Setting Up the Environment

Just a few steps more to take to make our environment easier to use and organize our work. Before we do anything else, we need a new perspective. This will set the Eclipse environment up for metaABM. Select Open Perspective.. from the Window menu and choose metaABM. If for some reason metaABM isn't listed in the menu items, select Other.. and it should appear in the list of all perspecitves. Everything will work fine if you use other perspectives such as "Java", but the metaABM perspective provides nice shortcuts, automatically opens useful views, hides information we don't need to see and handles other niceties. Then we need to create a project to organize our efforts within. Right-click in the project explorer on the left side of the screen, and choose New | metaABM for Ascape Project. As we can bundle Ascape (an "engine" for Agent-Based Modeling) as part of our update site, it makes a good initial target. But metaABM is very ecumenical, and is designed to work with various ABM platforms, as we will demonstrate shortly. We just need to give our project a name at this point. Typically Eclipse projects follow the Java package reverse naming conventions, e.g edu.blahstate.sillymodel, but don't let that constrain you. With our project created, we can then move on to look at an existing model or, if you prefer, skip the next step and create a new model.