VisIt 1.8.0 Release Notes

Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. This page describes the important enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.

Announcements

- The VisIt team released a patch release, version 1.7.1, to fix some critical defects that surfaced in the VisIt 1.7 release. The defects addressed by this patch release can be found in the VisIt 1.7.1 release notes.

Features added in version 1.8.0

- VisIt's Resample operator now contains an option to allow you to automatically choose the entire extents of the problem for resampling, requiring only the specification of the number of samples in X, Y, and Z.
- VisIt now allows you to change your username when attempting to connect to a remote host.
- VisIt now displays console output from components that it launches on remote computers. For example, this makes it possible to see the launch string used for a parallel batch system on a remote computer.

- VisIt now supports setting the background for a visualization to a user-specified image. VisIt can display the background image under all of its plots and can optionally tile the image. You can choose to set an image background by opening the Colors tab of the Annotation Window and from there, you can choose the Image background style. Once you choose the Image background style, you must choose an image file by entering a filename into the Background image file box. Note that you currently must provide a file local to the computer on which you ran VisIt. Support for image annotations in distributed mode will be added in a future version of VisIt.

  In addition to support for flat background images, VisIt also now supports Image sphere backgrounds. This style of background image takes a flat image and warps it around a sphere that contains the whole visualization. As you move the camera in the visualization window via rotations, the visible region of the image sphere will change, simulating movement within a larger environment. Image spheres are useful for adding backgrounds such as star fields to your visualization. It is also possible to tile images by setting the number of repetitions in X and Y.

- VisIt has a new 3D text annotation type that can be used to insert extruded text into a 3D visualization. The new annotation object is available on the Objects tab of the Annotation Window.
- VisIt has a new feature for checking which Subversion revision it was built against. This feature is useful for determining mismatches when having problems running client-server. You can access this by running "visit -svn_version".
- VisIt now provides a Shapelet Decomposition Query that calculates the cartesian shapelet coefficients of an image using the overlap integral decomposition method.
- VisIt's query infrastructure was extended to allow queries to return structured data to the CLI. This type of result is obtained via the GetQueryOutputObject() python method and is currently only implemented by the Shapelet Decomposition query.
- Support for building VisIt on Windows using Visual Studio 2005 has been added. There a now projects/solutions for version 7 and version 8 of MSVC.
- VisIt's Pick output window now has a button for Clearing pick points.
- Options can now be set when exporting databases in the GUI and CLI.
- The VASP file reader has been enhanced to support POSCAR files and multi-timestep CHG/CHGCAR files.
- VisIt now supports a context (right-click) menu in the Plot List box, which allows the user to Hide/Show, Delete, Draw, Clear, Redraw, or Copy the currently active plot in the list.
- Improved CSG mesh management GUI to indicate meaning of control parameters.
- VisIt histogram plots now support linear, square root and log scaling options.
- VisIt streamline plots now support streamlines in forward, reverse or both directions.
- VisIt's GTC reader has been extended to support parallelism.

Bugs fixed in version 1.8.0

- VisIt's variable lists have been made more efficient so they are created less often when the "Treat all databases as time-varying" setting is enabled. The improved variable menus also allow VisIt to quit faster.
- VisIt no longer fails to save movies when the Animation caching setting is used in the Animation Window.
- The IndexSelect operator now works correctly with species data.
- VisIt's CCM reader has been extended so it supports 2D polygonal cells in addition to previously supporting 3D polyhedral cells.
- For an AMR mesh, if the number of patches per level changes from time slice to time slice, but the total number of patches stays the same, VisIt now correctly honors material selection when changing time slices.
- VisIt's Label plot now takes cell and node origins into account when labelling mesh cells and nodes.
- VisIt's Label plot no longer uses incorrect label colors when using custom colors for node and cell labels when the Restrict number of labels setting is used.
- VisIt's Revolve operator now works with 2D Boundary plots.
- VisIt's Elevate operator can now work on Boundary plots with the option "elevate by zero height."
- VisIt does not show windows that have been iconified when you choose the menu option that should open the window.
- The parallel coordinate plot can now work with expressions that have the angle brackets used for specifying variables in subdirectories.
- Wheel mouse events have been disabled for non-navigate modes, since they were causing multiple bad effects.
- The Derived Data Function feature (available only through the CLI) now correctly ignores points that are not incident to any zones, which is a common case when doing material selection.
- The Derived Data Function feature (available only through the CLI) can now correctly work with expressions that use the coordinates of the mesh.
- The "Treat all databases as time-varying" setting does not take effect when it is saved in the settings.
- Using the -o or -sessionfile option with a path containing spaces from the command line on the Windows platform has been fixed.
- SuppressQueryOutputOn() from the CLI now applies to Picks and spatial extents queries.
- Pick-through-time of vector variables now returns the magnitude of the vector, where before it was erroneously returning the first coordinate of the vector.
- Pick window now has a time-curve option to specify whether the time curve uses values relative to the Picked Element (old behavior) or to the Picked Coordinates (new behavior, now the default). Time Query using Node/Zone Pick in which physical coordinates are supplied now uses those coordinates for each timestep (before it would find the picked element at first timestep and use that element for subsequent timesteps). Through the cli, to get the old default behavior for a Node/Zone pick through time, you must set the PickAttributes doTimeCurve to 1 and timePreserveCoord to 0.
- A bug was fixed where Node Pick of sliced, Material-selected data could return incorrect results.
- The simulation interface infrastructure now supports Mac OS X.
- VisIt will return a proper error message when screen capture is attempted without onscreen windows and Mesa is disabled.
- Enhanced the VTK plugin to issue warnings when encountering numeric errors in ascii data.
- Enhanced the SAMRAI plugin to create the default plot if there is at least one patch and, if so, create a subset plot of 'levels' if there is more than 1 level, otherwise a subset plot of patches.
- Tuning was performed to better handle data with large numbers of small domains.
- The Spreadsheet plot now displays correct indices if ghost data is present.
- A VTK bug with ghost zone filtering that in rare cases could cause cell connectivity problems was resolved.
- VisIt's Cale reader has been changed so it correctly identifies more files, preventing VisIt from opening them using an incorrect plug-in.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the 1.7.1 patch version of VisIt: VisIt 1.7.1 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 1.7 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the 1.8.1 patch version of VisIt: VisIt 1.8.1 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version of VisIt: VisIt 1.9 Release Notes.