
files has been changed. For a file called
Basename.ext, The old timestamp-based scheme
Basename (Received 2002-04-16T22;52;11-05;00).ext
is replaced with a simple incrementing version number placed
between the filename's base-name and its extension:
Basename;1.ext
- Lots of minor bug fixes (transparency handling, outwipe trash,
rotated backgrounds and background-movies)
- Lots of performance enhancements (movies, movie clips,
opacity).
- The Sigma Designs NetStream 2000 MPEG-2 card now works with the
MCI MPEG EX.
- A text crawl can use different colors for different segments of
text.
Here is an example of the crawl data:
This text is in the original color
<facecolor="#ff0000">
This will be red
<facecolor="#ffffff">
This will be white
(We also support changing outlinecolor,
shadowcolor, and undercolor.)
- Fixed potential hang with TextCrawls that are fed by Windows
scripts.
- More correct handling of transparent pixels in true color
average scaling.
- Random wipes could effectively select a Cut when this was not
supposed to happen.
- 3D wipes work again for all element classes.
- Rotated Animation and Movie pages are now offset correctly.
- MovieClips now work with Alpha wipes, Script wipes, and the
Dissolve wipe.
- Fixed a crash involving playing a partially transparent element
larger than a page on a video mode smaller than the script's
page size.
- When playing a movie background on the desktop, if you moved
the window, the movie would get larger. Now fixed.
- Rotated Text, TextCrawl, and TextEntryButton elements are now
drawn correctly with shadow on and face off.
- In advanced scripting, when an element command is used in a
loop to create multiple elements, Wipeout commands will no
longer try to wipe out elements that have already started
wiping out.
- Clips with transparency, without any alpha channel, and with
backdrops, will now be drawn correctly.
- Certain element drawn using pen zero will no longer carve
through their backdrop pixels. Now they'll appear as if the
backdrop was a separate element.
- Certain effects with alpha-blended elements now run much faster.
- Non-antialiased elements with opacity now work again on
high-color displays.
- Faster rendering of elements with less than 100% opacity.
- Fixed crash in certain combinations with 3D wipes.
- Fixed crash where a MovieClip that had a wipe but now has
overlay enabled. The wipe is correctly ignored now.
- Fixed audio / video stutter with Optibase EX that was seen
on some machines.
- Various serial device EXes (Serial EX, Weather EX,
CORIOgen EX, VCR EX, Switcher EX, ...) can now
access COM ports 10 and higher.
- New wipes including peel and roll effects
(PeelOff, DoublePeelOff, RollOff, DoubleRollOff, QuadRollOff,
PlaneRollOff, PeelOn, DoublePeelOn, RollOn, DoubleRollOn,
RollOver, UnrollStrips, ClaspSmear, SqueezeOut)
- The overall "thread priority" of the playback process
has been reduced. Until this change, Windows would sometimes
starve certain critical processes (e.g. USB modems) which would
then lose data.
To restore the original behavior, add this to your MMOS.INI:
BELOWNORMALPRIORITYCLASS=no
- The MCI MPEG EX now supports playlists.
To make a playlist, create a new script and add several
individual MPEG clips as separate MCI MPEG EX Play
commands. Save the resulting script as your playlist-script.
Within your regular script, add an MPEG.Playlist event using
the playlist-script as the file to play. The playlist-script
can be included with the main script or sent as
Linked Content.
- New ScalaScript variables
Mouse.PrimaryButton and
Mouse.SecondaryButton that represent the mouse
button state.
- The
Billing.PlayerName ScalaScript variable now
defaults to the COMPUTERNAME environment variable
value.
- Wipe parsing is about 75% faster.
- The Windows Script environment is initialized for COM apartment
threaded instead of free-threaded. This is more typical of
other environments.
- The Value option of button elements now successfully parses
expressions containing variable references.
- Now correctly parses Button commands with no Value option.
- The
Notification() ScalaScript command now parses
correctly.
- New documentation is included with IC3 Designer, and is
also on the Support CD.
- New Align and Spread options in the Design menu
Edit pop-up give you various options to align or spread
a group of elements.
- On the Effects tab, a new Backdrop Image option
lets you set a backdrop image on any element. (You can adjust
the Border values to show more of the backdrop around
the element.) The backdrop image can be a bitmap or
multi-tile, and can have blended transparency. This feature
has some general uses, but can significantly improve the visual
appearance of a global crawl. (Transparency not supported for
the global crawl case.)
- In Publish to InfoChannel Network, you can now specify
Skip Cleanup?, which avoids the cleanup phase after
publish. This can speed up publishing. Cleaning up another
time will take care of all accumulated cleaning needs.
- In Publish to InfoChannel Network, you can now specify
Use Passive FTP?, which tells Designer to use
passive-mode FTP, which is sometimes needed to traverse a
firewall.
- The Publish Server now supports the p flag, to select
passive FTP.
- The Publish Server now supports the CheckPublish
interface to allow the controlling application to monitor
progress. See IC3 Advanced
Configuration for details.
- The Publish Server GenerateThumbnail interface no longer
is limited to 512x384 sized thumbnails.
- Adding a Flash file from the main menu resizes the Flash clip
to fill the page.
- When typing text, "straight quotes" are replaced with
“smart quotes”. This can be controlled by the
Use Smart Quotes? option in the Authoring tab of
the Options menu.
- Certain codecs that cannot be used for Publish to Video
are no longer listed as available choices.
- Fixed a crash in the File dialog when browsing files that have
file dates in the far future.
- Publish to InfoChannel Network would include the imagery
for any alpha wipes, but these would not be correctly
recognized by the player. Hence the wipes would only work if
they were already installed on the player. This is now fixed
(affected scripts need to be republished).
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.3 where
Billing events in sub-scripts would log incorrect page
and script names.
- Fixed a rare hang in the Main menu thumbnail generator.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.3 where extra quotes
were added to a Billing event which could affect
compatibility of tools that read billing logs. Affected
scripts will need to be resaved.
- Because FTP servers do not generally support filenames that
begin with spaces, the Publish operation prevents this.
Fixed a bug where after a publish is prevented, future publish
operations would be blocked unless you manually cleaned up the
right folder.
- Fixed a bug in Release 7.3 where Publish to Video
fails with scripts containing certain Movies or
MovieClips.
- Fixed a long-standing bug where pasting a string of spaces into
a text-input field would hang.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when undoing changes to a Global
Crawl.
- The new Keep Ideographs Together? option that tries to
avoid word-wrapping between ideographs in Asian text.
- Fixed some performance issues in handling long word-wrapped
text that were introduced in Release 7.2.
- If you load a password-protected script but Cancel instead of
supplying the password, Designer no longer reports a bogus
"internal error" message.
- The Publish to Video Frame Rate selector now also
offers 60 frames per second.
- In Publish to HTML and Publish to Web Component,
the Publish! button is now ghosted until a destination
path is selected.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 where
Publish to Video could lock up if the script contained a
Movie background or a Streaming Video background.
- Fixed some Unicode-related bugs related to loading scripts
containing symbol-font text, and pasting text into a
symbol-font text element. These fixes allow certain Arabic
workaround systems to work as they used to in Release 6
and earlier.
- Fixed a hotkey bug in popup buttons where the desired action
would not be performed if you let go of the modifier key before
the letter key.
- Fixed a bug where certain bad fonts could cause Designer to
exit immediately when they were scrolled into view in the font
popup.
- When a text selection contains different font sizes, the
Control+[ and Control+] hotkeys now modify each
size separately.
- In the font popup, a lock symbol indicates typefaces that have
"restricted license embedding", meaning fonts that are not
allowed to be published with the script.
- Changing the font size for a text crawl or text-entry button
now adjusts the element height accordingly.
- Fixed a bug in the Serial EX where hotkeys were still
active for buttons that did not apply to the current
Command:.
- For elements that are aligned, the user-interface now shows the
value of the aligned position, rather than the unaligned
position.
- Fixed a bug where the element would be mispositioned if the
left margin was zero.
- Fixed a problem where the underline opacity slider showed the
wrong value for text crawl elements.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if the user supplied a
zero-length expression for a text crawl.
- Fixed a bug where re-arranging the pages within a script
sometimes did not mark the script as changed.
- Changing the background file associated with a page no longer
resets the other background settings (e.g. overlay).
- Fixed a problem where changing the background of a page to a
non-existent file would not report an error.
- When selecting or marquee-selecting elements on a page, the
page now auto-scrolls if necessary.
- Fixed a bug where selecting an element that was scrolled partly
out of view could cause the element's position to jump.
- Fixed a bug where a button would not always show the correct
state.
- The Publish Server can now generate thumbnail images from a
script.
- Requests to the Publish Server now queue rather than block.
- Fixed a hang in the Publish Server that could occur on
dual-processor systems.
- The Publish Server can now run on systems with a 256-color
desktop.
- The Publish Server may be run as a service, using the
SrvAny.exe tool.
- The Publish Server now correctly handles scripts that have
script errors.
- The Publish Server is now authorized by NetManager dongles too.
- Publishing a script with script errors once again reports the
errors to the user.
- Fixed a bug where adding a ScalaScript as a subscript required
the file extension to be lower-case. Now works in all cases.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.2 where certain
Unicode characters were mistaken to be non-printable
characters, and thus saved in ^uNNNN form.
- Fixed a crash that could occur hitting the up or down arrow
while in the Text Expression: filed for Text Crawls.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 7.1 where publishing
only collected the fonts from the first segment of each Text
element. If you had a text element that used more than one
font, then the second and subsequent fonts would not be
collected (unless those fonts were used in the first segment of
some other Text element).
- When trying to save a script in ANSI format that cannot be
represented in ANSI, the user is once again given an
opportunity to save in Unicode UTF-8. Release 7.1
introduced a crash at this point.
- Publish to Video now remembers the last setting of the
Keep Aspect option.
- Publish was incorrectly showing script size information
for Publish to HTML.
- In a few cases, script size information was sometimes not shown
when publishing.
- Fixed occasional random failure when using the Publish Server.
- Hitting the left or right arrow with a range of text selected
now does the expected thing.
- On systems with Asian text-input enabled, when a pop-up list is
open, keyboard navigation now works by temporarily disabling
the IME.
- In some rare cases, a script that could have been saved in
legacy format was saved in UTF-8 instead.
- Using control codes such as ^n or ^xnn in
certain fields in the authoring station (e.g. Text Expression
for a crawl) now works properly.
- Fixed a bug where disabling or enabling an element would not
cause the page's thumbnail to be regenerated.
- Fixed a bug where a page's thumbnail would be regenerated if you
visited an EX menu without making any changes.
- Shortcut files may now be dropped into Scala just like dropping
regular files.
- The Wait state of a wipe is now indicated by a w
symbol in the wipe buttons of the Design List menu.
- Fixed some weirdnesses selecting the RandomOnce wipe.
- The Bold option for Asian Vertical Text is now
disabled.
- Fixed saving of scripts with non-printable Unicode-range
characters.
- Fixed a bug where an empty text element was not always removed
when it should have been.
- In the Font dialog, Symbol fonts are now shown in their
own theme, instead of in each theme.
- In the Font dialog, you can hit a key to jump to the
next font beginning with that letter. Fixed a bug added in
Release 7.1 where using the O or C keys in
this way actually caused the dialog to close (these being
hotkeys for OK or Cancel).
- Fixed a crash if you hit Alt+Enter or resized the
application window while the Add Text Entry Field dialog
was open.
- Fixed a crash when entering the Background EX menu after
selecting pages of different type (e.g. a picture and a movie
background).
- Fixed a crash saving a script after ungrouping a group that
contained references to functions or environment variables.
- Fixed a crash that could occur saving certain scripts with
Billing EX events.
- The settings of the opacity sliders for text crawls were not
being properly shown in the user-interface after saving and
reloading a script.
- New Paste Format feature lets you copy and paste
element styles. Select an element and copy it to the
clipboard. Now select one or more target elements, and pick
Paste Format from the Edit pop-up. This
will take the styles (font, color, shadow, etc.) of the element
on the clipboard, and apply them to the selected element(s).
- The new font-list popup shows the name of each font using
the actual font.
- Various convenient hotkeys are available for font control:
- Alt+F opens the font-list popup
- Shift+Alt+F opens the classic Font dialog
- Control+[ and Control+] decreases or
increases the font size
- Control+(numeric keypad Plus) and
Control+(numeric keypad Minus) changes the font
of the selected text to the previous or next font
- Hitting Control+C in an Error dialog will copy the error
message to the clipboard.
- General cleanup of hotkeys, including fixing a few incorrect or
duplicate hotkeys, and adding a few where they were previously
missing.
- Fixed some places where hotkeys were present but not working,
including:
- Schedule EX time buttons.
- Sound EX Track In and Out buttons.
- Opacity tab sliders.
- Quality slider in Publish to Video.
- Canceling a Paste Special operation while in the
File dialog now works.
- In the Schedule EX, the Copy to Clipboard
feature now correctly handles page names that contain quotes.
- The Entry Number button of the Schedule EX
could in certain cases end up too narrow to show all possible
values. Now fixed.
- The Windows Script EX no longer lists the
Microsoft XML script engine as a choice, since it cannot be
made to work and is anyway not useful in the Scala context.
- Fixed a bug when exporting images where the resulting bitmap
would be offset.
- Fixed a bug in Release 7 where the Backdrop and
Pointer buttons of the Field tab of the Design
Text Entry Field menu did not work.
- Most clips do not support the Focus option, therefore it
is disabled in those cases.
- The Palette Menu and the first tab of the Design menus now have
a more flexible layout, to better acccomodate translations of
the user-interface.
- When selecting a File to feed a Text Crawl, the file
dialog defaults to showing only Text Files.
- When selecting help for variables and functions in the
Branch EX, the help window now has a suitable
title.
- The Publish menu once again shows script information
(Publish size, font settings, etc.) This information
disappeared in Release 6 and is now back.
- Fixed a spurious error during Publish, which appeared as
"Error 0 while checking for matching typeface".
- Scripts that use fonts from several code pages can now be saved
in ANSI, for compatibility with Release 6 and earlier.
- Fixed most cases where a toolbar button could remain
highlighted erroneously.
- The initial width of each EX column now accounts for the width
of the column header text in the current language.
- Fixed some cases where Publish would fail to start if
you had an EX menu open.
- All the slider controls in the Sound EX now have
hotkeys.
- Fixed a rare case in the Sound EX where the
minus-sign for negative Pan values below -99 could be cropped
away.
- The File dialog no longer converts all-uppercase file names to
initial-caps.
- In the File dialog, it is no longer possible to create
Custom Places buttons with various illegal paths.
- In the File dialog, entering a period as a path-component is
now handled correctly.
- When hitting Enter at the end of a text element, the new
element did not always inherit all the correct settings. Now
fixed.
- Various Main Menu operations (such as Preview,
Group and Ungroup) now work properly when an EX
menu is open.
- Adding a button-preset file from the Main menu is not a legal
operation, so it is now prohibited.
- Fixed some cases where the thumbnail generator might stop and
not be restarted.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when publishing scripts using a
long project name, or with certain advanced save options and a
long script name.
- Fixed a bug where the Line Spacing of a global crawl
would be reset by selecting Preview.
- In some cases, selecting Undo while editing text did not
update the screen display even though the Undo operation
took place.
- Undo when typing text was sometimes undoing too much in
one step. Now improved.
- Setting the horizontal alignment of a text entry button now
works properly.
- Now accept quotation marks in the string-value of a radio or
toggle button.
- The obsolete CPU and Platform variables are no
longer shown in the Branch EX.
- Wipes using the Duration feature now appear correctly
during Publish to Video.
- Fixed a case where after changing the script size, Designer
might still use the old size for the next play.
- Fixed a bug where a page thumbnail would be regenerated if you
changed only the wipe's timing.
- Choosing a non-embeddable font as your user-interface font no
longer posts a warning to the user.
- The H and D keys now work on Flashclips as well.
- It is no longer possible to alter the wipe of a locked element.
- When you paste an event that references a external variable
into another script, that variable will be created as external
in that script.
- Fixed a Release 7 bug where publishing a script with
ASCII characters in the 0xF0-0xFF range could crash.
- Fixed a Release 7 slowdown in saving of scripts with lots
of Text elements.
- The help text for the Optibase EX now mentions the
Optibase.Video command.
- Fixed a bug when publishing a script with subscripts, where
those subscripts in turn call a common sub-subscript.
- The Font controls in the Design Text menu have been improved.
You can now pick a font directly from a font-list popup, and
directly adjust the size.
The Font: button still leads to the classic Font
dialog, which is still useful for picking a font from a theme
other than the default theme. (For example, to select a
Central European font on a Western system.)
- Symbol fonts are now listed at the end of the font list.
- The sample strings in the Font dialog have been updated.
- The Options Menu's Authoring tab now has a
Text Encoding for New Scripts button
for choosing the text-encoding to use for newly-created Scala
scripts. This lets you choose between Unicode and ANSI
encodings. The Unicode encoding supports complex languages and
multiple languages, while the ANSI choice is text-compatible
with older versions of IC3. The Automatic choice will use ANSI
if possible, and Unicode if not.
- In the Save As... File dialog, the
Advanced... dialog now contains a
Text Encoding option for setting the text-encoding
of a particular script.
- The text-cursor, text-selection highlight, and
element-selection highlight now use black-and-yellow rendering,
to be visible on all backgrounds.
- You can now delete the currently selected layout guide with the
DEL key.
- The Add popup in the Design menu toolbar now has an
Add Text item. (Normally, clicking on the
background is sufficient to make a new text element, but this
new feature is useful if you want to place text onto a very
large element on the page.)
- For text crawls or global text crawls whose Vertical Text
Alignment is set to Baseline, the baseline value can
now be adjusted in authoring.
- The Global? setting for Text Crawls has been moved to
the Crawl tab to leave enough room for the improved
font-picker.
- The Schedule EX title bar now shows the current
time in 24-hour format, to match the time-entry buttons.
- On systems where year/month/day is the preferred order, the
Schedule EX uses that order. (It still understands
and adapts to month/day/year and day/month/year.)
- The Schedule EX no longer asks for confirmation
before removing schedules from events. This question is
redundant given the Undo feature.
- Clarified some options in Designer's Options menu, which are
now called Save New Scripts as Plain Text and Text
Encoding in New Scripts to emphasize that these options
affect new scripts only.
- In Publish to InfoChannel Network, the Advanced
Publish Options menu now includes a new Exclude Standard
Fonts? button. This controls whether the fonts given in
the FontEmbeddingExclusionList.xml file should be
included or omitted during publish. If those fonts that are
known to be pre-installed on all players are listed in this
file, then publishing to InfoChannel Network will not normally
include these fonts, as a size optimization. See IC3 Advanced Configuration
Options for more information.
- FTP transfer during publish uses the new built-in FTP client,
for better performance, robustness, and logging.
- The About script now shows the product version information.
- The Publish to Email command is no longer
offered. To Publish a script to Email, use
Publish to File, then email the file.
- The spell-checker now does a better job of skipping over
Central European, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. text.
- When picking Files of Type: MIDI files in the File menu,
the .midi extension is also included.
- The default name given to a Group of pages is more descriptive.
- It is now possible to disable a global text crawl.
- When you add a new page, sometimes the new page got a zero
pause rather than the correct default. Now fixed.
- If you undo a grouping action while you are inside the group,
the current script no longer seems to "disappear".
- Clicking to select a flash clip in Designer now works even if
you click on transparent parts of the clip.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when switching in or out of
full-screen mode within the Design menus.
- Fixed a case where the user could not click to get a cursor
after selecting a text element with the marquee.
- Fixed a crash in the File dialog when clicking on the
blank part of the Custom Places list then selecting
Remove Custom Place.
- Fixed a bug where Publish to HTML was not
respecting the Thumbnail Size option.
- Fixed a crash changing the Windows desktop display mode while
Scala is running.
- Fixed publishing to the root (login) folder of an FTP server.
- Fixed a bug where cutting and pasting text could break an
element internally into unnecessary segments.
- Publish button is now correctly disabled until a valid
project name is specified.
- Fixed a bug when dragging events in Design List that
could leave an event drawn in the wrong place.
- Fixed a bug where if a font was only used by Global Text
Crawls, it would not be included when publishing the script.
- Fixed a bug where loading a binary-format script and re-saving
it could silently convert it back to plain-text form.
- In the Schedule EX, you can now select Event:
Disabled Within Valid Period for grouped pages, or for
elements.
- After using the spell checker's Ignore button, Designer
could occasionally crash.
- Reset Settings in the Print page now correctly
disables the Pages: All/Selected button and the
Print Range: button, and resets the Copies
button.
- If you paste a clip into a Scala script, and before you reload
the script you publish to InfoChannel Network, the clip would
not be properly included in the published script, and would
fail to show.
- The Element Size button of a newly-added Flash file is no
longer disabled.
- Turning a Text Crawl into a Global Text Crawl no longer selects
a different element.
- Margin-markers now update correctly when changing element
justification.
- The Sound EX MIDI Pause, Resume, and
Wait commands are unsupported by the Microsoft MCI
MIDI sub-system, and therefore these commands never
worked. Therefore they have been removed.
- Fixed a problem in authoring where changes made to a
Sample.Play command would not take effect the first time
you played it.
- Fixed a crash if you Cut events in Design List with the
Branch EX menu open.
- Fixed a problem in the Branch EX menu where
changing between Repeat While and
Repeat Until might get ignored.
- Fixed a crash in selecting the Out wipe while the Out wipe menu
was open with the None wipe selected.
- When authoring the CD.PlayMSF command, manipulating the
track numbers now shows the correct MSF time.
- The Design Background menu has been fixed to stay up
when you change the background image or toggle the tile option.
- Publish to HTML now handles page names that contain
symbols that are significant to HTML, such as <, >, and
&.
- If you log out or shut down Windows, or close Designer from the
task manager, then you are warned about any unsaved changes.
- With Designer running, double-clicking on ScalaScripts to open
them now works reliably. Before, scripts could fail to load in
many circumstances.
- Fixed a crash using very long file names in the
Sound EX.
- Publish to HTML and Publish to
Web Component now warn the user if they are going to
overwrite files.
- Fixed a bug that could happen with the right sequence of events
involving Undo, Redo, and adding clips.
- Fixed a hang that could occur in certain unusual circumstances
when an error occurred while generating thumbnails.
- Fixed a bug where the script title-bar could show some junk,
for very long script names.
- Fixed a bug in the Sound EX where the minus sign
would not be visible for extreme left Pan settings.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when publishing scripts with
extremely long file names.
- Fixed a crash when setting an incorrect type of expression on a
button variable.
- Fixed a case where selecting the Windows close button while a
modal dialog box was up could do odd things.
- If you made a TextCrawl or GlobalTextCrawl
element and selected a source type of File, it was
possible to cancel the File dialog and end up with
"no file" as the source. Such a script would then fail to
save. This is now fixed — if you cancel the File dialog,
the source type is reverted.
- No longer crashes if you select Add Line, and then
immediately try to delete.
- If Designer was running in full-screen mode, in a resolution
that matched the Windows desktop, the application would in some
circumstances fail to start up properly. This is now fixed.
- The format of remembered FTP passwords for publish has changed
in Release 6b of IC3 Designer. You will need to
re-enter them once, and they will be remembered again.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you removed all commands from
a special event, then added one.
- A Hotkey script-command that specified no action to take is
useful because it can temporarily override an existing Hotkey
action for the same letter. However, such commands would fail
to save or publish. This is now fixed. Example:
Hotkey("A").
- In the Sound EX, a CD.Play command with expressions
for the in-track or out-track parameter would fail to save or
publish. This is now fixed.
- It is now possible to directly change the backdrop color of
global text crawls.
- When editing a page that has a clip whose filename is a
variable, the placeholder box image is now shown for that clip.
- When saving a multi-segment Text element, some color
information was not correctly being saved. Now fixed.
- If you copied an event whose Timing was Wait Forever,
any pasted copy had its Timing reset to a pause of zero. This
is now fixed.
- Fixed a crash that could occur saving or publishing scripts
with missing content.
- Fixed a problem during Publish to InfoChannel Network
with how linked content is identified within the published
script. The resulting scripts play fine, but sending a
Delete Unused Content command to players would fail to
execute with the failure saying that "a coding error has been
detected". Any scripts that use linked content will need to be
re-published with Release 6a or better before Delete
Unused Content will work again.
- The Publish feature has been internally reworked, and
now appears as a dialog over the Main Menu, rather
than in its own full-screen menu. Publish features
better error handling, better usability, more consistent naming
of options, and improved remembering of previous settings.
- Publish to InfoChannel Network is somewhat faster,
especially with very large numbers of files. It is also much
faster when skipping files that do not need to be updated. The
Cleanup phase of publishing is extremely fast compared
with previous releases.
- Publish to Web Component and Publish to HTML to
an FTP location that is an IIS "virtual directory" now succeeds.
- Improved error handling for Codec settings in Publish to
Video. Before, certain conditions could cause Publish
to Video to fail to come up.
- You can now drag to resize buttons that are made from a Button
Preset file (.btn file).
- When you Preview a page or selection of pages, Designer
now respects the timing of the last page, rather than expecting
an extra mouse click.
- Pasting a page that has an Exact Schedule was
incorrectly being rejected when at the top level of the
script. (It remains illegal inside groups.)
- Fixed a crash that could occur when resizing a horizontal line
while holding Shift or Control.
- Fixed some problems updating menus when Undo or
Redo was performed.
- Publishing a script that has the RandomAlways or
Next wipe no longer includes random wipe files in the
published script.
- When adding Linked Content to a script, the warning
dialog now includes an option to not show that message in the
future.
- Fixed some cases where new events were getting Duration
timing even though the Default Timing Type in
Timing EX Options was set to Pause.
- In the Design menus, the View pop-up has a new
function, Hide Global Elements?. If selected, any
global crawl elements are normally hidden in the page area. If
you select a global crawl in Design List, it will
appear until you select something else.
- In Designer, selecting the Password? option for
text-entry buttons had no-effect. This is now fixed.
- The state of the Show Selected Only? View option is
retained from page to page.
- Some fixes in how things are positioned for hand-modified
scripts whose "view size" and "page size" differ.
- Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur if you hit F1 for
help, then closed the active menu.
- Fixed a crash in the File dialog that could sometimes
occur if the initial folder was a share on a server that is no
longer available.
- Fixed a bug where Play would hang after changing the
Windows desktop display mode.
- Fixed a bug that caused a publishing to silently fail for a
script having two sub-scripts that each reference the
same sub-sub-script.
- The iplay player will now start on systems that lack
access to My Pictures or My Documents.
- Scripts with a Mixer.Volume() event with Wait(On)
were losing the wait setting when loaded into Designer.
- Designer can now be run as a "publish server", which allows
other applications to invoke Publish to
InfoChannel Network and monitor progress and results.
Please contact Scala Technical Support for interfacing
information.
- The logic that makes otherwise-identical page-names and
event-names unique has been improved.
- Selecting a Through in-wipe for an element will now
blank the out-wipe, because it would have no effect.
- Fixed a bug where using Save As... to save a script
that was loaded from the Linked Content location would
save the script under the wrong name.
- If the Thumbnail aspect option was set to 16:9, it would get
reported as "Custom" instead. This is now fixed.
- Resizing a drawing element now respects Snap to Grid, as
does creating a new text element.
- Selecting the window's Close button during Play or
Preview returns to the Main menu rather than
causing Designer to exit.
- Fixed a problem which caused bogus errors during cleanup if you
placed XML files into a Publish Location.
- If an element had another setting added using
Design List (such as a Branch atom), then changing
that element's wipe to None could lead to a crash. Now
fixed.
- No longer crashes when trying to ungroup a group containing a
large number of pages.
- No longer have to click an extra time to conclude after
Preview has finished showing the selected part of the
script.
- If there is a problem making the thumbnail for a page (for
example, one of the image files could not be found), then a red
X is placed in the lower-right corner of the thumbnail.
This can help the user quickly identify pages that are affected
by missing artwork or fonts, for example.
- Page thumbnails in the Main Menu were wrong for
certain unusual combinations of video mode, script size, and
alignment.
- Better thumbnails for groups that contain other groups.
- Thumbnails for button presets in the File dialog now
look correct.
- Previewing button presets in the File dialog now
presents <Previous and Next> controls so
you can move through the set of selected presets.
- Fixed a noticeable delay exiting the File dialog,
and in other cases where the thumbnail generator needed to be
stopped.
- Fixed a crash that sometimes occurred after previewing button
presets in the File dialog.
- In the File dialog, Quick access buttons to folders
inside My Documents or inside the Desktop
now work again.
- On systems with IC3 Designer and
IC3 Reporter, the File dialog for
opening scripts or adding files now has a
Reporter Scripts Quick access button that is set up
for the right location.
- Sizing of buttons created from button presets now works.
- When specifying the Hotkey in Design Buttons
you can now specify qualified keys, for example:
- Shift-F for "hold Shift, hit F"
- Ctrl-X for "hold Control, hit X"
- Alt-C for "hold Alt, hit C"
- Ctrl-Alt-P for "hold Control and Alt, hit P"
You can also specify these special key names:
- Up for the up arrow
- Down for the down arrow
- Left for the left arrow
- Right for the right arrow
- Enter for the Enter key
- Help for the Help key
- Tab for the Tab key
- Backspace for the Backspace key
- Escape for the Escape key
- MouseLeft for the left mouse button
- MouseMiddle for the middle mouse button
- MouseRight for the right mouse button
These worked in hand-authored scripts before, but may now be
entered from the user-interface.
- It was not possible to set Keyboard Button Controls
off in the Input EX because such an event did not
get saved.
- In the Branch Menu if you selected an out-wipe as
the destination for a Goto, the destination name is now
shown correctly, rather than with an unneeded ".2" extension.
- Publish to CD now creates CDs that have the correct
color depth setting.
- The Line Thickness button now shows the correct value
when you select a Line element.
- Fixed a bug in the Design Menu which could cause an
element to be shown behind elements that it is actually in
front of.
- Elements that can't be drawn correctly (for example a
Clip whose image is missing) now show the selection-box
when they are selected.
- If you attempt to paste a very large amount of text into Scala,
you now get an informative error message and the text is
truncated.
- Selecting Reset Settings in the
Options Menu no longer changes the window size,
leaving the size of the contents out of sync.
- Fixed an obscure crash loading a script whose
Script Settings Page Size was set to the unusual
value (0,0).
- When using Publish to InfoChannel Network to republish
scripts containing a very large number of files, it proceeds
much faster.
(R4)
- In Publish to InfoChannel Network, the progress message
stating "Generating Contents File" now also says that this
could take a few minutes.
- In Publish to InfoChannel Network, the progress messages
make clear that publishing is successful when the file
transfers are complete, and that the (potentially slow) cleanup
pass is in essence a separate step. It is also made clear that
the cleanup can be aborted and left for a future publish.
- Aborting the cleanup pass at the end of Publish to
InfoChannel Network no longer throws a spurious error
message, and no longer leaves the publish site "locked" (which
would block other machines from publishing to the same site).
- Aborting the cleanup pass at the end of Publish to
InfoChannel Network still allows the Copy to Linked
Content Folder operation to complete.
- Authoring of video files is now faster -- much faster in
the case of MPEG-2 files.
- Fixed crash in IC3 Designer when ungrouping a group with
more than 31 members.
- Fixed crash in IC3 Designer when entering the Branch menu
if the thumbnail size was very large.
- Fixed rare crash in IC3 Designer when the main shuffler
generates images for pages of a script that has embedded media
(e.g. pasted clips).
- In the MCI MPEG EX, you can now specify a video image
size larger than the current desktop.
- For Movieclips, the Volume button has been moved to the first
tab, for better usability, and consistency with the
TV Tuner EX.
- Fixed a problem where newly-pasted text into an element would
not use the correct colors.
(R4)
- The File dialog now supports Windows shortcuts to files and
folders.
- The File dialog now has a functional Back button.
- When converting IC200 scripts into IC3, we more thoroughly
determine the correct page size for the script.
- Rotation of backgrounds now supported in the authoring station.
- Schedule EX warns you if you try to commit an expired event.
- >> Details button appears in error dialogs
that have additional info that can be shown.
- In the Font dialog, typing a letter will advance the selection
to the next typeface matching the letter you typed, if any.
- In the Font dialog, if you select a non-embeddable font, you
now get an explicit warning message.
- If a script cannot be edited because playback-only fonts are
missing, the user is now told which fonts are needed.
- Timing EX Options lets you choose between Pause and
Duration as the default timing type.
- Various EX column buttons show better information, and use
tooltips so you can see that info when it would not fit within
the column.
- You can now install IC3 Designer on a system that has
Designer 1, without first having to remove the older
version.
- The Main Menu "Tools" pop-up now has entries to launch the
Welcome and Tutorial scripts.
- Various improvements to user-interface and error message
wording.
- The File dialog path list dropdown now has a tool-tip which is
the complete path.
- The File dialog quick-access buttons have a tool-tip showing
the button label and the folder path, which can help when the
label was truncated for width reasons.
- The Element toolbar button now has a hotkey.
- Lots of minor bug fixes (shuffler icons, color picking, button
states, printing with subscripts, publish to video, ...).
- Various performance enhancements (script saving)
- Pasting text was confusing in IC3 Designer. It now works as
expected (more like Designer 1).
- No longer crashes when saving scripts containing real numbers
with large exponents.
- When saving a script some of whose media files are in use, no
longer generate "access denied" warnings.
- Fixed a crash when printing a script.
- After copying and pasting the selected page, any open EX Menu
will now show the correct event.
- Copy & Paste of an element while the Wipe menu is open now
works.
- In certain cases, if you specify a non-existent folder, the
File dialog was asking twice for permission to create it.
- Fixed a few cases where the File dialog would fail to generate
or show thumbnail images.
- Thumbnail images for Button Presets now look correct.
- The File dialog will show thumbnails for MPEG files even when
the MCI MPEG EX is enabled.
- Avoids unnecessary recalculation of main menu page thumbnails.
- You can again set the backdrop color of text elements used in
buttons.
- Picking a transparent color will pick the correct color when
clicking on the background image.
- Picking absolute black from a clip as the transparent color now
works.
- Now avoids saving ChromaKey option for clips when transparency
is turned off.
- In unusual cases, Publish to Video was using the wrong video
dimensions.
- Publish to Video was failing on certain non-English versions of
Windows, because we were relying on the English name of a
particular CODEC. Now fixed.
- Various internal changes for the new way scripts are laid out,
versionated, and sent.
- Publishing via FTP would clean up too many files if the FTP
path ended in a trailing slash.
- Fixed handling of certain characters in script names (e.g.,
#) when publishing to InfoChannel Network.
- Scripts that have no content of their own can be successfully
published.
- The FTP port number and passive mode settings in the Publish
app work again.
- Publish to InfoChannel Network now allows aborting during the
file gathering stage.
- Publishing now works with virtual directories on a
Microsoft IIS FTP site.
- Publish to InfoChannel Network no longer copies all files into
the temp directory.
- Publish to InfoChannel Network is much faster overall,
especially the file gathering stage.
- Changing certain attributes of button elements correctly
recalculates the button's size.
- In the Design List Menu, non-wiped elements and special
events now ghost the correct set of EX columns.
- If an element's wipe is a Through wipe, the Out Wipe column
will be ghosted.
- The Layer menu no longer closes when adjusting the layer of a
text element.
- After Preview, you can again properly select drawing elements.
- The Control-B/I/U hotkeys now work from all Design menus and
tabs.
- Fixed some bugs handling clip element hotkeys such as R,
H, D, X, and Y.
- Getting Help on tiled background now says "Picture"
instead of "Plain"
- In the Design Menu, if you adding file of unknown format, you
now get a correct error message.
- In the Schedule EX, you no longer have to select
"Selected Days" twice when you first enter the menu.
- The Schedule EX button for a page now correctly shows
"(expired)" when an interrupt atom has a To: date
that is before the current date.
- Updating, canceling and undoing/redoing changes in the Input EX
Menu works fine in all cases.
- Fixed crash in MPEG2 import.
- Now do not offer both "Pause" and "Pause HH:MM:SS:hh" anymore
in the Timing EX menu.
- If you use !variables in the Log EX, the EX column and EX menu
now show the correct text.
- You can again select the MPEG.Play() command for a new event.
- Fixed a problem where a Scala sub-script with a .SCB extension
could not be found if accessed via a UNC path
(
\\machine\share\...\script.scb).
- The ICDesigner 3 product CD now has new clipart and
application-specific demo content, including demos for:
- Airports
- Banking
- Cable TV
- Corporate communications
- Grocery / Supermarkets
- Hotels
- Retail
- Weather
- Fixed bug where clearing the TextFile file and saving could
cause the script to be considered corrupted.
- Removed some confirmation dialogs from TextFile that are
unneeded on account of Undo.
- Cutting special events from the main menu and pasting into
Design List no longer crashes.
- Sometimes, when a script upload should have succeeded
(e.g. during Publish), it would instead fail with an error "no
more files".
- After a script upload such as a publish, we now do an extra
check that all files made it. If somehow a file is missing in
spite of the checks we already have, we now signal an error and
mark the destination location as incomplete, so the operation
can be retried.
- Publishing a script to InfoChannel Network that used subscripts
within subscripts again works.
- There is a new Scala System Optimizer tool that adjusts
various Windows system settings on a Player system for optimal
behavior. This tool can modify various registry settings,
adjust or disable various Windows services, and even schedule a
weekly reboot. You can simply use the recommended settings, or
customize the set changes you wish to perform.
You can save a set of changes to a preset file that can be
used when preparing multiple players. To apply a preset file
from a batch file command, use:
soptimizer.exe --apply=presetfilename --quiet
- In NetManager's System Settings, added a feature for
automatic retrieval of billing logs. You can enable this
feature and specify N, the number of days worth of logs
that should be retrieved from the players and placed in the
retrieved files area of the transmission workspace. Every
night after midnight, the players will compress and upload any
of the last N days worth of logs that are not yet on the
server. If there are no logs on the player for a past day, an
empty log will be uploaded, so on the server we know there are
no logged events (as opposed to a log delivery problem). The
player will delete any logs older than N days.
On the player, the mmos.ini setting
SSHEALTH_BillingLogUploadDelayHours=h
governs when the player performs the log upload. The player
will hold off for a random amount up to h hours after
startup or midnight, then connect to upload logs.
The billing log retrieval will also retrieve log files whose
name looks like:
billYYYYMMDD_anything.log
which can be used for automatic retrieval of custom log files
as well as or instead of billing logs.
- ConfigIC now offers several new useful options that were
formerly only available through MMOS.INI:
- Use Passive FTP?: Tells player to use
passive-mode FTP, which is sometimes needed to traverse
a firewall.
- Enable FTP Bandwidth Throttling?: Enables a
feature that limits the FTP bandwidth used by the
player. You can specify a Throttle Limit, and
you can choose to Apply Throttle always, or
during a specified time-window. For example, you can
restrict the daytime bandwidth used by a player.
- Number of Days to Keep Logs: Lets you specify how
many days' worth of logs are to be kept on the player.
- Minutes to Wait Before Sending Alert: Lets you
tune how many minutes to wait after the Player stops
running before NetManager is alerted.
- In ConfigIC, the Dial-up and Logging options have
been moved to their own tabs.
- The diagnostic pages for the ready script have several
improvements:
- Show total physical memory, free memory, VM size, and OS
non-paged pool size
- Have a new screen-resolution calibration screen
- Streamlined timing and removed some of the less-useful
audio tests
- Adapt to display modes shorter than 600 pixels
(e.g. 848x480)
- With health monitoring enabled, a player sends its first
heartbeat immediately upon startup. In order to balance
network loads (e.g. when players restart at about the same time
due to scheduled reboots, maintenance jobs, etc.), the first
heartbeat is now held off by a random amount in the range of
zero to ten minutes. The range of random hold-off can be
customized with the MMOS.INI keyword:
SSHEALTH_HeartbeatStartupMaximumDelayMinutes=n
If you do not customize the hold-off for the first
heartbeat, the default hold-off is never more than the
Overdue Heartbeat Tolerance less five minutes. This
avoids false reports in NetManager of dead players.
- With nightly log retrieval enabled, a player uploads its log
file immediately after midnight. In order to balance network
loads, the nightly upload is now held off by a random amount in
the range of zero to ten minutes. The range of random hold-off
can be customized with the MMOS.INI keyword:
SSHEALTH_LogUploadMaximumDelayMinutes=n
- When using Send Content to send non-script content to a
player, if the file was updated more than once within the same
minute, the player could fail to download the updated version
and report that the file was up-to-date. This is due to the
fact that timestamps under FTP have a one minute resolution.
This is now fixed, at the expense of waiting an extra minute to
retrieve the file. (The delay does not apply to script files,
media belonging to scripts, or broadcast players, none of which
are affected by this issue.)
- Install Software Update no longer leaves an alarming but
harmless error in the log about not being able to delete
icUpdate.exe.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 that upon system
startup, could prevent either the graphical engine or the
network engine from successfully starting up, leaving only an
error about "datalog" in the Windows Event log.
- When the player is set to receive broadcasts using the
IPPipe, if the multicast receiver fails to add itself to
the IP-multicast group, it will now retry.
- Periodic timestamps are once again written to the IC.log file
(this has been broken in Release 7.1).
- Fixed a bug in Player and NetManager which prevented Chinese
and Korean installations of Windows from interoperating with
installations in other languages. For new networks, the fix is
transparent. However, for existing Chinese or Korean networks,
there are two options:
The installer will detect affected systems and warn the
user.
The NetManager Install Software Update command will
automatically add the MMOS.INI keyword to any affected
player because in this case it is certain that the legacy
option is desired (otherwise the player will become remotely
broken).
- Reduced bandwidth needed when players upload health monitoring
logs by eliminating a folder listing of a potentially large
folder on the server, and by other streamlining.
- If a player's main script takes nearly no time to loop, it no
longer consumes a huge amount of processor time. This could
have occurred for example if a main script was sent but its
Linked Content was missing. The CPU use did in some cases make
it difficult to remotely correct the system.
- Improved the display of the IP address in the Ready script to
handle systems with multiple IP addresses, systems whose
network adapter is not in the first registry-slot, and systems
whose IP address is obtained via DHCP.
- When players upload job responses back to the NetManager
transmission workspace, they use much less return bandwidth
(i.e. back to the player over that connection). This can be
significant in larger networks, especially broadcast-based
networks.
- Fixed a problem where the Install Software Update
feature to remotely upgrade players was not always successfully
patching the Scala add-on EXes.
- When the player uploads logs as part of health monitoring or
nightly log retrieval, the logs are now compressed. This
greatly reduces transmission time and reduces server-side
storage requirements.
- If the player exits because the user hit the Close button or
the Escape key, a specific message is logged. This can be
useful in debugging certain situations.
- The ScalaIntegration.dll functions were broken in
Release 7. Now fixed.
- When selecting the path to the Player's job folder, you can now
create new folders in the File dialog.
- The Player's IP address is now displayed on the first screen of
the Ready script, as well as on the diagnostic information
page.
- ICPlayer now reboots between sequences of
Install System File tasks, as originally
intended. It did not do the right thing if the job had other
tasks after these.
- Fixed a bug in the InstallToFolder function of the
ScalaIntegration.DLL. If it fails to copy the file, it
no longer leaves an empty temporary file above the destination
folder.
- If a player crashes in the middle of receiving a broadcast job,
upon restart the player was erroneously reporting success when
queried about the job. It now reports that the transmission
has not been received, which will cause a resend.
- If the player aborts the connection or is restarted while
trying to send a job response to NetManager, it now sends the
response at the next opportunity, instead of dropping the
response.
- When a broadcast player communicates wth the Broadcast Server,
if the connection hangs, the player now correctly times out so
that it can retry later.
- Better error logging when a player fails to communicate with
the Broadcast Server.
- Fix for an ISP-related problem seen in the field where during
the dial-back connection to the Broadcast Server, the server
can hear the player but not vice-versa. We now detect this
case and hang up, so that we can dial later.
- Improved logging of broadcast events.
- Fixed a problem where if the system restarted during the middle
of a broadcast reception, the data received so far was
discarded rather than kept. This would have led to additional
data being retransmitted.
- Better logging of connection-bookkeeping problems that are
detected at shutdown.
- Improved retry logic in broadcast IPPipe, to better handle
initially-successful connections that are later dropped.
- Rearranged shut-down logic to maximize the chance for a clean
shut-down when other subsystems or applications hang.
- Fixed a case in ConfigIC where selecting the Windows close
button while a modal dialog box was up could do odd things.
- Fixed a rare bug when using ConfigIC to set the Target
Folder could result in a corrupt path and a weird error
message.
- Now support Unicode file-paths for the Target Folder and
Pipe Driver.
- Now correctly handles the highly unusual case of a Publish
to File script being hand-placed in the Content folder.
Before, a job to send a new script by that name would fail.
- Fixed a Release 7 bug where a job that involves a reboot
could end up being processed repeatedly.
- In certain rare circumstances, the Player could fail to install
a font and report that "a TrueType font could not be installed
because the system substituted another font." This has been
fixed.
- Fixed a bug introduced in Release 6 where the information
used to display Report Generated on and Last Player
Boot-up within NetManager's Health views was not being
sent.
- Added a series of configuration options to detect excessive
modem use. The player can report an error to NetManager if the
total time on-line, total dial-up attempts, total successful
connections, or total number of dial-up failures exceeds limits
you set within a configurable interval. See IC3 Advanced Configuration
Options for more information.
- Two versions of the CAB file for Install Software Update
are now supplied. One is the regular version and the other is
the "UK English" version. The key difference is that in
the UK English version, the first day of the week is
defined to be Monday. This affects the
Week Numbers feature of the Schedule EX
— use the UK English CAB file wherever ISO-standard
(Monday-starting) week numbers are desired.
- Fixed a case where under certain error conditions the Player
Network Engine might stop sending health monitoring heartbeats
while otherwise running normally. In such a case the network
engine might also hang forever upon shutdown.
- The Input EX supports disabling the Escape key by setting
EscapeKey=off using the Branch menu
Set Variable feature. This worked fine in
Designer, but in Player hitting the Escape key would still
exit. This is now working correctly in Player too.
- Fixed a problem where Flash clips would not receive user-input
when run in ICPlayer.
- Player always supported two basic configuration choices for
point-to-point communication:
- Central FTP server ("player-pull" model)
- FTP server on player (hybrid "command-push / data-pull" model)
The Player now includes FTP server functionality
(Player-Direct FTP), which greatly simplifies setup
of the hybrid push/pull model because there is no need to
separately configure an FTP server for each player. The
advantages of the hybrid model are:
- Greater player responsiveness. Command directives are
delivered directly to the player, rather than the player
polling for them across the network.
The hybrid model cannot currently be used in certain
networks, namely where:
- NetManager cannot contact the player by machine name or
IP number. This is true for example if the players have
a non-static IP number and no dynamic DNS system is in
place.
- NetManager cannot physically contact the player. This is
true for example if the players are modem-based and
cannot be set to answer incoming calls.
If you are using the hybrid model,
Player-Direct FTP offers these advantages:
- Simpler ICPlayer configuration. Various settings are
automatically established when
Player-Direct FTP is used.
- One less thing to administer. No need to separately
administer your IIS, Apache, etc. FTP server.
- FTP status and activity logging is integrated into the
Player logs, which get reported back to NetManager.
- Since the Player-Direct FTP server is not a
general purpose FTP server, various security
restrictions are applied automatically, such as
disallowing anonymous access, restricting file access to
designated directories, etc. Various attempted security
breaches are clearly logged.
- The Receive Job Commands Via selector in the
InfoChannel Player Configuration Point-to-Point
Connection tab allows the following choices of how the player
receives point-to-point jobs:
- Local Computer (Tutorial): This sets up the
Player to communicate with Network Manager on the same
machine. This setting is basically useful for the
tutorial setup only.
- Player-Direct FTP: This connection type uses
the built-in FTP server — the only configuration
option needed is a password.
- Custom: This connection type lets you choose a
local or LAN-based folder or an FTP location, which were
the two primary options from before.
The built-in FTP server is selected when
Player-Direct FTP is chosen. If a different
mechanism for receiving jobs is chosen, the built-in FTP server
is completely disabled.
- Minor wording changes within InfoChannel Player
Configuration to go along with the
Player-Direct FTP choice and to be consistent with
NetManager.
- For Logging Detail Level, we now use the term
Normal instead of Moderate, to underscore that
this is usually the right choice. This is consistent with
NetManager of the same release.
- When Health Monitoring is disabled in
System Settings, the other health monitoring
options are no longer displayed, nor is the
Player Health tab.
- Upon startup, and again once per day, The Player network engine
checks the location where its daily logs are uploaded for
NetManager. Any daily log files that are missing are then
uploaded, and any outdated files are cleaned up.
- Release 5 added the MMOS.INI keyword
SSCLIENT_ThrottleFTPMaxKiloBitsPerSecond=n
to throttle data transfers. Now player health monitoring
traffic is also included in the throttling.
- New MMOS.INI keywords to throttle player data transfers during
certain times of day only. For example, use:
SSCLIENT_ThrottleFTPMaxKiloBitsPerSecond=500
SSCLIENT_TurnOnFTPThrottleAtHour=7
SSCLIENT_TurnOffFTPThrottleAtHour=22
to throttle FTP data transfer to a rate of 500kbps during the
business hours of 7 am till 10 pm. Outside those
hours (i.e. from 10 pm until 7 am the next morning), FTP
downloads occur at maximum possible speed because throttling is
turned off during that period.
- Now sets problems explaining the (alertable) consequence
(Player cannot receive jobs) and recommended solutions if the
integrated FTP server for Player-Direct FTP cannot
be started due to:
- A 3rd party FTP server is already running on this machine.
- Another server application is already running on this
machine and using port #n.
- Some other error which resulted in the integrated FTP
server not starting.
- The Player's network engine now reports to NetManager whether
or not the graphical engine is running. In InfoChannel
Player Configuration, the new Alert Network Manager if
the Player is Not Running? option controls whether this
should be considered an alert. Clear this option if it is
normal for the graphical engine to sometimes not be running on
this player.
- If a job file gets corrupted, it could have caused part of the
Network Engine to get stuck. This is now fixed.
- Now preserve rather than strip extended Latin-1 characters
(i.e. accented letters and other special symbols) within
heartbeats and log files.
- The transmission of heartbeats from Players to NetManager has
been made more efficient and more robust.
- Logs and heartbeats now have a (generous) limit on the number
of entries, to prevent runaway conditions from creating
unweildly logs.
- Fixed potential deadlock that could occur if using the
Retrieve Files job command to retrieve IC.log
around midnight.
- Normally, all players will retrieve their job data
using the User Name and Password specified for the
Transmission Workspace Location in NetManager's
System Settings.
For networks where the players need to log in with per-player
credentials, the new MMOS.INI keyword
SSCLIENT_OverrideJobLoginFromCustomSettings=1
tells the players to instead use the per-player
User Name and Password (already established in
ConfigIC for accessing the job commands)
to also access the job data in the
Transmission Workspace Location.
However, if the Player's Job Folder is a shared folder,
then there is no existing User Name and Password. In that
case, use the MMOS.INI keyword
SSCLIENT_OverrideJobLoginURL=ftp://user:password@ftp.domain.com/path
to specify everything.
- If you used the Send Content job command to send a
file with a .dat extension to the player, it was not
correctly being recognized as Linked Content. An easy
way to hit this problem was use to TextFile EX on
such a file, e.g. mytext.dat. This is now fixed.
- Normally a Player never changes its display resolution during
playback. This is now officially not
supported. The most likely case where this is an issue
is when the ConfigIC setting Adapt Resolution to
Script? is checked. The Player will end up locked to the
resolution of the current script (or for a fresh player, of the
Ready script). If you send a new main script of a different
resolution, you now need to exit and restart the player for the
new resolution settings to take effect.
- The ScalaIntegration.FileInstaller interface (in
ScalaIntegration.dll) has a new method:
GetMediaContentFolder()
which returns the path to the Linked Content folder.
- The ScalaIntegration.FileInstaller interface (in
ScalaIntegration.dll) has a new method:
RestartPlayback(ErrorNumber, ErrorDescription)
which restarts the player engine. This method returns
True if it succeeds, or False if it fails. You
can pass in optional arguments that will return the error
number and an error description string if this method fails.
- If ICPlayer suffers an abnormal termination, or hang on exit,
this will now be reported as an error in the log and to
Network Manager.
- Some of the ScalaIntegration.dll functions would fail if
there was no MMOS.INI file in the Player's installation
folder. This is now fixed.
- If a script download was aborted, any files already downloaded
were abandoned and were therefore re-transferred on the next
attempt. Such files are now preserved instead.
- The Delete Unused Content command now logs the names of
the files that get deleted.
- Fixed a bug where old versions of content would not get cleaned
up if the filename case changed.
- In ConfigIC, the Idle Time Hang Up setting can
now be set to infinity (never hang up). This can be useful for
example for PPPoE connections.
- In the InfoChannel Player Configuration, there is a new
option to control the Logging Detail Level. The default
level is Moderate, and you may choose from:
- Errors and Problems Only: The sparest logs,
containing only reported errors and problems.
- Low: Records general information and progress
into the player log, but does not include file download
progress. Appropriate if the logs are becoming too
large at the Moderate setting.
- Moderate: The default level of detail, which
records general information including file-download
progress into the player log. This is useful for
general monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Diagnostic: This level can be useful when
diagnosing more complex problems, or when providing
information to Scala Support, although at this setting
the logs can become quite large.
- Starting with Release 4, we introduced a
new format for how the files belonging to a script
are arranged, different from the old format used in
SP2 and earlier. If a Release 4 Player downloads a
new format script having the same name as an
old format script that the player already had, some
of the files would end up in the wrong place, which ultimately
leads to the player not finding the files it needs. (If the
script was re-sent, things would correct themselves.) This is
now fixed.
(R4)
- In ConfigIC, the broadcast identifier is now specified in
decimal (no longer hexadecimal), which is consistent with the
representation in the server products.
(R4)
- The Weather EX and CORIOgen EXes no longer cause the
"help" question-mark to sometimes appear in the playback
display.
- Fixed a problem where if an Install Files or
Install System Files command failed, sometimes
it became impossible to re-send a file of the same name.
- The file cleanup code is now more robust against failure.
- When deleting unused content, we now operate in ways that are
less likely to hit Windows path-length limits.
- If a script using third-party wipes is sent to an
IC3 Player, in many cases those wipes would not be found
unless the icon-file for that set of wipes was available on the
player. This is now fixed.
- Improved the error message when a piece of Linked Content
could not be found. Before, it was a bit misleading.
- The Player now supports broadcast reception, and has options to
configure this.
- Players now support autodial. This greatly simplifies
configuring networks of dial-up players, which was possible but
complex before.
In the Player Configuration utility you can specify dialing
information by:
- Selecting an existing Windows phonebook entry
- Making a new phonebook entry
- Entering a simple phone number as well as a user-name and
password.
You can also control:
- The number of consecutive failed attempts before an error is
reported.
- The length of inactivity before Player hangs up.
- Now retries, rather than fails, when trying to update files
that are locked.
- Fixed various bugs in validation of FTP paths in ConfigIC.
- There is a new "secondary" content location called
InstalledContent.
Scala software looks for linked content first in the
Content location, and then in the
InstalledContent location. The basic idea is that
the Content location is managed by the Player
Network Engine, and the InstalledContent
location is for content managed outside of ICPlayer. A big
difference is the Delete Unused Content
command will not touch files in the
InstalledContent folder.
This location is placed by default adjacent to the
Content folder in Documents and Settings\All
Users\Documents\Scala but can be overridden with the
MMOS.INI keyword:
MEDIA_InstalledContent = "<path>"
Setting MEDIA_InstalledContent can be useful for:
- IC3 Designer, to support a group of authors who
wish to have their Linked Content shared on
a LAN. (Set
MEDIA_InstalledContent to a
shared folder on the network.)
- IC3 Player, for installations with a hand-delivered
("sneaker-net") partition or folder location.
(Set
MEDIA_InstalledContent to the desired
partition or folder location.)
- IC3 Player, for installations with multiple players
at one site where bandwidth over the internet to
that site is more critical than bandwidth over the LAN
at that site. (Add an additional player (or
designate one player) as that site's "Linked Player",
and use Send Content to deliver large video
files to the Linked Player only. For all other players,
set their MEDIA_InstalledContent to the regular
content folder of the Linked Player. When the other
players reference the video as linked content, they will
play it over the LAN each time is is needed.)
This was documented with Service Pack 2, but was
not working until Release 4.
- When a player receives a job, a message is immediately posted
back to the server. This lets the operator know the job was
received, and how deep the queue is.
- When the Player's main script changes, audio, MPEGs,
asynchronous Windows events, etc., are stopped, and various EX
parameters are appropriately reset, to prevent one script from
causing side-effects in another.
- New ScalaIntegration DLL to allow integration
software written on the player to create or copy files in a way
which allows them to be seamlessly introduced into a Scala
script.
If you have custom software on the player that generates or
retrieves files that you wish the Scala Script to use, then the
ScalaIntegration DLL lets you install those files without
having to worry about whether the script currently has these
files locked or in use. This would allow your custom software
to for example retrieve current weather information from the
web or generate a chart showing call-center volume, then pass
the resulting bitmap to the Scala script.
This DLL is installed with IC3 Player and provides an
API to accomplish seamless file installation. To use it from
Visual Basic or VBScript first you must:
Set obj = CreateObject("ScalaIntegration.FileInstaller")
To install a file foo.txt into the Content:
location, you can then say:
Dim errNumber
Dim errDescription
result = obj.InstallToContentFolder("C:\MyStuff\MyFolder\foo.txt",
errNumber, errDescription)
This will make the file Content:\foo.txt
available to the Scala Script, without you having to worry
about whether the previous version of foo.txt was
in use.
There is another API called InstallToFolder
which lets you control the destination directory, has an
additional parameter that comes first. Also, you can locate
the location of MEDIA_InstalledContent with the
GetMediaInstalledContentFolder API. For example:
Dim errNumber
Dim errDescription
mediaInstalledContentName = obj.GetMediaInstalledContentFolder
result = obj.InstallToFolder(mediaInstalledContentName, "C:\MyStuff\MyFolder\foo.txt",
errNumber, errDescription)
- IC3 Player can now run on the desktop as a top-most
borderless window of arbitrary or full size.
You can specify the left, top, width and height. As an
example, add this to your MMOS.INI:
DESKTOP_Borderless = 1
DESKTOP_TopMost = 1
DESKTOP_CustomPosition = 100 50 800 600
Omitting DESKTOP_CustomPosition will make the
window fill the primary display.
- Many error messages now include a Problem that describes
the consequences or outcome of a particular error.
- Certain system dialogs or tray icons could cause ICPlayer to
switch back to the desktop, which caused playback to terminate.
This is now generally prevented.
- Various improvements to error message wording.
- IC3 Players will now work if there is no mouse attached to
system.
- Scripts on the player can now locate their wipe and bitmap-font
files.
- The
MEDIA_InstalledContent feature added in
SP2 finally works.
IC3 Broadcast Server was introduced with Release 4.
- The Recipient's Email Address can now contain a list of
comma-separated email addresses.
- Fixed an occasional crash when the Broadcast Server was
updating its display.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.2 where the system
priority of Broadcast Server threads was slightly lower than
intended.
- Error dialogs once again have the correct title-bar text.
The Broadcast Server (and the corresponding broadcast receiver
components on the Player) have been reworked internally for improved
transmission performance, robustness, and recovery. The improvements
are particularly helpful in networks that suffer higher levels of data
loss.
- New Maximum Tolerated Data Loss Per Player setting. If
a player misses most of its data during a broadcast, the
Broadcast Server would have to retransmit nearly the whole set
of data. With this new option, you can set a limit on data
loss per player. When the Broadcast Server determines what to
resend, high-data-loss players are not considered. (This limit
is in addition to the Maximum Transmission and Query
Retries Per Player settings.)
High-data-loss players still will continue to receive other
retransmissions. Thus they can heal themselves. They also can
receive retransmissions from the later auto-retransmission
phase.
This setting lets players with good connections be satisfied
faster, and can also be used to limit overall bandwidth use.
- New Maximum Cumulative Retransmission Count setting. Use
this feature to limit the maximum cumulative amount of data
retransmitted per job. The default is unlimited. There are no
limits as long as players are making progress and responding to
queries. This setting can be used to limit overall bandwidth
use when no remaining players are making progress.
- In some cases, the auto-retransmission feature was not working
properly.
Auto-retransmission is a feature where the Broadcast
Server keeps repeating the most recent job. Broadcasting
proceeds as follows:
- The Broadcast Server transmits the job data.
- Based on the responses from the players, and according
to all the Transmission and Confirmation
settings, the Broadcast Server retransmits any lost
parts.
- Optionally, after the retry limits have been reached,
and until a new job is pending, the
Broadcast Server begins auto-retransmission of
the most recent job..
To use this feature, set Automatic Retransmission Delay
to a suitable non-zero value. The Broadcast Server will repeat
the most recent job until a new job comes along. This setting
is appropriate in networks where additional bandwidth is cheap
or free (for example where a dedicated slice of bandwidth has
been purchased). Using auto-retransmission allows players with
serious connection problems to receive the jobs if the
connection fixes itself, and allows new players to be
commissioned and automatically pick up the current broadcast.
- The Broadcast Server now sends missing blocks as soon as
possible. In some cases the server used to wait before sending
missing blocks.
- If a player is late in reporting the data blocks it is missing,
the Broadcast Server could resend those blocks unnecessarily,
even if they had already been resent.
- The user-interface provides better feedback while the Broadcast
Server is resending missing blocks.
- Removed several obsolete or unnecessary configuration options.
- Improved button labels and help texts to make it clearer what
each broadcast configuration option does.
- The Broadcast Server now logs a reasonable amount of detailed
information. Look in IC.log for detailed information.
- The bandwidth throttling logic has been improved to be more
consistent and precise.
- The former Player Target Redundancy Count setting is now
named Player Control Message Redundancy, and now
controls the redundancy count of all control messages including
status requests. This can improve broadcast throughput. The
interval and delay options are now named Player Control
Message Interval and Player Control Message Delay to
signify that these also affect all player control messages.
- Fixed several smaller miscellaneous bugs, including overall
reliability, and time-out detection.
- Various GUI options that used to use a value of 0 to
mean infinite now use the infinity symbol.
- The File dialogs for selecting the Log Folder and
the Broadcast Folder now let you create new
folders.
- Fixed a rare case of spurious error messages being displayed
within the Broadcast Server.
- The automated email notification features of
Broadcast Server no longer rely on the default mailer
(Outlook, etc.) because of various problems with that solution.
Starting with Release 7, these features require you to
specify the mail server and authentication settings to use, in
Broadcast Server's Options menu Email
tab.
- Fixed a bug where broadcasting to a large number of players
(greater than about 120) could fail.
- Fixed a problem in the DirecPC Broadcast Driver that would
prevent it from uploading broadcast data to the Network
Operations Center (NOC).
(R4)
- In the Broadcast Server, selecting
Reset Settings would temporarily disable the
Confirmation and Email tabs. This is now fixed.
- Some clarifications and corrections were done to the help text
for the Broadcast Server.
IC3 Reporter was introduced with Release 4a.
- Reporter now supports 50 profiles, up from 20.
- Fixed a problem where certain user-interface text in Reporter
was sometimes not drawn.
- Fixed the Reporter installer because it refused to install if the
Designer or Player was Release 6b or newer.
- Added Override published script size? to the Reporter
Options menu. Normally, Reporter uses the Simulation
Resolution when publishing to a player. This option allows
users to instead specify a custom published script resolution,
and is helpful if your script(s) are using a resolution that is
not available in the Simulation Resolution.
- Fixed a problem where the Simulation window loses the message
text after visiting the About dialog.
- Fixed a problem where the Title and Message text became ghosted
if you visited the Message Maintenance dialog.
- Fixed a problem where the
Reporter Content <Profile>.sca script
incorrectly contained full paths instead of relative ones, when
Publish to Player was unchecked.
- Fixed a crash when closing the Profile Settings
dialog after changing passwords.
- Reporter now allows the page pause time to go up to
9999 seconds rather than 99 seconds.
IC3 Add-on EX Changes
The updaters for IC3 Designer and IC3 Player will
automatically apply any relevant fixes to Scala add-on EXes, namely
the CORIOgen EX, MyHD HDTV EX, TV Tuner EX,
Video EXes, and Weather EX.
Starting with Release 7, cumulative patches for all fixes for
these EXes are also included in the IC3 Player Update CAB file
for the remote Install Software Update feature.
The IC3 CORIOgen EX was introduced with Service Pack 2.
- To improve understandability, the V.Soft key hardness
choice is now called Very Soft.
- CORIOgen commands could sometimes cause the player to crash.
This is now fixed.
- If the CORIOgen option Unfreeze on Exit was not set,
Designer would fail to open the serial port the second and
subsequent times you played a script.
The IC3 MyHD HDTV EX was introduced with Release 6.
- The File dialog to select video files to play now remembers the
last visited folder.
- Fixed a couple of incorrect or missing hotkeys.
- Fixed a problem where if playback of a transport stream is
interrupted, the next play may not work correctly.
- Fixed stability problems with short transport stream files.
- New Use DVI Output Mode? option to select the DVI output
of the MDP-120 DVI daughter-board.
- Removed the 1280x1024p mode from the MyHD mode list because
this mode does not actually work with the card/driver.
- Fixed a bug in the MyHD EX where the VGA display would not
be restored at conclusion, leaving a blank video display.
- Fixed a bug in the MyHD EX where it would not notice the
end of a transport stream.
- The HDTV tuner now supports a Subchannel option.
The IC3 TV Tuner EX was introduced with Release 4a.
- The TV Tuner EX Options menu now lets you
explicitly select the particular tuner hardware you are using.
Making a choice automatically enables the necessary internal
configuration options that are appropriate for that device.
- The TV Standard Type selector in the
TV Tuner EX Options menu is no longer disabled
when the Video Source is set to Composite or
S-Video.
- For most TV tuner cards (not including the Hauppauge
cards), you can now specify the size of the "capture window",
i.e. the resolution at which the original image is grabbed.
Use the MMOS.INI variables
DSHOWRENDER_ChangeTVCaptureToYUV=1
DSHOWRENDER_TVCaptureWidth=width
DSHOWRENDER_TVCaptureHeight=height
Best results are usually obtained when you choose a width and
height that evenly divides into the width and height of your TV
standard.
- Initializing the TV tuner is now much faster for many cards.
- A hidden TVTuner atom will now appear in the right place
when you turn it on.
- Significantly improved TV Tuner initialization time for the
Pinnacle PCTV Rave cards with the MT2050 tuner.
- The frame rate on certain TV Tuners got worse in
Release 7.1. This is now fixed.
- Further improvements for USB capture devices.
- Made some changes to allow USB-based TV capture solutions to
work better.
- Fixed a problem introduced in Release 7.1 when using a
Hauppauge PVR 250 or 350 card. With Overlay off, it ran
with a performance penalty. With Overlay on, it did not play.
- Fixed a potential resource leak and memory corruption in
TVTuner EX.
- Fixed a rare deadlock in the TVTuner EX playback.
- Fixed a problem where the Player would sometimes not play the
first TVTunerClip in a script.
- After a TVTuner.Off(), a subsequent TVTuner.On()
command now triggers faster because we reuse certain internal
structures.
- There is a new TVTuner.Hide() command. Like
TVTuner.Off(), this turns off TV Tuner display.
However it keeps the TV Tuner enabled in the background,
which makes a future TVTuner.On() command trigger much
faster.
- In some cases the TV Tuner menu was showing the position
to be (0,0) instead of the correct value. Now fixed.
- If setting the country-code fails, TV Tuner events can
still play.
- In the TV Tuner EX Options Menu, the
Tuner Type had no effect — it acted as if it
was always set to cable. Now fixed.
- The TV Tuner EX now explicitly tells the TV
tuner driver to use the current country code. This addresses
the problem where the tuner was not using the correct
channel-to-frequency map for the current locale.
- Fixed a deadlock that could occur if you were playing on the
desktop and you moved or sized the window at the same time a
TV Tuner event was starting or ending.
The IC3 Video EXes were introduced with Service Pack 2.
- The Leightronix EX now supports the MINI-T-NET
model when connected to the PC by serial port.
- The PESA LNS-8 is now supported through a new
Switcher definition file. Other PESA switchers may be
compatible with this new definition too.
- In the UVW VCR driver, the forward and reverse scan, and
fast-forward commands should now work.
- If the VCR EX was currently showing a
Play Track command, and you change the Unit
to a different unit that does not support playing by track, the
menu now correctly switches to Play.
- The VCR EX now has a driver for the MPEG-2@Disk
digital video recorder, available from TV One (in
North America) or from Como
(in Europe). When using this driver, the VCR EX now has a
Play Track command.
- The Pioneer driver for the VCR EX can now control the
Pioneer DVD-7400 DVD player.
- The range of COM ports supported by the Leightronix EX now
goes up to 32.
The IC3 Weather EX was introduced with Service Pack 2.
- The In File feature of the Weather EX is now fixed.
- When using the Vantage Pro hardware, the wind chill value
now comes from the Vantage Pro itself, rather than from a
calculation.
- Fixed a problem where in some cases, the Weather EX
settings would not always be saved.
- On the VantagePro, the Weather.Rain value was too low by
a factor of ten — this is now fixed.
- The In File option of the Weather EX lets this
EX display data from a file instead of from a weather station
device. The Weather EX was only reading this file at
startup, instead of polling every five seconds.
