I’m currently learning my way around Stella, to work with the WETLANDSCAPE models. I am working on comparing 10-day time step outputs to daily outputs, to see if the results are comparable. As you know, though, I hate closed source software, so working with something like this is…challenging. I was excited (and still sort of am) to learn a new program, but this one is cumbersome, for a variety of reasons.
I wanted to convert the models to R, and found an R package (StellaR) to do just that. Unfortunately, it’s for the older version of the program, and converting back and forth between Stella file type versions isn’t so simple. The program is seemingly so proprietary that to update a file to the new version, you have to send it to the company. I was actually wary of this for content sharing, but it was the only way to update one of the files we had. Now, I have a program that, to convert it using StellaR, I’d have to send to the company to get them to revert it. Can they even do that?
Some silver linings:
- I have an old and a new version of the same program, so I can see on the equation layer how they differ
- StellaR releases its underlying Python code
The problem, though, is I can’t seem to get something that looks “enough” like the old equation layer from the new version, so it’s hard to know where to start. Even so, I can’t get the old version to convert through StellaR, so there’s probably a glitch in either the conversion program, or the old model, that I’m not quite savvy enough to fix. All of this is frustrating, but I haven’t given up my quest to move this to open source.