VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 13 2003 - 10:13:58 CDT

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 11:50:12AM +0300, Dr. Daniel James White PhD wrote:
[potential stereo bug manifestation descriptions deleted...]
> The left eye image is indeed drawn over/ontop of the right eye image!
> clearly seen when viewing a molecule in licorice or ribbons!
>
> so a VMD bug then?

Its always possible, but I'm skeptical since we regularly use stereo here
and we don't see that behavior. Would it be possible for you to get a picture
with a digital camera and email it to me? This would also help in reporting
the problem to XiG if it is a driver bug. In your other note you mentioned
that you didn't have these problems with the previous version of Redhat with
your prior installation of XiG, were you running the same version of VMD
at that time, or was that also a different version of VMD?
One item I'd be curious about is whether or not your old XiG driver also
attempted to do stereo and antialiasing at the same time. Its possible that
VMD is exercising relatively untested code in their driver as few apps
actually enable both of these features at once. I've already helped several
vendors identify and fix OpenGL driver bugs that cropped with the specific
video mode combinations that VMD uses.

> I haven't done the
> VMDPREFFERSTTEREO thing yet.... I have to set this as an environment
> variable as on right?

You'll need the new version of VMD for that, it should be available
by this weekend if all goes well with testing the builds today.

[more stereo bug descriptions deleted....]
> my mouse pointer seems to cause artifacts sometimes, so that must be a
> driver problem as it occurs with all (stereo?)applications

Yes, that's likely a driver bug. Applications can't do much with
the mouse other than set the mouse cursor bitmaps, etc. The mouse
is also normally drawn in an overlay plane, so it should be impervious
to stereo display modes, at least on a properly written video driver.

  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