VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 17 2014 - 08:24:44 CDT

Tristan,
  Yes, I will be working on updating the VRPN libs very soon, that
should be updated for beta 2 if all goes well. Every library I update
has to work for all of the target platforms, so it's often a lot of work to
get them sorted out. I'm hoping the new revs of VRNN are less trouble
than some previous revs were.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 07:02:55AM +0000, Tristan Croll wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Thank you very much for all your hard work on this (and, of course, thanks to the rest of the team) - there are some very exciting new features here (and as soon as I get my CUDA drivers updated I'll actually be able to use them...). Just wondering: have you included an update to the latest VRPN version, or is that on the cards?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tristan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of John Stone
> Sent: Saturday, 13 September 2014 3:03 PM
> To: vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu; vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Subject: vmd-l: VMD 1.9.2 beta 1 posted for download...
>
> 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/
> 

-- 
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/