




Projects hold all the components of a PDP simulation. Projects are
essentially just an object with groups for the networks, the
environments which provide the patterns, the processes to control the
simulation, and the logs of the statistical data. Typically a user will
load and save the project as whole, since the project represents the
conceptual experiment or simulation. Also, the first action a new user
must perform is to create a new project to hold the various components
that will be created thereafter.
This chapter describes operations and features of the project that
affect the project as a whole. This includes the following:
- Basic Project Management
-
There are a number of different kinds of things one needs to do with a
simulation as a whole, like saving and loading it, recording what
parameters were used, etc. This section gives some tips on these tasks.
- The Project Viewer
-
The project window contains an interactive project viewer program that
enables users to conveniently view and manipulate many aspects of the
project. This is especially useful for configuring processes, because
they link together all the different elements of a project to actually
achieve various processing goals. In addition, specs can all be viewed
together in the project viewer, making it easier to manage complex sets
of specs.
- Startup Arguments and Controlling PDP++ with Signals
-
These sections describe how to affect how PDP++ runs (e.g., turing off
the graphical user interface and running it in the background). If a
process is running in the background, it can be controlled by sending it
signals.
- Customization Through Defaults and Settings
-
There are several levels of defaults and settings that can be modified
in the PDP++ environment to get things to work just the way you like
them. In addition to XWindow defaults, there are some global
parameters, and a specialized set of object-specific defaults that are
actually stored on the project itself (in the
defaults
group).
- Scripts
-
These allow the user to add all kinds of different functionality to the
software by creating objects that hold different CSS scripts. These
script objects are saved with the project, and can be run from a simple
pull-down menu.




