From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 05 2001 - 15:17:19 CST

Dear VMD-L,
  We have just made a pre-release version of VMD 1.6.1 available
for download. Here's a brief summary of changes since VMD 1.6.
We're hoping to release a VMD 1.6.1 in a slightly shorter-than-usual
development cycle in order to release new features we're working on.
We appreciate any feedback you would like to give on this pre-release
version, and we intend to make further improvements before 1.6.1 is
finalized.

Enjoy,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

What's new in VMD 1.6.1?
------------------------
  New Features
    o Some builds of VMD now support multiprocessor acceleration and
      multithreading for improved I/O performance even on uniprocessors.
    o Multithreaded IMD socket I/O for improved performance on high latency
      networks and with slow simulations.
    o New "getbonds" and "setbonds" commands for Tcl and Python
      atom selections. Replaces older "bond" command.
  
  General Improvements and Bug Fixes
    o Tcl atomselect speed increased by 10-30x for large molecules for
      numeric selections. String-based selections slightly slower, but
      a good improvement for the common performance intensive use-cases.
    o Increased speed of "lines" representation drawing and animation by
      a factor of 3, allowing interactive rotation of huge systems in lines
      mode (4 million atom water box at 2 seconds per frame.)
    o Increased the number of colors in the color scale map from 16 to 1024.
    o Fixed PRs: 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 145, 148
    o Fixed a minor EOF failure in G96 file reader

  User Interface Changes
    o None at this time.

  User Documentation Updates
    o very minor corrections and updates.

-- 
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