Changelog

Version 24.1 – released March 23, 2024

General Improvements

• Loading data from events (e.g. Vehicles, Agents) is much faster (often 20-40% less time)

Public Transport

• New analysis: Delays of transit vehicles arriving/departing at stops
• New anlaysis: Waiting time of passengers at stops
• Stop query now shows all custom attributes in the Attributes panel
• Stop query by name is now less strict (match using contains instead of exact match, ignore case)

Movie Recording

• Much faster mp4 / H264 encoding with higher quality and smaller files
• Support for VP9 and AV1 video encoding (AV1 is very slow, though)

Map Backgrounds

• Allow to modify a background map: grayscale, saturation, contrast

Facilities

• Support the new facilities_v2.dtd from MATSim.

Other Improvements and Bugfixes

• Create Agents-Layer from a population without x- and y-coordinates, but with facility ids
• Network-Layer now provides z-coordinates as custom attribute
• Legend allows customization of font and font-size
• Ruler: Measuring distances sometimes used a wrong font size to display the measurement

Version 22.2 – released August 22, 2022

Shapes / GeoData

• Time-dependent display of individual shapes (GIS features).
• Query for shapes got heavily improved, allowing to search for arbitrary attribute values.
• Linestring-shapes (polylines) are now able to show labels.
• Shape files containing points can now be used in the aggregation analysis.

New Label Layer

A new layer allows to quickly place text and symbols to create labels.

Vehicles

Vehicles’ trajectories can be exported from Via (think “fake GPS traces”).

Other improvements

• Custom symbols can be tinted.
• Width of legend can be customized.
• Scalebar overlay can be positioned by scripting.
• Via-files can be opened when passed as program argument.

Version 22.1 – released February 11, 2022

Public Transport

It is now possible to analyze more than one transit route on a common network segment, and to visualize the results directly on the map instead of only in charts. In addition, the import of public transit schedules got more robust, better supporting the loading of partially invalid schedules (e.g. including transit routes without departures, missing network routes).

XY-Plotter

Support of TSV (tab-separated values) files.

(OD-)Aggregator

Optionally show empty zones withing the aggregation extent.

Scripting

Network-Export can be scripted.

Other improvements

• Use activity locations from events if available instead of only from links
• Custom WMS servers were not properly saved, resulting in empty maps
• Support GeoTIFF raster images with embedded geospatial information and without separate world file
• Names of new Groups in the Vehicles’ Layer setup dialog were not always correctly saved

Version 21.1 – released April 14, 2021

OD-Aggregator

The OD Aggregator can now visualize relations between zones. Relations are filterable in order to keep the visualization tidy and helpful.

Movies

MP4 and ProRes encoding got 20-25% faster, and when converting transparent images to movies, a color can be set for the background.

Scripting

Scripting can be made interactive (e.g. asking the user for a file or directory), and can work with externally defined parameters for better automating Via in workflows.

Other Improvements

• Values of Charts in Aggregator and OD-Aggregator (introduced in 20.3) are now shown in tooltips and in queries.
• Link labels are automatically hidden if links are short, and null-values are not shown.
• Display of Map-Attribution is customizable.
• Improved the performance of several public transport related analyses.
• Try not to open windows and dialogs off-screen (e.g. after disconnecting a second screen).
• Various other minor bug fixes.

Version 20.3 – released December 10, 2020

Mini-Charts

Various layers now support visualization of multiple attribute values as small charts. Layers currently supporting this visualization style are:

• Aggregation Layer
• OD-Aggregation Layer
• XY Layer
• Transit Schedule Layer

Stuck Agents Analysis

Via is great at visualizing and analyzing the agents performing their activities and legs. But agents getting stuck in the simulation during their day are hard to analyze, as they just disappear at some point in time. Via includes now a new, special analysis to figure out, when and where agents are getting stuck in order to help to figure out why they get stuck. The analysis will show when agents get stuck and where they were last observed, e.g. on which links or at what transit stops. More details are available in the Via manual.

Other improvements

• Support for *.xyz files (often used for digital elevation models)
• Transit-analysis “Transfers at stops” can be heavily customized (colors, filtering, …)
• Define custom default colors that can be easily selected in the color choosers.
• Detailed link geometries can be loaded from link attributes.

In addition, there were several smaller improvements and some bugs fixed:

• Support unicode characters (e.g. cyrillic) in Ids
• Support Vehicle type attributes for Vehicles layer’s colors and size.
• Support Geopackage-Databases that contain linestring geometries
• Querying multiple shapes works again
• Showing Network Differences failed in some cases when two networks with different links were used

Version 20.2 – released August 19, 2020

• User Interface

  • Alternative dark and light themes
  • improved several icons with support for Hi-DPI screens

• Aggregation, OD Aggregation

  • completely reworked the settings dialog for Aggregation and OD Aggregation layers
  • ability to define multiple aggregations
  • aggregations can be visualized as symbols instead of zones-only

• GIS interoperability

  • Export spatial data as GeoJSON (supporting GeoJSON Lines and GeoJSON FeatureCollection). In all places, where data could be exported as SHP files, the data can now also be exported as GeoJSON Lines (*.geojsonl, also known as newline-delimited GeoJSON, where each object is exported as a single GeoJSON object on a separate line), or as a single GeoJSON Feature-Collection. This applies to exporting networks, XY data, transit data, and aggregator zones.
  • Import GeoJSON data (alternative to SHP files) and visualize it with the Shapes layer.
  • Import GeoPackage data (alternative to SHP files) and visualize it with the Shapes layer.
  • Easier selection of coordinate reference systems. No need to predefine a required CRS in the settings, but one can just use and search for the required CRS by name or EPSG code.

In addition, there were several smaller improvements and some bugs fixed:

• Improved scripting support for Network layer, including LinkVolumes and IntersectionFlows analysis.
• Emissions plugin: Add support for additional emission types from HBEFA 4.1
• Provide Trips and Legs to Aggregation analysis, not only Legs
• Simplified selection of custom coordinate reference systems
• Fix loading and displaying facilities’ activities options
• Label backgrounds did not correctly scale with font size in some cases
• Fix some issues with custom web maps

Version 20.1.1 – released April 24, 2020

• Transit Layer

  • New Transit Router available to query transit routes based on the schedule
  • Support for MATSim’s latest vehicles file format (vehicleDefinitions_v2)
  • New Query: Passengers at Transit stops
  • Search transit lines not only by line names, but also by route names

• Vehicles Layer

  • New vehicle fleet statistics, show the usage and occupancy of vehicles across a fleet

• WebMap Layer

  • Additional Map Styles from MapTiler
  • reworked user interface to simplify management of multiple custom map servers
  • Downloaded map tiles get cached for a few days to improve performance

• General, UI

  • Improved support for UI-Scaling on Windows 10. Icons might still look pixelated, but they are no longer tiny and hard to click.
  • Support for custom color gradients
  • Support for view-specific durations for fly-to transitions
  • easier coordinate query including support for multiple coordinates

Smaller improvements and fixed bugs:

• Improved display of labels in area shapes
• Fix issue with recording movies with non-even height or width
• show a circle when measuring distances
• add some scaling options to Image layer
• optional confirmation dialog before quitting Via
• display of agent and vehicle plans can be resized
• option to have followed vehicles, agents and points exactly centered
• quering links on top of a WebMap works again
• WebMap geolocation works again

(Version 20.1.0 was never released)

Version 19.2.1 – released July 18, 2019

Bug Fix:

• Map Background plugin: fix loading maps from OpenStreetMap

Version 19.2 - released May 14, 2019

New Features:

• Labels
  • Support for showing multiple attribute values in labels (links, nodes, vehicles, transit stops, facilities, shapes, households, xy).
  • Support for labels having a background (links, nodes, vehicles, transit stops, facilities, households, xy)
• Transit Layer
  • New Transit Stop Attribute: Number of Waiting Passengers
• UI
  • Add “Open Recent” menu item to the File menu.
  • Add “Add Recent Data” menu item to the File menu.
• Manual
  • Completely reworked the user manual

Improvements:

• Network
  • support WKT-Linestrings as link-geometry attributes (e.g. LINESTRING(x1 y1, x2 y2, x3 y3))
  • faster initialization of large networks with link-geometries
• faster loading of data from *.via-files
• Facilities:
  • add simple global facilities statistics
  • reduce memory consumption
• Scripting: Improve scriptability of Overlays.

Bug Fixes:

• Vehicles: Fix displaying vehicles on loop-links upon a Web-Map.
• Network: Link-Difference-Attributes were not properly saved to/loaded from *.via-files.
• OD-Aggregator: aggregation produced wrong values in certain cases, sorry!

Version 19.1 - released March 12, 2019

New Features:

• Network
  • Support detailed link geometries.
  • Visualize free-speed travel times in network, originating from a node
  • Visualize shortest paths in network, originating from a node
  • Support for node and link attributes in Networks (network_v2.dtd)
• Facilities
  • Support for attributes in Facilities (facilities_v1.dtd)
• Shapefiles
  • Shapefiles Layer can load additional attributes
• Vehicles
  • Trip Travel Time Histogram for vehicles

Improvements:

• Network
  • Show more details in network-route query result
  • better support for multiple dynamic link attributes in networks
  • When styling links in a network, attribute values from either from- or to-node can be used as well.
  • Nodes are made available as data source for (OD-)Aggregation layers.
• (OD-)Aggregation
  • Improved Speed of (OD-)Aggregation (especially to Shapes) and reduced memory-consumption of OD-Aggregation
  • OD-Aggregation now uses considerably less memory.
  • Exporting the aggregated data based on a ShapeFile supports using shape-attributes as zone-ids.
• XY Plotter
  • better support xy datasets where some rows are missing the coordinate values
• Shapefiles
  • improved visual appearance of shapes files (reduce jagged borders)
  • Shapes Layer uses less memory.
• Public Transport
  • Transit Stops and Transit Lines can now be queried using wildcards (‘*’, ‘?’)
• Vehicles
  • Navigate from a vehicle’s plan to the driver’s plan.
  • Vehicles Layer uses much less memory and loads a bit faster
• UI
  • easily add new licenses by dragging them onto Via, just like adding a network or events file.
• Scripting
  • WebMap Layer is now scriptable.
  • MetaData-Import and -Export is now scriptable.
• General:
  • Saving data to a via-file takes less time and creates smaller files.

Bug Fixes:

• some minor ui-bugfixes
• Querying the number of persons waiting at a transit stop showed a too high number.
• Fix exceptions when visualizing very large XY datasets (e.g. 100 million points or more).
• Fix problem removing Vehicles layer.
• Fixed some cases where stopping a script resulted in Via being unresponsive afterwards sometimes.
• Fixed issue where OD-Aggregation of vehicle trips would not work.

New Features:

• Support for dynamic link attributes by loading NetworkChangeEvents

Version 1.8.3 - released October 15, 2018

New Features:

• Support for dynamic link attributes by loading NetworkChangeEvents

Improvements:

• Reduce memory consumption of large OD Aggregations with millions of OD-relations
• Improve speed of OD Aggregation
• Improve ScaleBar overlay, so it should be more suitable for geographic applications
• Transit Stop Query now also shows Arrivals, not only Departures
• Agents transferring at a transit stop can be collected into an Agent Group for further analysis
• Text-Encoding can be adjusted when loading Shape Files
• Text-Encoding can be adjusted when loading data for XY Layer
• several minor UI improvements

Bug Fixes:

• Fix a problem saving/loading household-data in via-files
• Fix functionality in “Create Id Set from Vehicle Ids”
• Layer “Transit Vehicles at Stop Locations” had problems displaying vehicles when the stops were on loop-links
• Attributes (like link and node attributes, others) could not be managed on some Linux distributions
• Shape Labels did not show up when the shape files was shown on top of a WebMap
• Symbols of CarCounts layer were not correctly shown on top of a WebMap in certain cases
• Transit Stops couldn’t be queried if stops were aggregated to Stop Areas
• Data could not be exported from “Transfers at Stop” analysis
• Times in LinkEmissions-Analysis shifted by some hours in the chart when compared to the data table, depending on local time-zone.

Version 1.8.2 - released April 10, 2018

• New: Support for time-dependent custom attributes, e.g. custom link attributes
• New: Support MATSim Households, visualize and query them, provide household attributes to persons
• New: show agent and vehicle attributes when querying them
• Improved: “Go To Time” and “Set Speed” now preselect existing time/speed values for easier overwriting
• Improved: Much faster aggregation of transit vehicles’ passenger counts to links
• Improved: Improved performance of aggregation of points to Shapes
• Improved: Show progress when aggregating large point sets in Aggregator and OD Aggregator
• Improved: XY Plotter provides legend entries for lines and areas
• Bugfix: Preferences are correctly stored on Windows
• Bugfix: Custom attributes for links and nodes were not saved in via-files
• Various other bugfixes (parsing of very large times formatted as HH:MM:SS, cannot add dataset using Ctrl+D, saving WebMap layers in via-files, …)

Version 1.8.1 - released February 20, 2018

• First release by Simunto
• New: Text labels of points in the XY plotter can be positioned (left/center/right, top/middle/bottom)
• New: initial support for loading MATSim’s upcoming transitSchedule_v2 files
• New ruler functionality to measure distances
• New: Transit Stops show their attributes (like name, coordinates) in their query panel
• New: Script-Editor offers Search/Replace functionality
• Improved: Support and examples to export transit analysis by scripting
• Restored functionality that got missing in version 1.8.0, e.g. to list the passengers of a transit vehicle
• UI improvements, especially on Windows
• Various bugfixes (loading shape files, showing teleported legs, …)

Earlier versions

All versions listed below were released by Senozon.

Limited support for these versions is provided by Simunto. In general, only the latest version of Via receives full support.

Version 1.8.0 - released August 30, 2017

• Agents vs. Vehicles: Via now fully distinguishes between Agents and Vehicles
• Heavily improved Attributes management
• Visualization improvements, e.g. zoom-dependent labels, teleported legs, varying vehicle sizes
• Aggregate Vehicles to Links
• Support for displaying Lines and Areas, even animated, with the XY Plotter
• Improved Map Backgrounds
• Improved Movie Recorder: New encoding format (Apple ProRes), improved MP4 encoding
• a lot of other, minor improvements and additions

Version 1.7.1 - released October 28, 2016

• Compatibility with new file formats for network and population in the upcoming MATSim 0.9.0 release
• several bug fixes

Version 1.7.0 - released June 6, 2016

• Compatibility with upcoming MATSim 0.8.0 release
• Node attributes, node labels
• Vehicle labels
• Facility labels
• Custom Symbols for XY Plotter
• New Emissions Plugin for analyzing Emissions calculated by MATSim’s Emission extension
• Faster saving and loading of via-files
• Improved WebMap visualizations
• ID Sets based on filter expressions
• Vehicle Occupancy for all vehicles

Version 1.6.1 - released January 8, 2016

• several bug fixes
• scripting improvements

Version 1.6.0 - released October 26, 2015

• Intersection Flows
• Improved Network visualization: Link Labels, Transparencies
• Network Router
• Time-Dependent (OD) Aggregator
• Transit Stop Areas, improved Transit Stop Query
• Presets
• XY-Layer: Voronoi region as style
• Scripting
• Legend
• Link Volume chart of single links
• Faster visualization of large Facilities and XY data sets
• Export movies as animated GIF

Version 1.5.1 - release March 31, 2015

• several bug fixes related to opening via-files

Version 1.5.0 – released January 30, 2015

• Web Map Layer
• Select Facility Analysis
• Meta Data Manager: Export/Import Styles and Views
• Network Difference Layer
• Background Images
• Rotate Maps
• Major memory optimizations for XY Layer, Aggregator, OD Aggregator

Version 1.4.5 – released October 20, 2014

• Only released for Mac OS X
• Bugfixes for running Via on Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Version 1.4.3 – released November 05, 2013

• some Bug fixes

Version 1.4.2 – released October 25, 2013

• Some events changed in MATSim recently (attributes made optional, or renamed). This version restores compatibility for parsing such new event files.
• Bugfix: recording more than 100k screenshots started overwriting some screenshots as the numbers in the filename were limited to 5 characters.
• Feature: Links and Nodes can now be searched for with wildcards.

Version 1.4.1 – released September 19, 2013

• fixed two bugs related to loading *.via-files

Version 1.4.0 – released September 18, 2013

• Improved GUI: queries are now always accessible
• Layer Styles: save and load typical settings for your layers
• Improved Queries: access many query features with a simple right-click
• Agent Attributes: load arbitrary attributes for your agents and visualize them
• Transit Trips: visualize non-car trips of agents (requires Transit plugin)
• Transit Analysis: the Transit plugin provides many additional analyses
• Histogram: setting up color scales has never been easier
• many other small improvements

Version 1.3.0 – released January 21, 2013

• automatically create layers when adding data files
• Improved queries
• more file formats for XY layer
• improved network handling
• new plugin: aggregation analysis
• uses much less CPU-power, thus longer battery life on laptops
• many other small improvements

Version 1.2.0 – released July 11, 2012

• Support for facilities
• Vastly enhanced functionality for XY plotter
• Memory improvements, most notably for big networks
• Improved many queries, e.g. Selected Link Analysis, Link and Node identification, and others
• Faster movie and screenshot recording (part of MovieRecorder plugin)
• Several GUI improvements, making the application much more user friendly

Version 1.1.1 – released March 06, 2012

• Support for MATSim 0.4.0 (release Spring 2012). MATSim generates additional events, which could confuse some transit-related analyses included in via, leading to error messages.

Version 1.1.0 – released Januar 20, 2012

• Memory improvements: loading large scenarios now uses conciderably less memory
• Network visualization: The network can use several attributes (not only allowed transport modes) to color the links in a network, or to visualize links with different weights based on the attribute values.
• New Layer: Link volume differences: allows to compare two scenarios and analyze the differences in link volumes between them.
• Additional keyboard short cuts for more efficient working.
• Many small improvements to the User Interface
• Car Counts (plugin): Highly improved analysis features. Can now exclude single counting stations from the analysis.
• Movie Creator (plugin): Emprove video encoding so video files should be viewable in more players.

Version 1.0.0 – released July 27, 2011

• initial version