PTB BETA RELEASE "Stadtmusikanten"

A new minor beta release, inspired by the ECVP 2013 tutorials. This one provides:

* A new folder PsychDemos/ECVP2013 with a few new demos written for the ECVP tutorial about ptb, as well as a pdf file in PsychDocumentation/ with the slides used for that tutorial.

* New functionality for a new feature introduced in that tutorial and slide set:

It is from now on recommended to call PsychImaging('OpenWindow', ...) instead of Screen('OpenWindow', ...). PsychImaging provides a drop-in replacment with some built in extra convenience.

The function PsychDefaultSetup(featurelevel) can be placed at the top of new scripts. It performs standard setup tasks, depending on the 'featurelevel' to spare you from typing a couple of lines of boilerplate code:

A featurelevel of 0 executes AssertOpenGL and may execute some setup tasks in the future.

A featurelevel of 1 executes tasks to unify behaviour across operating systems. Currently it executes KbName('UnifyKeyNames') to provide consistent KbName mappings across os'es.

A featurelevel of 2 will cause all onscreen windows which were created via PsychImaging('Openwindow') to use expect colors in the normalized range from 0.0 to 1.0 instead of 0 - 255. Screen('Maketexture', window, imageMatrix) will also expect texture color values in the 0 - 1 range if imageMatrix is of double type.

The idea is that a normalized range from 0 - 1 is more natural and nicely independent of the resolution of output devices. Internally the range is still resolved with 256 levels (8 bpc) by default, unless you specifically ask PsychImaging() or Screen('MakeTexture') for floating point framebuffers or textures, or you ask for use of special high precision output devices (e.g., video attenuators, Bits+, Bits#, Datapixx/ViewPixx/ProPixx, HDR displays, 10 Bit displays etc.).

We will gradually adapt our demos to use PsychDefaultSetup(2) and normalized color values wherever appropriate, and new demos will be written with these new conventions in mind.

Old code will continue to work as in the past, but typing "clear all" will be needed to reset ptb to compatible behaviour after executing scripts at higher featureLevels.

* Also in the box are a new demo SimpleSoundScheduleDemo, robustness improvments for GStreamer and for use of GUI windows, some minor bug fixes, improvements to GetEchoNumber and GetEchoString, and improvements to PsychColorimetric routines by David Brainard.

enjoy,
-mario