News ::.
19 July 2010, FET 5.14.0 released
- Improved the random number generator, so that potential cycling problems are avoided (though probably nobody met such problems). The new random number generator has a much longer period and is better. The command line parameters for specifying the random seed are changed and you need to change your script if you use FET command line and if you want to specify the random seed. See the README file for the new command line parameters for specifying the random seed.
- Improved memory consumption on constraints activity/activities/subactivities preferred starting times/preferred time slots.
- Minor interface improvements.
- Updates in the Arabic translation, by Hatim Alahmadi.
22 June 2010, FET 5.13.5 released
- Corrected a bug, under newer versions of GNOME (the locked/unlocked icons for the special constraints were not shown in the menus).
- Very rare bug fix (crash in import if some fields in a line are missing, reported by murad).
- Other minor bug fixes in import (if an imported line was incorrect, the report message didn't specify this line number, in some cases).
- Updated the Indonesian translation, by Nirwan Yus.
- Updated the Spanish translation, by Jose Cesar Fernandez Lopez.
- Code cleanup
13 June 2010, FET 5.13.4 released
- Added a Slovak translation, by Ondrej Gregor.
14 May 2010, FET 5.13.3 released
- Updated the Indonesian translation, by Nirwan Yus.
- Rare minor bug fixed, reported by Frans on the forum.
- Code cleanup.
4 May 2010, FET 5.13.2 released
- Increased max activities from 15,000 to 30,000 (suggested by murad). Also, increased max time constraints from 30,000 to 60,000 and max space constraints from 30,000 to 60,000.
- Added a partial Sinhala translation (only the main menu), by Achini Duisna.
- Updated the Indonesian translation, by Nirwan Yus.
- Very rare crash bugs fixed.
- Code cleanup.
1 April 2010, FET 5.13.1 released
- Corrected a generation bug (probably very rare, it gave impossible timetable). Bug may have appeared if using constraints students (set) early with max beginnings at second hour >= 1 and generating on a locked file.
- Increased maximum number of teachers, subjects, rooms and buildings to 6000 (they were 3000 previously).
- Corrected some HTML minor problems, by Volker Dirr.
- Added a new sample file, by alfaromeo (from Morocco). This user also describes tricks to use official FET for Moroccan schools.
21 March 2010, FET 5.13.0 released
- Updated to Qt 4.6.2.
- For constraints students (set) min hours daily is now possible to allow empty days (in advanced usage) - suggested by Horatiu Halmajan and Catalin Maican.
- Added a simple activity planning form, by Volker Dirr (see Advanced menu).
- Now it is allowed to have 3 constraints of type interval max days per week for each students subgroup or teacher (it was maximum 2 previously).
- Added export of active activities, by Volker Dirr.
- Added Brazilian Portuguese translation (partial, incomplete yet), by Werner Bruns and Frank Martin.
- Added Danish translation (partial, only the main form and a few other forms), by David Lamhauge.
- Improved a bit the memory consumption.
- The tables contain now an -x- (lowercase) if the teacher/students set/room is not available and -X- (uppercase) for a break (suggested by George Miliotis). Also, you can configure separately if you want breaks displayed and/or not available displayed.
- Removed some useless messages, improving speed for some rare cases under GNU/Linux operating system and similar.
- Added a few new sample files (by Christoph Schilling, Horatiu Halmajan and aliponte).
- Changed default language/locale to en_US (instead of en_GB, which is non-standard).
5 February 2010, FET 5.12.3 released
- Crash bug fix for a rare situation, in which you have constraints (sub)activities preferred starting times or time slots and they refer to no activity (reported by George Miliotis).
29 January 2010, FET 5.12.2 released
- Updated to Qt 4.6.1 .
- Minor interface improvement: since a person reported he accidentally removed the basic constraints, it was added additional user confirmation for this, and more user information.
- Corrected a possible compiling crash bug under MinGW (this is not a FET bug, it is a MinGW bug). It was made a hack to overpass this bug.
- Improved export of timetable as CSV, by adding the id-s of the activities (suggested by m).
11 January 2010, FET 5.12.1 released
- Added Ukrainian translation (by Andriy Melnyk).
- Bug fix: when modifying the number of students in a students set, the related activities will show the correct number of students, but the generation will consider the old number of students until the user saves and loads again the file.
- Bug fix when adding/modifying a group's/subgroup's number of students, now all groups/subgroups with same name will have the same (new) number of students.
- Improved speed of loading for large files and blocked user input while loading a larger file, because otherwise the user could obtain an incomplete file (minor bug reported by Volker Dirr).
- Minor interface improvement: when exiting FET and choosing Save file, if you press Cancel, FET will not exit anymore - reported by Soyeb Aswat
- Minor interface improvement: added a shortcut button to advanced functions in Time shortcuts section.
- Minor leak fixed (when removing a group or subgroup).
- Other minor bug fixes, when removing a group or a year.
15 December 2009, FET 5.12.0 released
- Added shortcut buttons on the main form (suggested by more users, especially: daviodan, Massimo Mancini, Paolo Cataldi). They can be deactivated from Settings - Interface menu.
- Increased max activities to 15,000, max days per 'week' to 35, and other limits, and improved memory management. Now you don't need to have much virtual memory and memory usage is lower. This better memory management may bring a small slowdown of the generation, although in rare cases the new version may be faster. Speed variation depends also on the platform. More details about the possible slowdown: I compared times by starting parallel generations with the same random seed, which produces the same timetables in identical steps. I noticed usually less than 10% increased generating time, but in rare cases for some unusual files a bit more, maximum 17%. From the official examples, the worst situation is for the file Hungary/Bethlen/2007-2008-difficult/Bethlen_2007_2008.fet, with about 17% slowdown from FET version 5.11.0 to FET 5.12.0. I apologise for this "downgrade" of speed, but it is necessary.
- Updated to Qt 4.6.0
- Improved add activity dialog, by Volker Dirr: if in activities dialog, you select a filter and then try to add an activity, the values in this filter will be selected in the add activity dialog (this was also suggested by daviodan).
- Minor interface improvements.
- Changed help management (added links to online help).
- Corrected/updated translations.
- Code cleanup.
5 November 2009, FET 5.11.0 released
- Updated to Qt 4.5.2
- Converted all dialogs to Qt 4 Designer files - suggested by George Miliotis. Compilation time is now shorter and intermediary and executable files are smaller.
- Added constraint teacher(s) min days per week (suggested by several users).
- Added constraint teacher(s) or students (set) for an activity tag maximum hours daily (suggested by several users). It is not perfect and must be enabled from settings menu.
- Added constraint students (set) max gaps per day. It is not perfect and must be enabled from settings menu.
- Very rare crash bug fix (reported by Marco Barsotti).
- Constraint room not available times permits now multiple constraints for the same room (so, you can use multiple constraints with different weights and preferences for the same room).
- In add/modify activity and modify subactivity dialogs, the students are displayed in a tree-like structure (suggested by George Miliotis).
- In all constraints dialogs, added a nice filter (suggested by daviodan).
- Changed name of constraint: MinNDaysBetweenActivities becomes MinDaysBetweenActivities.
- Added a count for activities list and constraints list.
- The constraints with tables now contain an X (nicer look), also centered nicely, and they have colors (which can be enabled in settings)
- The timetables view forms now center text in cells.
- Many other minor interface improvements.
- Rewritten the Catalan translation by Silvia. It is very complete, check it out.
- Added a new Greek sample file, by George Miliotis.
- Updated and improved Persian translation by sally sat.
- Dropped !DOCTYPE FET tag in the .fet files - following general recommendations, and changed FET tag to fet tag. Of course you can open older files.
- Improved activities simple description (suggested by Massimo Mancini and alfaromeo).
- Added possibility to save the highest stage timetable (suggested by alfaromeo, pinco and Massimo Mancini).
- Added a new Romanian sample file, by Horatiu Halmajan.
- Updated translations: Russian, German, Romanian, Italian, Spanish.
- The timetable view dialogs now have resizeable widgets (you can drag the sections with the mouse) - suggested by Ben Bauer.
22 August 2009, FET 5.10.3 released
- Added 2 new constraints: three activities grouped, max days between activities (suggested by Zsolt Udvari).
- Improved the names of constraints: "2" activities grouped, ordered and consecutive are now "two" activities grouped, ordered and consecutive.
- Code cleanup.
- Added a new Italian sample file, by Marco.
20 July 2009, FET 5.10.2 released
- Speed improvement if user has constraints activities same starting time, 2 activities consecutive and 2 activities ordered and activities not overlapping (idea and partial code by Volker Dirr). In some cases, the speed improvement is very high. This has to do with the initial ordering of the activities.
- Other minor speed improvements (idea and partial code by Volker Dirr).
- Added a Persian manual by Hamed SadeghiNeshat.
11 July 2009, FET 5.10.1 released
- Speed improvement if user has constraints activities same starting time. Idea and partial code by Volker Dirr.
- Added possibility to print activities with same starting time in the html timetables (suggested on the forum, implemented by Volker Dirr).
- Minor interface improments under GNU/Linux. The combo boxes are now smaller.
- Modified the main menu arrangement of constraints (suggested by Massimo Mancini).
- Crash bug fix (very rare, if user pressed cancel immediately after hitting generation start in timetable generate dialog).
- Added another sample file (by T. Renganathan).
1 July 2009, FET 5.10.0 released
- Leaking bugs fixed (closed Qt widgets were not removed).
- Bug fix in generation algorithm. This bug is not seen in practice, but the code in generate.cpp was incorrect in a minor portion. Specifically, it corrected tests done when the user has constraints of type students early max beginnings at second hour, without max gaps per week for students, with max or min hours daily for students.
- Added constraint teachers max days per week (suggested by Marco Barsotti).
- Made the results directory customizable (user can choose it) - suggested by Massimo Mancini. Important: under Windows, the default location is not the usual one, but $HOME\fet-results (C:\Documents and Settings\username\fet-results or C:\Users\username\fet-results)
- Fixed a bug: if user deactivated some activities, in some cases he could not generate a timetable (if using preferred times for (sub)activities).
- Added a filter in add and modify dialogs constraints activities not overlapping (suggested by Yush Yuen).
- Added a new feature in the timetable generate dialog, which allows you to see the time when the highest number of activities was placed (suggested by Yush Yuen).
- Added a Catalan translation of the manual, by Joan de Gracia.
- Changed the name of the html timetable files.
- Corrected many translations' layout (by Liviu Lalescu).
- Added a new test for inconsitency for indirect links between constraints actvities same starting time (suggested by Silvia).
- Minor improvement - in students statistics menu, user can select to view complete structure (duplicates enabled) or canonical structure.
- Interface improvement - dialogs when removing the constraints or adding them are improved, so that they are not very large for large constraints.
- Selection mode in constraints not available and preferred slots is improved - you can click table header (suggested by Massimo Mancini).
- Minor other interface improvements.
- Export warns if existing files (suggested by Angela).
- Changed directory of sample inputs to 'examples'.
- Added a 'Related' checkbox in activities and subactivities dialogs (suggested by Bingen).
- Speed improvement in some precomputing situations (not in generation).
- Improved size for constraints with combo boxes of very large activities (suggested by Bingen).
1 June 2009, FET 5.9.4 released
- Added the Russian translation (incomplete) - by Ilya V. Paramonov
- Added the Persian translation (incomplete) - by Hamed SadeghiNeshat
- Minor bug fix by Volker Dirr - highlighting the same teacher or student set, for html level >= 5, did not work correctly for advanced statistics export.
- Improved compilation time and memory consumption by modifying the data reading and parsing routines (additional checking/tests needed here).
- Minor memory leak fix (normally, not noticeable).
- Minor interface bug fix (description of constraint teacher max gaps per day displayed incorrectly information about the gaps, writing "per week" instead of "per day").
- Modified the order of search for translation files (firstly in current directory, then in current directory/translations, then, under Unix-like, in /usr/share/fet/translations).
10 April 2009, FET 5.9.3 released
- Added constraint activity tag preferred room(s) - suggested by Horatiu Halmajan and Catalin Maican
20 March 2009, FET 5.9.2 released
- Crash bug fix when importing activities (reported by Thomas Schwartz).
- Improvements and corrections in the import filter.
1 March 2009, FET 5.9.1 released
- Improved a situation for fixed timetables which were impossible sometimes (reported by Horatiu Halmajan).
- Improved the html timetables by Volker Dirr.
- Crash bug fix for constraint min gaps between activities with weight below 100%.
- Bug fix in students early constraint - not critical bug.
- Updates in Arabic translation.
14 February 2009, FET 5.9.0 released
- Added multiple activity tags for a single activity.
- It is now possible to edit a single subactivity.
- Added constraints teacher(s) or students (set) activity tag max hours continuously (to specify that a teacher or a students set must have maximum n hours continuously for an activity tag) - suggested by Hatim Ali, George Miliotis and Volker Dirr.
- Improved a bit the memory consumption.
- To avoid Windows problems with very large filenames, the sample file names were shortened.
- Minor html timetables corrections (cosmetic).
- Updates in Spanish, Arabic, Romanian and Italian translations.
- Minor improvements.
27 January 2009, FET 5.8.1 released
- Minor improvements (code cleanup) - modified a bit the xml files to contain for boolean variables only true/false values instead of yes/no (following xml format recommendations).
- Minor improvement: the constraint activity preferred starting time must have now the day and the hour both specified, so there is a clearer distinction between preferred starting time and preferred starting times.
- Minor improvement - when reading some kind of invalid data, instead of crashing, now FET reports the error (like for instance duplicate teachers, or subjects, or wrong tags).
- Minor improvements in the Italian, Arabic and Spanish translations.
- Added a sample file from Azu Boba.
- The index.html links now open in the same window (suggested by daviodan).
14 January 2009, FET 5.8.0 released
- Added the possibility to view locked activities in the timetables and toggle lock/unlock activities in the timetable (suggested by Azu Boba, implemented by Liviu Lalescu and Volker Dirr).
- Added the possibility to lock/unlock the activities of a certain day (suggested by Azu Boba, implemented by Liviu Lalescu and Volker Dirr).
- Added the possibility to lock/unlock the activities which end students day (suggested by Volker Dirr, implemented by Liviu Lalescu).
- The constraints activity preferred starting time and activity preferred room have now an attribute, which can mean that some constraints are added permanently by the human operator and cannot be unlocked from the view timetable form (suggested by Azu Boba, done by Liviu Lalescu and Volker Dirr).
- Minor bug fixes (very rare crashes).
- Minor improvements - when viewing the timetable, the detailed activity view is updated correctly (suggested by Jose Cesar Fernandez Lopez).
- Other minor interface improvements.
- Minor improvement: the directories under Windows contain now the correct back-slash, instead of forward slash.
- Repaired the Turkish translation (by Liviu Lalescu), but it is still old and incomplete.
- Added the output of activities timetable as xml