VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 13 2014 - 00:03:12 CDT

Dear VMD-L,
  I've just posted VMD 1.9.2 beta 1 for download.
At the present time I've only posted binaries for
the mainstream Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and Windows
platforms, but more platforms will become available
in subsequent beta releases.

Beta 1 is nearly feature-complete, with just a few items
expected to be added before release, but it is largely
representative of what the final 1.9.2 release will look like.

If you have trouble downloading, installing, or running
the beta versions, please let me know. I will be documenting
known bugs and open issues as the beta testing period progresses.

I will be preparing a more complete summary of the key new and
updated features of VMD 1.9.2 over the next several days,
there is a brief listing there now:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.9.2/

The full changelog for this beta version is posted here:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.9.2/devel.html

Probably the most exciting feature of VMD 1.9.2 that will
interest a broad range of users are improvements to the
"QuickSurf" surface representation, and a new GPU-accelerated version
of the built-in Tachyon ray tracing engine, which is referred
to as "TachyonL-OptiX" in the VMD rendering menu and the VMD movie
maker plugin. The new GPU-accelerated TachyonL-OptiX ray tracer
runs as much as six times faster than the standard CPU version
of Tachyon. The new GPU ray tracer is incorporated in the new
RHEL5-based 64-bit Linux builds of VMD, and I plan to enable the
ray tracing engine on the Windows builds as well in a later beta.
The new VMD version also includes a much improved version of the
ffTK force field toolkit, and many other plugins, and there is
now a VMD-native implementation of the collective variables
module that is already incorporated in both NAMD and LAMMPS.

Over the coming weeks, I am hoping to update the versions of
Tcl/Tk, Python, and other libraries that are incorporated as
part of the VMD build, and to spend some time working on improving
various platform-specific rough spots on MacOS X and Windows in particular.

Lastly, I would like to invite people to share any nice VMD
images that you've made, to add as eye candy (with appropriate
credits of course) to the final VMD 1.9.2 release web pages.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/