Unless there is a backlash, the following commands have been dropped from this
release of Fire 6:
menu, wedit, wform, wmenu, wradio, wswitch
In consequence, the forms and menu window types are no longer supported. They
are still operational in this issue by setting window_legacy
to 1 in the .fire.ini configuration file, but they will be removed completely
from the future releases unless we hear otherwise.
The development system, normally invoked by the start @fire command, can now be invoked automatically on Fire startup via a -devel command line switch. Alternatively a devel 1 statement in fire.ini will have the same effect.
A Development option on the monitor window File pulldown menu has also been added.
The default behavior in reponse to the Help option in the monitor window is now a link to the html help system, either local if installed, or remote if not.
Fire 6 now dumps its log files into <install_dir>/logs. This is a change from previous versions which dumped the files into $MXTEMPDIR. The ES6 installation process will create the logs directory if it does not already exist, but if for any reason this directory does not exist when Fire starts, Fire will revert to the old destination of $MXTEMPDIR.
The wdisplay command can now display partial images, using a -clip switch. This switch, together with the -res switch, have also been added to the rasdraw command.
These additions enable simple batch scaling, tiling and merging of images.
A new display window numeric element window.clip[4] has also been added for access to the clip values.
A new graphic window browsing facility has been added. When activated by the window attribute window.browsing, tooltips are displayed as the mouse passes over graphic entities.
The symbology of the tooltips is configurable via a new system font tooltip_font and a new textstyle tooltip_ts.
The text contents of the displayed tooltips is configurable at an entity class level by new .ebrowse methods, e.g gstructure.ebrowse, compound.ebrowse and entity.ebrowse.
The algorithm used during entity picking has been enhanced. Polygon identification is now more accurate and is available for hits within the polygon area when the polygon has a defined fillstyle.
An new command xmlread has been introduced to read an XML file into a Fire object. The Fire structure to accommodate the data values must be defined and instantiated before reading the data file. There is a new section in the User Guide with examples of its usage.
For xml devotees, applications may now be configured via .xml files as an alternative to .fsc. See the Fire 6 User Guide for details.
The wcloth command can now take its definition from an xml file instead of a cloth text file. This new input method also includes a definition to allow a contiguous tile matrix to be defined more concisely.
A new identifier type blob has been introduced. A blob is basically a block of binary data. Support has also been added for the blob type in Oracle 8i/9i. Consult the reference manual for details.
A new command lineclip has been added. Similar to usage to polyclip, this will clip one or more polyline or vector entities by a polygon mask.
A new "self-define" facility has been added to dynamic libraries to enable them to be defined within Fire without having to specify the C interface in the dynlib command. The Fire-to-C interface can now be defined within the C code by means of a static string array, and then loaded in a Fire macro by a -xm switch on the dynlib command.
To enable internet security issues to be handled, a new command httpset allows additions to be defined for outgoing http url's and headers, sent by the download command and network service traffic. With this command, user-defined name/value pairs, cookies and authentication strings can be appended where required to an internet domain.
A timeout facility has been added to the download command.
This command, although available in several previous versions of Fire, has finally been documented and provides debugging information which is sometimes useful during fault analysis.
The ascii function has been renamed charval and now returns one or more wide character (Unicode on Windows) values depending on the character-length of the parameter. The old name is still available but is now an alias.
A new function colcur has been added to return the red, green blue color components of a pixel in a graphic window.
The pcur and vcur functions now have additional parameters to use custom cursors.