VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 24 2010 - 10:45:39 CDT

Steve,
  By default, the makefiles with most packages (e.g. ACTC) would be
completely wrong for MacOS X. You can't hope to get them to link unless
you put more effort into it. Although MacOS X is unix-like, a lot of the
free packages out there make no effort to accomodate it with correct
compilation flags. If you don't want to deal all of that, then I'd
suggest you go with a completely minimal VMD compile, or else work
with Linux for the time being, since from what you describe below,
you're going to be heading into many other complexities soon anyway.
  
[...compilation hints...]
> Thanks! The (real) fun will start after this as we try to add in
> support for multi-projector output with warping for our dome(s). From
> the little I can suss out in the code, it seems like a wash as to
> whether to try to use the CAVE code or start a whole new display device...

Are you warping the image by fiddling with the OpenGL projection
transformation matrices, or are you rendering to an off-screen buffer and
then warping the image by rendering it as a texture for dome display?

How do you normally drive your display system, with a single OpenGL
window/context, or with many independent full-screen windows, each going
to separate projectors? Depending on which way you are approaching it,
you could either do a minor modification of the normal OpenGL display
device, subclass used by all of the desktop VMD versions, or you could
go with an approach more like CAVElib, FreeVR, etc.

If you need multi-pipe rendering, unless what you're doing is
completely unique and unlike what other people have previously
done with CAVElib, FreeVR, VRJuggler and the like, I would
definitely recommend working from the approach of extending one of those
rather than starting from scratch.

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