VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 16:20:54 CDT

Dear VMD-L,
  We've been working hard on developing VMD 1.8 and we felt it
was time to let the user community see what we've been up to
since VMD 1.7.1 was released, and to get important feedback
about the new code. This new version of VMD includes several
new graphical user interfaces, which replace the main menu,
mol menu, load from files menu, and graphics menu from the old
versions of VMD. These are some of the most user-visible changes.
The new VMD 1.8 code's file reading and writing is done entirely through
the new VMD plugin system, and all of the old file reading code has now
been removed from the core of VMD. At the present time we are in the
process of adding a few of the old features back into the new PDB, DCD,
and Gromacs file readers, and we're developing new readers for the Amber 7
PARM files.

We have added a new "dynamic bonds" representation which
can be used with ab initio simulations and QM/MM simulations to allow
the display of bonds which are created and destroyed during the course
of a simulation. The current implementation is entirely distance-based,
but it has a user-selectable cutoff distance, so we're curious to hear
what people think about this, and suggestions people may have for doing
it better. The new code includes a number of improvements to the core
OpenGL rendering code which is now more aggressive in its use of the
latest OpenGL features, though much work there is still in progress.

The new version now works pretty well in both the CAVE and with FreeVR
for those people using Caves and Immersadesks. We would like to hear
from anyone that tests the new code on CAVE or Immersadesk type systems.

There are still many improvements in the work before VMD 1.8 is released
later this summer, but we're making progress.

If people have suggestions for improvements after trying out this alpha
version of VMD 1.8, we would be very glad to hear from you. If you run
into any problems using this alpha version please let us know, as we definitely
want to fix bugs as soon as they come up.

At present, I've posted pre-compiled binaries for most of the Unix
platforms. AIX, Tru64, and Windows binaries will be made available
either in the next week or two, or in the next alpha version we release,
whichever works out best. You can download the VMD 1.8 alpha 10 release
distribution (and source) from the web site here:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD

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