VMD 1.3

VMD 1.3 Development Status

  • Released final version of VMD 1.3 (04/5/1999)
    • Extensive updates to the VMD 1.3 documentation.
    • Updates to VMD help system.
    • MSVC related source changes (type cast warning fixes)
    • Updated internal VMD URL for the PDB to point to the RCSB sites since the BNL sites will apparently be closing in June 1999.
    • Eliminated Tokenize code from build, no longer needed.
    • Eliminated unused mouse handling code.
    • Eliminated unused make targets from configure script
    • Misc small fixes to command code, including "wait" command.
    • Eliminated "+C" flag from POV Ray renderer command line.
    • Fixes to OpenGL Display Device code for window position and size. (this is also related to fixes required for SGI stereo extensions..)
    • Rewrote sections of the tube representation code to improve the end-to-end matchup of cylinders, and computation speed.
    • Added missing cylinder cap code for Tachyon renderer output.
  • Released VMD 1.3 beta 2 (02/24/1999)
    • Some last fixes to distribution scripts, Win32 induced bugs.
    • Eliminated some of the storage used by the MolAtom class, new code uses about 56 bytes less storage per-atom than the old code did, yielding a 10-15% decrease in overall memory use when viewing a 175,000 atom system with VMD.
    • Revised VMD startup messages and title screen slightly.
    • updated configure script to generate new code in the 'make install' targets of the generated makefile. VMD now installs the Announcement, README, and LICENSE into the final distribution directory. This should permanently fix the issue with the RPM building on linux as well.
    • Added Win32 targets to 'make_distrib', and 'use', including additional handling of ".exe" extensions and such.
    • Changed default Phong exponent on Tachyon exports to 60.0 instead of 30.0, should look a bit shinier now.
    • Found bug causing incorrect export of some kinds of geometry to the file renderers. File exporters were not getting any geometry made of DTRICOLOR primitives, they were being silently dropped. A further difficulty is that most of the external renderers cannot handle this kind of coloring on triangles. An initial fix is in place now, but the ability to render this primitive nicely is higly dependent on the external renderer. POV-Ray is an example of a renderer that is incapable (to my knowledge) of rendering DTRICOLOR as it is meant to be rendered. This feature could be added to Tachyon, but not at the present time.
    • More changes to Alpha compilation flags, runs better with -misalign, although this is just a temporary step until we fix the VMD display list code.
    • Modified our local copy of Stride, and built a Windows binary of it.
    • Modified our local copy of Surf, and built a Windows binary of it.
    • First runnable binary built on Digital Unix using the "cxx" compiler, successfully compiled and ran the Mesa version of VMD. The OpenGL version compiled, but got "stuck" when it ran. Now just a few more things to fix in the VMD display list code, and we may have something for people to try.
    • Many more fixes to DEC Alpha compilation flags (cxx based builds) due to various problems with templates, presently using -tlocal to see if we can get a successful build that runs.
    • Added a "WIN32" configuration to the configure script for the purposes of generating the correct config.h output, and in case we want to do builds using the Cygwin gcc-based tools instead of MSVC.
    • Successful build and run of minimal text-only VMD with MSVC 6.0 and while sharing source tree with Unix. Still has a stdio / Ctrl-Z / EOF bug in the text based UI however.
    • Filed a bug report with GNU for flex 2.5.4a, the generated output should protect an inclusion of unistd.h with an ifdef of some kind.
    • Another round of MSVC related fixes, several of which are specific to MSVC 6.0 (too much detail to list)
    • Changed configure script for new template source filenames.
    • Renamed all of the template-related ".c" files to "xyzTPL.h" in order to permanently cure filesystem name space collisions on Windows. This involved changes to numerous headers, RCS, etc. Also changed default behaviour the of ifdefed includes for these renamed files since renaming them had big effects on several platforms.
    • First Merge of MSVC build directories with Unix build directories
    • Upgraded MSVC project files to work for MSVC version 6.0
  • Released VMD 1.3 beta 1 (02/17/1999)
    • Upgraded VMD version of Mesa to 3.0 from 2.6
    • Upgraded VMD version of Tcl/Tk/TclX to 8.0.4 from 8.0p2
    • Several changes to configure script /wrt IRIX6 builds.
    • Rebuilt local IRIX6 tcl/tk/tclx libs with "-G 0" to avoid gp_overflow errors at link time.
    • Rebuilt surf_IRIX6, and stride_IRIX6 for -mips3
    • IRIX6 configuration now uses -mips3 instead of -mips4
    • Rebuilt local libraries for IRIX6 binary distribution, old ones forced the resulting executable to be mips4-only...
    • Bug reported in XYZ file reading (existed in previous revs too..)
    • Bug reported in CRD file reading (existed in previous revs too..)
    • Analysis of 1999 VMD User Survey Results / re-send to unresponsive users
    • LICENSE file missing from Linux RPM distribution, fixing.
    • Identified a bug in VMD's scripting language and/or docs. The coloring routines can't do "by resid". This is either a bug, or an incomplete implementation. Still under investigation.
    • May have identified a long standing rendering bug in VMD, likely incorrect display of specular highlights (phong equation) due to a bad transformation stack. Looks incorrect in current OpenGL version. Still under investigation.
    • Identified a bug in the OpenGL version tracker display/transform code.
    • Identified a bug in the OpenGL version Cave input devices (kbd, trackers)
    • Identified 64-bit portability bugs in VMD's rendering code.
    • Updated many documentation items to be correct for VMD 1.3.
    • Added information on new target platforms in web documentation.
    • Fixed IRIX6 binary distribution, was missing stride and surf binaries.
    • Fixed permissions of OSF1 stride and surf binaries for distributions.
    • VMD successfully communicates with VRPN based trackers.
    • Additional work on fixing VMD for compilation with xlC on AIX 4.2.
  • Released VMD 1.3 alpha 2 (01/25/1999)
    • Fixed flags in HPUX configur.options files after updating configure script
    • Fixed a few small bugs in the configure script, with respect to the ACC, GCC, KCC, and EGCS build options, and with the HPUX10 build configurations.
    • CAVE option is now part of all IRIX builds (both GL and OpenGL) by default.
    • Eliminated double linkage of xforms libraries, and a UIUC local item in the configure script.
    • Improved all IRIX builds, eliminated unnecessary libraries from linking, especially the old libmalloc.
    • Improved Tracker List, so that user can differentiate between VRPN trackers, and the old UNC trackers.
    • IRIX6 builds of VMD using OpenGL and the Cave.
    • Fixed configure script for OpenGL builds of VMD for the Cave.
    • Updated all VMD Tracker classes, fixed name collisions with VRPN library
    • First rev of VRPN based VR tracker/button/force support code for VMD.
    • Updates to Cave tracker code for keeping up with VRPN related changes.
    • Updates to Cave rendering code, first rev to compile under both GL and OpenGL.
    • Numerous fixes for compiling with xlC on AIX 4.2, still more left to go.
    • Small IRIX6 code fixes.
  • Released VMD 1.3 alpha 1 (01/15/1999)
    • Ported VMD to Solaris 7 x86.
    • Several fixes to VMD for builds on DEC Alpha and other LP64 platforms, still needs work though.
    • First version of VMD that works with FLTK for GUI instead of XForms.
    • Significant amounts of changes for future versions of VMD on Win32
    • First version of text-only VMD that runs on Win32.
    • Added new support for Tachyon Parallel / Multiprocessor Ray Tracer.
    • First round of Win32 changes integrated into main source treee.
    • Added new matrix code to replace some external tcl code and LASSP tools
    • Eliminated the use of LASSP Tools in VMD
    • Redesigned the render-snapshot feature to work in a platform independent manner. Wrote first implementation on OpenGL builds. Works on Sun, SGI, HP, etc. Writes PPM files presently.
    • Added new capability to VMD so that user may specify a preferred image viewer program.
    • Snapshot code now uses user specified image viewer if the environment variable is set
    • Eliminated some dead code in VMD.