OpenSesame 3.1.0 "Jazzy James" has been released!

Comments

• Daniel

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  Congrats Sebastiaan on this release that has some great new stuff!

  Just a few side notes:

  media_player_mpy

  This release also includes a completely new media player on which we have been working for a while: media_player_mpy. You find it in the item toolbar in the category visual stimuli:

  

  This version should work more reliably on all major operating systems (yes, also on Mac OS this time) than the other solutions that were available before (vlc, gst). We have tested the player thoroughly, but you may still experience some errors or unintended behavior (it is the player's first ever release after all). Please report these at the issue tracker on Github. In any case, I'd love to hear your experiences and suggestions on this new player after you have given it a spin.

  Some important notes:

  • The first time you use media_player_mpy, it will automatically download a program called ffmpeg. This program performs the actual decoding of the video files that you play. While ffmpeg is downloading (which may take a while), your experiment may give the impression to be stuck, but rest assured, it will continue after the download is finished. We hope to integrate ffmpeg into the next releases so this initial separate download will no longer be necessary.
  • media_player_mpy offers can use three different modules for playing the audio stream of a video. They can be selected from the sound renderer dropdown box on the player's configuration page. We have had varying experiences on different computers and operating systems with the same sound renderer, so you will have to test which one works best for you. At the moment, we think sounddevice (which is selected by default) is the most reliable, but do try the other options if this one causes problems or choppy sound playback.

  Multiprocessing works on Mac OS X

  Due to a new way of creating the Mac OS X app, it now also supports multiprocessing. This option can be selected on the preferences panel in the runner section.

  

  Multiprocessing increases the stability of OpenSesame by running the experiments in a separate process. Everytime an experiment is run, it starts with a clean slate of memory. If an experiment does crash, it no longer drags down OpenSesame with it entirely.

  Hopefully you like all these new goodies!

  
• neon

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Fantastic - thank you Sebastiaan et al.!
  It looks really awesome. I'm particularly delighted with coroutines and integration with OSF. Well done, and thanks for all of your hard work.

  Neon
• ghosty

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  Unfortunately, I could not run it on my PC (Windows 8.1). It just did not start.
  Had to downgrade to 3.07((

  Any suggestions?
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Any suggestions?

  Yes! Please provide more details! What exactly happens when you start OpenSesame? Which package of OpenSesame are you using? And which version of Windows 8.1 are you using?

  
  
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• Raluca_Szekely

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Hello, I started working with Open Sesame a about a month ago and I find it extremely useful! I just upgraded to OS 3.1.0 and tried to run an experiment that was built on version 3.0. All is well, except for when I try to change the font to Arial (it has the characters I need, which are: ț, ș, â, ă, î; this worked perfectly in OS 3.0) by going to 'other' fonts. I receive an error (see image). Do I need to upload a .ttf to the file pool or is this a bug? Thanks so much! Cheers!
  
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  @Raluca_Szekely This is indeed a bug--thanks for pointing it out. We'll push out a bugfix release soon, but for now you can:

  • Stick to 3.0 until the issue is fixed; or
  • Place the font in the file pool, as described here: http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.1/manual/stimuli/text/

  Cheers!
  Sebastiaan

  
  
  Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!
  
• Raluca_Szekely

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Great! Thanks a lot for the quick reply! Cheers! - Raluca
• ghosty

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  sebastiaan,

  The package is default -- opensesame_3.1.0-py2.7-win32-1.exe;

  The version of Windows is 8.1 Pro 64-bit (all updates);

  CPU -- Intel I5-2500K;

  RAM -- 8 Gb

  When I double click on the shortcut nothing happens.
  The process cannot be found in the task manager.
  I tried starting it as administrator, tried different 'compatibility' options, but nothing helped.
  3.07 is still working fine.
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  When I double click on the shortcut nothing happens. The process cannot be found in the task manager. I tried starting it as administrator, tried different 'compatibility' options, but nothing helped. 3.07 is still working fine.

  In the OpenSesame program folder (usually something like c:\Program files\OpenSesame), you will see two versions of opensesame.exe:

  • c:\Program files\OpenSesame\opensesame.exe
  • c:\Program files\OpenSesame\Scripts\opensesame.exe

  If you try to launch these directly, does either of them work? And, if so, which one?

  
  
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• ghosty

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Neither((
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Neither((

  Ok, let's find out what the problem is here. If you start OpenSesame from a command prompt, you should be able to see any error messages. To do so:

  1. From the start menu, run cmd.exe
  2. Go to the OpenSesame folder by typing cd "\Program Files (x86)\OpenSesame", where you may have to change the folder so that it matches the folder where you have installed OpenSesame.
  3. Now run python Scripts\safelaunch-opensesame.py

  This will probably crash, but at least you should see some informative output. Please post that here! This will help us to resolve the issue.

  
  
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• ghosty

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  
• knmeyer

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  Hi,

  I am running an experiment that was built with OpenSesame 3.0 on the new OpenSesame 3.1 release. Previously, I had used run if [response] = None to display items if the participant did not provide a response. This worked fine on 3.0, but seems not to display for 3.1. I noticed there were some changes to the response function, but it appeared that if a participant did not provide a response, then var.response and var.response_time would both be None. Is there a different way this should be coded in 3.1 that I'm missing?

  Thanks for the help,
  Kristin
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  @ghosty Thanks for digging into this. Apparently there is a problem with PyQt4, which is the graphical toolkit used by OpenSesame. The exact error is (again) hidden. Would you mind trying the following?

  1. Step 1 as before
  2. Step 2 as before
  3. Now run python (by itself, without any arguments)
  4. In the Python that opens, run:

  import PyQt4
  from PyQt4 import QtCore
  from PyQt4 import QtGui
  

  This should hopefully show the exact problem that prevents PyQt4 from loading.

  
  
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• ghosty

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  I did not close the previous Command prompt window, so I just continued typing:

  
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  @ghosty Thanks! This information is really helpful. I'm not sure we'll be able to resolve it, but at least we have an idea where the problem comes from!

  
  
  Check out SigmundAI.eu for our OpenSesame AI assistant!
  
• sebastiaan

  July 2016 edited 1:54PM

  @knmeyer

  I am running an experiment that was built with OpenSesame 3.0 on the new OpenSesame 3.1 release. Previously, I had used run if [response] = None to display items if the participant did not provide a response. This worked fine on 3.0, but seems not to display for 3.1. I noticed there were some changes to the response function, but it appeared that if a participant did not provide a response, then var.response and var.response_time would both be None. Is there a different way this should be coded in 3.1 that I'm missing?

  This is indeed a bug in the new way that responses are processed. We'll fix it in the upcoming bug-fix release, but for now you can work around the issue using the following run-if statement:

  =var.response in [None, 'None']
  

  Technically, this is a Python-style statement that checks whether the response is the string 'None', as it should be, or the special None value, which is shouldn't be (but currently is).

  • http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.1/manual/variables/#using-conditional-if-statements

  
  
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• ghosty

  July 2016 edited July 2016

  sebastiaan, Thank you so much for your attention to my problem. I really hope it will help.

  Please, also notice, that now some part of documentation has disappeared and can be viewed from Google cache only. Here is an example:
  http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/miscellaneous/timing/