VisIt 1.4 Release Notes

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

Features added in version 1.4

- VisIt's Expressions window has been completely redesigned so that it is now much easier to use. The new Expression window provides more room to type in complex expressions and features a menu that allows you to insert any of VisIt's built-in expressions. The new window also provides better support for viewing only the expressions that contribute to your visualization, which means that expressions created by VisIt or by a database can now be hidden.
- VisIt now has a Label plot, which allows you to label plots with mesh nodes, cells, or scalar and vector fields. Scalar fields which correspond to characters are displayed as characters. The new plot has preliminary support for 3D but most of the 3D support is yet to come.
- You can now pick on Vector plots and display the pick points at the origins of the vectors.
- VisIt no longer uses the z-buffer to composite 2D images in parallel scalable rendering unless it is absolutely necessary, which results in a modest speed increase.
- VisIt now supports transparancy in scalable rendering mode.
- VisIt now supports multiple engines running in scalable rendering mode.
- VisIt's variable recentering code has been rewritten to boost its performance.
- VisIt no longer creates ghost data values when contouring nodal variables, which speeds up the Contour plot and Isosurface operator.
- VisIt's Ultra database reader plugin has been improved so that it can handle extra whitespace as well as Fortran-style scientific notation. The enhanced reader can also now read Ultra curve files that do not have comments in their first line.
- Variable names returned by VisIt's BoxLib database reader plug-ins should contain underscores instead of commas.
- VisIt's Pixie3D database reader plug-in now treats the database variables as nodal variables to eliminate periodic boundary conditions in the Surface plot.
- VisIt now has zoneid, nodeid, global_zoneid, and global_nodeid expressions to aid plot plug-in developers.
- VisIt now has a biggest neighbor expression.
- VisIt can read global node ids out of Silo files if they are present in the Silo files.
- VisIt can read spatial and data extents from Silo multi-block objects and will use this information to reduce I/O for certain operations such as slice.

Bugs fixed in version 1.4

- VisIt's password window is hidden by other windows on MacOS X.
- VisIt cannot print on MacOS X.
- VisIt's compute engine crashes when visualizing FilledBoundary plots of data generated by EMSolve.
- VisIt's compute engine crashes when drawing a transparent Pseudocolor plot when running in parallel and performing scalable rendering.
- Silex crashes when attempting to open a second file via the File menu.
- VisIt's compute engine crashes or hangs on material plots of files with uninitialized data in their mixed material arrays.
- Pick returns the coarsest information for AMR data.
- The password window does not raise itself to the front on MacOS X.
- The header above the Selected files list in the File panel can reverse files, if clicked.
- VisIt hangs during startup on MCR. This was due to an interaction with VisIt's pthreads coding and the stack size in some users' environments.
- VisIt's usage logging no longer works.
- Memory problems in the Isovolume operator cause the compute engine to crash when processing large datasets.
- Label plots do not appear in images that have been saved without screen capture.
- VisIt's fault tolerance is impaired when VisIt's compute engine switches to scalable rendering mode.
- VisIt can't save PNG images due to a header file and library mismatch when VisIt was built.
- Pick is very slow in parallel for large datasets.
- VisIt's compute engine hangs in parallel during the transparency phase of scalable rendering when there are fewer domains than processors.
- Pick points show up in all windows when using scalable rendering mode.
- Lineouts show up in windows other than the window in which they originated when using scalable rendering mode.
- VisIt attempts to launch multiple compute engines for a single scalable rendering request when there are multiple vis windows and VisIt ultimately hangs.
- The output of the PickByNode query is bad when all incident cells are ghost cells.
- Curve queries fail with ALE3D datasets.
- The 3rd dimension controls for the IndexSelect operator do not behave as expected.
- Pick does not work on Vector plots.
- Silex garbles long strings when scrolling horizontally.
- Sometimes VisIt does not honor variable changes when multiple scalable renders happen as a result of menus overlapping the vis window.
- The Expression window sometimes causes the GUI to crash.
- Datasets with really small or really large extents are drawn all black when lighting is enabled.
- The Surface plot sometimes has discontinuities when it was not requesting ghost zones. The Surface plot now requests ghost zones.
- VisIt calculates the wrong view with flat plots.
- Columns won't stay sized in the Expression window.
- Scalable rendering mode does not update images properly when color tables are changed.
- VisIt requires write permission to open files on MacOS X.
- VisIt's interval tree data structure has been enhanced.
- The width of a text annotation object can be decremented when clicking the Apply button in the Annotation window.
- The Label plot's legend cannot be turned off.
- The IsoVolume operator needs to be tuned for efficiency.
- VisIt's -totalview flag does not work.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version of VisIt: VisIt 1.4.1 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 1.3.5 Release Notes.