The OpenSees Community

Whats different between Version 2.1.0 and 2.0.0

The interpreter is now based on Tcl version 8.5 instead of version 8.4. The main advantage this provides to OpenSees users is:
The tcl part of the code is now approx. 10% faster.
New min, max and ** (pow) operators.
New in and ni for checking membership of lists, e.g. if {$item in $list} { ..}
New dictionary data type. These are like tcl arrays (hash tables) but allow s pass by value instead of by reference.
New {*} syntax to avoid abusive use of eval which is often used when you have a list of seperate things that needs to be passed as paramaters.
And many more. see http://wiki.tcl.tk/10630
For users and developers there is a new mechanism for including outside material and element routines. These routines can be written in C++, C or Fortran and can be dynamically linked at runtime through use of .dll's on windows, .dylib on mac and .so on linux. This means people can share new materials and elements without the need to compile and link with OpenSees or w/o having to submit their code to the OpenSees repository. Mechanisms willl be set up to alert users as to what elements and materials are available outside the core interpreter.
New eleResponse command to get information from an element during the analysis. args similar to element recorder. Results returned in a list.
Modified nodeDisp, nodeVel and nodeAccel commands. If no dof specified list returned for all dof values.
New sectionForce eleTag? sectNum? dof? to return a section force.
New eleNodes command to return nodes at an element. (eleNodes eleTag?)
New getEleTags and getNodeTags commands to return in a list all ele and node tags.
New command to set the setElementRayleighDampingFactors to set an individual elements damping factors.
New command searchPeerNGA which returns a list of earthquakes from the Peer NGA database.
Users can obtain acceleration records from PeerNGS using modified TimeSeries command PeerNGAMotion $record $fact -dt dtName? -nPts nPtsName? The number of data points and dt are placed in the variables nPtsName and dtName.
New Py, Tz, and Qz materials for shallow foundations and new command for generating a shallow foundation (thanks to P. Raychowdhury (UCSD)
We continue to work on the reliability parts of the code.
And of course the minor bug fixes and performance enhancements.