VMD "Visual Molecular Dynamics" 1.4 beta 3 Announcement
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The Theoretical Biophysics group at the Beckman Institute For Advanced
Science and Technology, the University of Illinois (U-C), is proud to
announce the public release of VMD 1.4b3. VMD is a package for the
visualization and analysis of biomolecular systems. This software is
distributed free of charge and includes source code, documentation,
and precompiled binaries for IBM, HP, Linux, Sun, and SGI Unix systems,
as well as Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT.
The VMD documentation includes an installation guide, a users guide, and
a
programmers guide for interested researchers. VMD also provides on-line
help through the use of an external HTML viewer. VMD development is
supported by the NIH National Center for Research Resources.
A full description of VMD is available via the VMD WWW home page:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
Beta 3 includes a significant number of improvements over
the last widely announced beta (Beta 1).
The salient points are:
- OpenGL versions of VMD now implement a simple (but very fast)
transparency algorithm. So the transparency button finally works
in the OpenGL builds now! I will be making a number of additional
improvements to this code when I return. I hope to implement at
least
one alpha blending based technique.
- new transparency support added to Raster3D export code
- improved scene exports to Tachyon (especially transparency)
- greatly improved Postscript renderer, several serious memory leaks
fixed,
works fine now on large molecules that used to crash the code.
- fixed a bug with Surf on HPUX, and another Surf bug on all VMD
platforms.
- updated interactive MD code, with much better responsiveness.
- updated builds for AIX 4.3 with both Mesa and OpenGL
- improved speed of the "within" and "same residue" atom selections
- Many improvements to external renderer scene exports.
- Improved SGI Multisampling support (8 samples per pixel now...)
- many other small bug fixes and minor improvements.
We are eager to hear from you, and thank you for using our software!
John Stone
vmd at ks.uiuc.edu
November 18, 1999
