VisIt 2.1.1 Release Notes

Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. Release 2.1.1 is primarily a bug fix release to release 2.1. It fixes additional bugs in release 2.1. Look here to see a complete list of changes in release 2.1.

Bugs fixed in version 2.1.1

- When you save a window using the Screen ratio option, the image should match what you see on the screen much better.
- Saving movies using "movie templates" is now fixed.
- Clicking Print in the Print dialog now prints on all platforms.
- The molecule plot now correctly uses 'sphere imposters' in scalable rendering mode.
- The FVCOM reader can group files again.
- The Tecplot reader understands additions to the Tecplot ASCII format, such as comments, NODES/ELEMENTS as aliases for N/E, and complex VARLOCATION specifications.
- The Tecplot writer adds extra spaces between elements to avoid cases where field widths were not sufficient to prevent overlap.
- The ThreeSlice operator now correctly handles data with mixed mesh types, such as unstructured and structured in different domains.
- The H5Part reader no erroneously longer assumes a timestep of 0 for some operations.
- The 3D view axis scaling behavior has received some usability improvements.
- The POV-Ray exporter now avoids POV-Ray errors on degenerate geometry.
- The `-viewer_geometry` argument works again, letting you tell VisIt where to place the viewer windows.
- Position independent code is forced when building Mesa, as a workaround for build that appeared on 32bit SELinux-enabled systems.
- The streamline plot:

- now works properly on 2D curvilinear meshes.
- now updates its legend properly when you change color tables.
- no longer suffers from memory corruption issues like those described in issue 368.
- no longer crashes when applied to an empty data set.
- handles sample densities more robustly when going from the CLI to the gui.
- now is more robust when cropping away portions of a streamline for animations. 4 defects were resolved and the user interface was improved.

- The resample operator now correctly preserves vector data for all mesh types. (Previously only rectilinear and AMR worked correctly.)
- The uniform placement option for the vector plot now:

- works with the save window feature and in scalable rendering mode.
- warns you when you have tried a configuration it can't succeed with (e.g. uniform placement over a surface in 3D).
- does not produce gigantic vectors in regions where there is no data.
- no longer scales your data when you look at non-rectilinear data.

- The Reverse, Turn all on, Turn all off buttons in the Subset window now take effect immediately when the Auto apply setting is enabled.
- The volume plot was incorrectly restricting the maximum number of samples per ray when ray casting. This restriction has been lifted.
- The DataBinning operator now can be used in conjunction with the Contour plot and the Volume plot.
- Save Session and Save Settings will now work correctly for the DataBinning, AMRStitchCell, DeformSphereGlyph, Delaunay, and Edge operators.
- The PersistentParticles operator now works in conjunction with Selections for all data. (It previously only worked with FastBit data.)
- Banks can now be correctly specified on Argonne's Eureka machine.
- An indexing problem for the SetWindowMode in the Python interface was corrected.
- The Label plot can now set text heights that are fractional percents. Meaning 1.5% is now possible, where only 1% and 2% were possible through the GUI previously.
- A bug was fixed that prevented saving movies with old session files.
- Expressions that extract vectors from tensor data now work correctly for 2D data.
- Making movies once again can obtain the engine launch parameters from a session file. This fixes the movie-making case where you want to use a new instance of VisIt or if you want VisIt to tell you the command to run.
- Quoting for string data in saved settings has been eliminated except for strings that contain spaces. This more closely matches VisIt's old behavior, improving compatibility with older versions of VisIt.
- Cracks Clipper operator works again.
- The embedded viewer example program now works on Windows.
- The Windows installer now checks for previous versions of VisIt in the PATH environment variable, and removes them if user so chooses.
- SimV2 can better deal with 2-element arrays when setting real indices and base indices for rectilinear meshes.
- The default number of cores per node to use was changed from 8 to 16 for the parallel interactive pdebug profile on hera.
- The new RenamePickLabel function has been changed so it can repeatedly use the pick letter as the old pick text.
- A Mac-specific bug was fixed where the Threshold operator was not correctly inputting ranges from the window in all occasions.
- A Mac-specific bug was fixed where legend annotation attributes were not correctly inputting labels in all occasions.
- A bug with passing arbitrary arguments to Python Queries was fixed.
- Versioned releases of build_visit are now tied to the proper release tag in svn mode.
- A parallel engine bug with patch selection for Silo AMR data sets was resolved.
- Windows version can save mpeg encoded movies again.
- A Windows-specific bug with Restore Session was fixed.
- The DDCDM reader works properly again in parallel.

Enhancements in version 2.1.1

- The -o command line option, and OpenDatabase Python command, to open files with a specific database reader plugin no longer requires a plugin version. For example, `visit -o myvtkfile,VTK` now works as expected.
- Host profiles were added for the new LLNL machines aztec, edge and inca.
- Host profiles were added for Argonne's MCS machines.
- Performance of vector plots with lots of zero-magnitude data has been improved.
- VisIt's behavior for prompting about whether you want to exit all of VisIt or just the graphical interface has been improved.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 2.1 Release Notes.