VMD Plugin Library

VMD 1.8.3 Plugin Update 1, Released 05/12/2005

This is the first plugin update for VMD 1.8.3. The release includes new and improved molecule file reader/writer plugins, as well as improvements to several of the GUI extension plugins included with VMD 1.8.3.

New features and improvements in this plugin release:

  • New SPIDER plugin for reading CryoEM maps and other volumetric data processed by SPIDER.
  • New MSMS surface file reader for loading already-calculated MSMS surfaces
  • Fixed volumetric grid aligmnent for CCP4 and DSN6 plugins. They were scaled in each dimension by an extra factor of N/(N-1).
  • Plugins using the fast I/O routines now use the user's Unix umask for file permissions when writing new files
  • Better I/O checking when writing DCD trajectory files
  • Bug fixes for PQR file reader
  • The movie maker plugin now supports user-defined movie types with a very simple scripting interface that allows researchers to develop very complex animations. The movie maker now works better when VMD is installed in a directory name that contains spaces and adds support for movie rendering with POV-Ray on Microsoft Windows.
  • Updated APBS plugin to emit the new syntax for the chgm, srfm, bcfl, calcenergy, and calcforce input file parameters to eliminate warnings with APBS versions 0.3.1 or newer.
  • Fixed an atom selection leak in the AutoIMD plugin

Installing the new plugins:

The link below will download the latest directory of VMD 1.8.3 compatible plugins for all of the supported platforms. We intend to provide a new "updater" plugin soon. Until the updater plugin is ready, you may manually unpack this plugin distribution into a directory on your system. Once unpacked, you can use the new plugins either by replacing the plugin directory in your installed VMD distribution, or by adding commands similar to the following examples, to your personal .vmdrc or vmd.rc file. In order to utilized updated GUI extensions, you must replace the plugins in your installed VMD distribution. If you only want updated molecule file plugins, the .vmdrc/vmd.rc based plugin update method is sufficient.

Unix and MacOS X .vmdrc additions: 

menu main on
# Load the molecule file reader plugins from ~/plugins/....
# This command will evaluate to something like:
#   vmd_plugin_scandirectory   /users/johns/plugins/SOLARIS2/molfile   *.so
vmd_plugin_scandirectory [file join $env(HOME) plugins [vmdinfo arch] molfile] *.so

Windows vmd.rc additions: 
menu main on
# Load the molecule file reader plugins from c:/plugins
vmd_plugin_scandirectory   c:/plugins/WIN32/molfile   *.so

Newest VMD 1.8.3 plugins for all platforms

Note that when unpacked, this archive will consume approximately 70MB of disk space. Once unpacked, you may delete the subdirectories which correspond to architectures you don't need or use.

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