VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon May 18 2009 - 15:24:21 CDT

Dear VMD-L,
  I've just posted VMD 1.8.7 beta 3 for download.
I've posted binaries for all of the mainstream platforms
and more will become available in the next beta release.
The new beta is posted here:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD

Many bugs have been fixed in this version, so I urge people
that have downloaded earlier test releases to switch over
to beta 3 at this time.

The major new features enabled in this beta version include:
 * Built-in GLSL outline rendering (see new the "outline"
   controls in the Materials window), with the ability to
   export to Tachyon
 * Built-in support for shadow rendering and ambient occlusion
   lighting in Tachyon renderings. This is enabled by turning
   on the new "Shadows" and "Amb. Occl." modes in the
   Display->Display Settings menu. Now that it is built-into VMD
   itself, it is easy to use ambient occlusion lighting when
   rendering VMD movies, etc. The ambient and direct lighting
   scaling factors are also adjusted in the Display Settings window.
 * Much faster ambient occlusion renderings, requiring far fewer
   AO samples for high quality results when combined with
   antialiasing
 * VMD-specific Tachyon rendering mode flags are now contained
   in the scene file itself and do not need to be specified on
   the command line anymore (unless you intend to override the
   settings in the scene file with different values)
 * The VMD movie maker plugin now supports the TachyonInternal
   renderer on the Windows platform.

Many plugins have been updated for this version, including
new Desmond plugins from D. E. Shaw Research.

Beta 3 is compiled with CUDA GPU acceleration support for
32-bit and 64-bit Linux (x86), and for MacOS X 10.5.x (x86).
In order to use the CUDA features of the new versions of VMD,
you will need to install the latest NVIDIA drivers for
CUDA 2.2, as described on this page:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.8.7/cuda.html

I plan to add CUDA support to the Windows versions of VMD
in the next beta release if all goes well.

If you have trouble downloading, installing, or running
the beta versions, please let me know. We are updating the
platform-specific release notes as people give feedback
on the new test versions:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.8.7/docs.html

Cheers,
  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