Orcina news

We aim to release a major OrcaFlex update in Q4 of each year. This year we are not going to achieve this goal, and version 11.1 will now be released early in 2021. We hope and expect that we will be able to do this in January or February.

The most significant new feature in 11.1 will be restart analysis. We are excited to be adding restarts, and development is very well advanced and progressing smoothly. However, it is such a broad feature, and impacts almost all existing functionality in the program, that development and testing has taken a long time. We considered releasing 11.1 without restarts in Q4 2020 to fit in with our schedule goals. We decided that it is preferable to delay the release a couple of months and ensure that restart analysis is included.

As well as delaying the OrcaFlex release, we have decided also to push the user group meetings into the new year. As previously announced these will be virtual because of the pandemic. Our intention is that these meetings will run around the same time as the OrcaFlex release.

Continue reading “OrcaFlex 11.1 release schedule”

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.0f. Version 11.0f fixes a number of bugs in both OrcaFlex and OrcaWave. Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

• OrcaFlex
• OrcaWave

We recommend that all users of 11.0 upgrade to 11.0f.

A patch to upgrade from earlier 11.0 releases can be downloaded here. The full installation program can also be downloaded from your Orcina download page. Please contact us if you do not have the link to your Orcina download page.

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.0e. Version 11.0e fixes a number of bugs in both OrcaFlex and OrcaWave. Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

• OrcaFlex
• OrcaWave

We recommend that all users of 11.0 upgrade to 11.0e.

A patch to upgrade from earlier 11.0 releases can be downloaded here. The full installation program can also be downloaded from your Orcina download page. Please contact us if you do not have the link to your Orcina download page.

We have decided, in light of the Coronavirus pandemic, that this year we will not run our annual series of OrcaFlex user group meetings in person. These events require significant advance planning and unfortunately there is just too much uncertainty to do that.

Instead of physical meetings we will run virtual meetings as webinars. We have not finalised details for these yet, but we expect to run them in October or November, to coincide with the release of OrcaFlex 11.1.

It is a shame that we won’t be able to meet in person this year. However, one benefit of virtual meetings is that they will be available to users who are not located in the venues that we visit for our physical meetings.

Please watch out for notification of these meetings later in the year. We look forward to seeing you then (virtually!) and sharing with you the new developments in our software.

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.0d. Version 11.0d introduces some minor new functionality and fixes a number of bugs. In addition, we have made a number of significant performance improvements for OrcaWave calculations. Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

• OrcaFlex
• OrcaWave

We recommend that all users of 11.0 upgrade to 11.0d.

A patch to upgrade from 11.0a, 11.0b or 11.0c to 11.0d can be downloaded here. The full installation program can also be downloaded from your Orcina download page. Please contact us if you do not have the link to your Orcina download page.

We are sure that many of our clients, like us, are experiencing significant changes in their day-to-day lives in these difficult times.

Those of you who have been in touch with us recently will already have realised that we are now almost exclusively home-working. This means that we are no longer offering face-to-face training or customer visits. However, we are continuing to offer our normal technical support service. We are not currently able to offer technical support over the telephone, but would be more than happy to respond to any queries through email.

We are also still able to ship out dongles for those setting up new OrcaFlex licenses and apply dongle updates (e.g. activating or de-activating a lease, licence transfer, or adding new licences). However, to limit the requirement for a staff presence in our office, this service will only be available on Mondays and Wednesdays. We appreciate that this may be slightly inconvenient in some circumstances and ask for your patience and understanding.

Finally, we hope that you, and your friends and families, stay safe and healthy, wherever you are in the world

Back in November 2019, we released OrcaFlex version 11.0. This included the initial release of our diffraction analysis program OrcaWave.

At the time of release, we had performed extensive validation of OrcaWave, by comparing its results to theoretical predictions where possible, and also by comparing results from OrcaWave to results from Wamit. We have now written up this validation work and published it in a comprehensive validation report.

The report (including all input files and meshes) can be downloaded from the validation page.

Back in 2016 we published An introduction to the Python interface to OrcaFlex. This is a high level overview and introduction to the Python interface that attempts to fill in some of the gaps not covered by the reference documentation.

We have just released an updated and extended version of this document. The document now covers some functionality that has been added to OrcaFlex since its original release in 2016, specifically frequency domain and diffraction. Additionally, we have added sections covering extreme value statistics and fatigue analysis.

The updated version of the document can be downloaded from our documentation page.

We also offer a single day introductory workshop devoted entirely to the Python interface to OrcaFlex.

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.0c. Version 11.0c introduces some minor new functionality and fixes a number of bugs. Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

• OrcaFlex
• OrcaWave

We recommend that all users of 11.0 upgrade to 11.0c.

A patch to upgrade from 11.0a or 11.0b to 11.0c can be downloaded here. The full installation program can also be downloaded from your Orcina download page. Please contact us if you do not have the link to your Orcina download page.

Microsoft support for Windows 7 ended on the 14^th January 2020. As a consequence of this, we are no longer supporting our software products on Windows 7. Our internal IT policies mean that we no longer have any Windows 7 machines on which to test our products, and are therefore unable to officially support our products on Windows 7.

Note that this change does not mean that our products will stop working on Windows 7 in the near future. Existing versions of our software that are known to work on Windows 7 will of course continue to do so.

Future releases of our products are also likely to continue to work perfectly well on Windows 7. Our underlying code base is very stable and we rarely make changes that lead to incompatibilities with operating system versions. However, because we are no longer able to test our products on Windows 7, there may come a time when we release new versions of our software that are not compatible with Windows 7.