VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2000 - 18:43:53 CDT

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