VMD-L Mailing List
From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2000 - 18:43:53 CDT
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Dear VMD-L,
We have just made VMD 1.6a1 available for download on the
VMD downloads page:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi
Some short commentary on what we've been up to for VMD 1.6a1:
VMD:
--- For VMD 1.6, we've been trying to fix various bugs, improve interactive rendering speed of Surf and MSMS surfaces, and build up the necessary framework to add support for rendering electron orbitals, better support for rendering of other volumetric data such as EDMs etc. Many of these changes we've made in VMD 1.6a1 so far are invisible to the end user so far, but will become visible in later revs, when the rest of the new code is in place. The immediately noticable improvements are in the speed of rendering for surfaces, many machines now render two to three times faster than they did before. (draw speed, not computation speed) We've made a number of significant changes to the way VMD does its command processing, so that it will be possible to make VMD work with scripting languages other than Tcl (i.e. Python, Perl, or whatever) at some point in the not-too-distant future. This is a work in-progress however, and will take some time to complete. It may not even be done by the end of this year, although we have already done a few simple things with VMD and Python in this context. Along the road to making VMD less Tcl-specific, we took that opportunity to update VMD to use the Tcl 8.x object based API's which has provided some serious performance improvements to many core VMD commands. Many of the simple VMD commands implemented to have a Tcl interface are between 5 and 200 times faster now than in VMD 1.5. Another significant user-visible change in VMD 1.6a1 is that RMSD fits are done in a completely different way now, they are implemented in a Tcl script which is packaged with VMD. The new RMSD functionality is described in the current VMD User's guide found within the VMD 1.6 web page area: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.6/ We appreciate any feedback you may have about VMD 1.6a1 and would like to know if you have suggestions for us etc. Since its an alpha release, we don't know if it is as stable as VMD 1.5, but this is why we encourage people to try it out. Please email us with your feedback on it. Here's a snippet from the new 1.6a1 README: What's new in VMD 1.6? ---------------------- New Features o New support for generation of RenderMan .RIB files from VMD scenes. General Improvements and Bug Fixes o Improved interactive rendering speed of molecular surfaces by a factor of two or more on most platforms. o Improved OpenGL materials rendering and gave VMD better looking default material properties. o Tachyon ray tracer binaries are now packaged along with VMD on all supported platforms. o Added the ability for Tcl code to capture VMD events as through the logfile mechanism, but through a Tcl variable, so that one VMD can easily remote control other VMD's through a bit of Tcl sockets code. o Significant speed increases for many common VMD commands, many commands are 5 to 200 times faster now, using new Tcl 8.x interpreter interface. o Made it easier to customize size/position of the VMD command window on Unix versions of VMD. o Built with FLTK 1.0.9 o Built with VRPN 5.01 o Fixed PRs: 60, 108, 109, 110 User Interface Changes o New Tcl/Tk based RMSD fit GUI User Documentation Updates o Updated various sections in User's guide. o Started lengthy update to Programmer's guide. Thanks for using VMD!!! John Stone vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu -- NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801 Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu Phone: 217-244-3349 WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Fax: 217-244-6078
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