Animation: MC14 vs. MC11 vs. MC 2001 Pro

[mcterry]

It seems that sometimes 'older is better'. I have a Mathcad worksheet carrying out a somewhat intensive magnetics computation, including graphic output. I recently tried the Animation tool in MC14 in order to do an iterative execution of the final portion of the calculation, including displaying a couple of output graphs. I was unable to get this to work - the Animation simply drew the existing graph N (number of frames requested) times. The computation program would not execute during the Animation, although it was (of course) included in the selection box. I tried this same process in MC11 and MC 2001 Pro, after saving the worksheet in filetypes compatible with those versions. It worked fine in both older versions of Mathcad.

Is there a known problem with Animation in MC14? Or am I doing something incorrectly?

[wayne]

mcterry,

I did not do animation in previous versions, but in MC14, I have, and not had any problems.

The calculations are done for anything with, or based on, FRAME as a variable. Neither FRAME, or any of
the equations or programs to be iterated need be in the selection box. Are you using FRAME correctly?

Wayne

[ValeryOchkov]

I see only one problem with animation in all version of Mathcad.

When I need more than 1000 frames I must use FRAME<0: from -900 to 900 for example.

But Mathcad Animation does not work correct by FRAME<0.

It is why I work with Luxemburg (<1000 cities) - not with more big country - see here

[wayne]

Valery,

Thanks, that good to know. You probable saved me some aggravation some time in the future.

[mcterry]

Many thanks to wayne and Valery. wayne's suggestion that the variable FRAME must be in the interative loop of the calculation actually matches the MC14 Help document, but I didn't fully appreciate this originally. By the way, this was NOT necessary in my two older programs MC11 and MC 2001 Pro, but it certainly is in MC14 (and this delayed my finding a solution). Once I embedded FRAME in my calculation (which was tricky, since I didn't "need" an iterative index like that - I already have an independent "time" scale in what I am doing), the Animation is now working in MC14.

One other interesting finding emerged as I tried various ways to put FRAME in an iterative loop for my case. I used the conditional "x if y" statement with "otherwise" to control the process. I had not realized that "y is any valid Mathcad expression that can evaluate to 0 in some cases" (per the Help document) , so in order to satisfy this, I had to allow my y inequality involving FRAME to reach a zero condition at least once. I did this by letting y be [(FRAME+1) <= FRAMEmax], and then using "otherwise" to again return the usual function result when I reached y=0 for FRAME=FRAMEmax.

Anyway, the problem is now solved.