# SIM: Simulation Viewers

### Trace Viewer

The Trace Viewer is used to display the trace file in an external viewer tool such as gvim or notepad. To open the Trace Viewer, open the View menu and select Trace Viewer. You can also click on the Trace Viewer button on the toolbar

Depending on your selected Trace Viewer Tool, the trace will open with that program. To select a different Trace Viewer Tool, see the Dashboard tab of the Events Pane. When a Trace Viewer is open, you will see all the trace that has been written to the file since you started your simulation. Depending on your program, you may need to refresh the file as you simulate.

### Graphical Viewer

The Graphical Viewer is used to watch a simulation taking place as it happens graphically, using the graphical representation of each DES. To open the Graphical Viewer, open the View menu and select Graphical Viewer. You can also click on the Graphical Viewer button on the toolbar . This will shift the simulator window to the upper left corner of the screen and, if no DES are currently displayed, it will open a viewer window for each in a tiled fashion. If a single DES viewer is open, it will close all viewer windows.
If you would like to open a single DES in the Graphical Viewer, double-click on the DES of your choice in the Current State Tuple tab of the States Pane.

The Graphical Viewer uses different colours to show the simulation's evolution. A DES's states and transitions are defaulted to the colour Black except when they are taking part in the current step of the simulation in some way. A state gets coloured Blue when it is the current state in that DES. A transition also gets coloured Blue when it is on the list of eligible events for the current step. You may notice you will not always have a Blue transition for a given DES. This is because you may not always have an eligible event to change the state of your DES. When an event occurs that changes the state of the DES you are viewing, the transition arrow will flash Blue for a moment and the current state will change. At this point you will notice another colour. When a DES has changed state, the transition arrow that brought the DES into that state will change to Pink and the transition name label will also be Pink with a *. It's also possible to have multiple events on the same transition arrow. Only the event labels that are eligible or previous will be coloured. If an event is selflooped, it could be an eligible event and the last event at the same time. In this case, the transition arrow body is Blue, and the transition arrow head is Pink. The name label will be Blue, and the star Pink. You could have a selfloop with two events, with one eligible and one last. In this case the arrow will be Blue with Pink arrowhead and the two event labels will be coloured appropriately.

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