AmiBroker 5.41.0 BETA Read Me

July 16, 2011 18:44

THIS IS A BETA VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE. EXPECT BUGS !!!

Backup your data files and entire AmiBroker folder first!

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

IMPORTANT: This archive is update-only. You have to install full version 5.40 first.

Just run the installer and follow the instructions.

Then run AmiBroker. You should see "AmiBroker 5.41.0 BETA" written in the About box.

See CHANGE LOG below for detailed list of changes.

CHANGE LOG

CHANGES FOR VERSION 5.41.0 (as compared to 5.40.3)

• New Analysis window (File->New->Analysis) - featuring multithreaded Scan and Exploration
  Performance note:
  to fully benefit from multithreading it is best to use AmiBroker local NATIVE database (not external)
  as it is the only database that can deliver data quickly enough.

  Tests show that on AmiBroker native databases scans and explorations are 100% scalable to multiple cores
  - i.e. for example would run upto 8 times faster on 8 CPU/core machine.
  
  IMPORTANT: This window is work-in-progress. Multithreaded Backtest and Optimization features will be added later.

• AFL: AddColumn - added mini bar charts to explorations
  Exploration now features ability to create mini bar charts in individual cells.

  AddColumn has new parameter 'barchart'

  AddColumn( ARRAY, "Caption", format = 1.2, fgcolor = colorDefault, bkcolor = colorDefault, width = -1, barchart = null )

  'barchart' parameter accepts values from 0...100 represening percentage width of bar chart displayed in a cell
  the in-cell bar chart is drawn with bkcolor (background color).

  Example usage:

  Filter=1;
  AddColumn( Close, "Close" );
  rank = PercentRank( Close, 100 );
  Color = ColorHSB( rank * 64/100, 255, 255 );
  AddColumn( rank, "100-day percent rank", 1.2, colorDefault, Color, -1, rank );

  Note that although this example uses same value for numeric display and chart bar width, it does NOT need
  to be the same, i.e. numerical value of the cell is independent from bar chart.
  

• Totally rewritten listview with very efficient owner draw code speeds up list view scrolling/resizing/repainting more than 10 times. Native system ListView control is terribly slow on Windows XP/Vista/7 (surprisingly it was many times faster in Win9x!)
• AFL: Percentile() does a param check for range > 0 now
• Mini-chart in RT Quote window - Mini chart shows where LAST price is within LOW-HIGH range.
• Errors and warnings are now displayed in red color in the indicator pane
• During actual GDI chart rendering AmiBroker measures time and if it exceeds 500ms timeout it stops rendering with Warning 901.
  This check is required because GDI rendering occurs in GUI thread and if GUI thread does not process messages for half second Windows will think that application is "not responding".
  This prevents making application stuck with some overly complex, possibly incorrect formulas that call hundreds of Plot()s
  
• Warning 502: Calling Plot()/PlotOHLC over 500 times is displayed in indicator in runtime to prevent abuse
• All list views, pressing Ctrl and NumPad'+' automatically adjusts column widths to content
• if data are missing in the in-memory cache, Foreign() calls from non-GUI threads use synchronous retrieval method for reliability.
  This provides reliable results in AA but may slow down the multi-threaded operations if cache size is too small and user uses more Foreign() calls than in-memory cache size.
  IMPORTANT:
  For optimum performance in-memory cache setting (Tools->Preferences->Data) should be GREATER than number of Foreign() calls in any single formula used.
  Values lower than that cause lots of disk activity and serialization of all Foreign calls that means that additional threads must wait for data retrieval to complete.
  
• Old and new Analysis window: outputting millions of rows to listview is much faster now
• All list views - Ctrl+A (Select All) made much faster
  
  

If you experience any problem with this beta version please send detailed description of the problem (especially the steps needed to reproduce it) to support at amibroker.com