VisIt 1.2.5 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 1.2.5

- VisIt now supports time slider and 2D text annotations. The Annotations window has been redesigned so that it has another tab labeled "Objects". The "Objects" tab contains the controls for creating annotation objects and setting their properties. The time slider object shows the progress through an animation. The 2D text annotation object allows you to place labels in the vis window. You can set the colors, position, size, and font of the text annotations and can use them to create more sophisticated looking movies using session files or VisIt's command line interface (CLI).
- VisIt's mesh quality expressions are now available in the variable list for databases that have curvilinear or unstructured meshes.
- VisIt has a new minmax query that returns the min and the max for the variable in the currently selected plot.
- VisIt has two new Queries that allow you to pick by giving a domain and zoneid or a domain and a nodeId.
- VisIt can now display zone numbers in terms of logical coordinates so it will output i,j or i,j,k indices instead of a global zone index if the mesh is structured.
- Pick now works in Curve windows. It returns the X,Y values of the closest curve to the pick point.
- VisIt now supports specular lighting. To turn on specular lighting, open the Rendering options window and click the "Specular" toggle button.
- VisIt now reads the ANALYZE data format, which is used to store MRI and fMRI data.
- The Line tool can now be used to set the end points of the Cylinder operator.
- The vectors in the Vector plot can now originate and terminate at the nodes of the mesh instead of being anchored at their midpoint.
- VisIt now supports tensors in Silo files if the Silo files have the "_visit_defvars" variable that defines the tensor in terms of all of the scalars that comprise it.
- VisIt has new host profiles for lilac (xEDTV).
- VisIt supports launching parallel compute engines using the SLURM/SRUN launcher.
- VisIt's movie script now uses the name of the session file or Python file as the base name for the movie if no movie base name is specified. This allows movies generated by right clicking on session files on the Windows platform to have different names thus avoiding the need to constantly move image files before generating a new movie.
- VisIt no longer changes the open database when you select different active plots. Several users disliked this feature so we removed it. Setting the open database is now only done in the file panel.

Bugs fixed in version 1.2.5

- 2D views are erroneously recalculated when using Replace after the user has set the 2D view manually.
- VisIt's metadata server crashes when trying to access a new database with a fewer number of time states than the one that is already open if the animation time state is greater than the number of time states in the new database.
- VisIt's compute engine crashes when you switch back and forth between scalable rendering mode and geometry mode too often when running the compute engine in parallel.
- It is difficult to select multiple items with VisIt's plot list.
- Scalable rendering deletes the vtkActors each time, increasing the cost of rerendering the scene with a different view.
- Specular lighting does not work with scalable rendering.
- The viewer does not send the SIL to the client when it should.
- VisIt crashes when rendering a Volume plot in scalable rendering mode.
- Hidden plots should not be rendered in scalable rendering mode when they are restored from a session file.
- Scalable rendering leaks a lot of memory.
- The compute engine crashes when transitioning to a new time state with certain types of Silo files.
- The compute engine hangs in ghost zone communication when it is run in parallel with more processors than domains.
- The compute engine's default timeout is too short.
- Problem with exchanging ghosts with Boxlib data.
- The compute engine crashes while executing the OnionPeel operator when running in parallel.
- Need to add Qt license to the binary distribution.
- Plots do not update when their plot attributes are changed when using scalable rendering.
- Ghost zones are not created for Boxlib data.
- The SIL is not preserved for a database with a time-varying SIL.
- VisIt reexecutes a virtual database after doing file selection even though the virtual database did not change.
- Odd choice of extents for constant valued Histogram.
- Need to remove TIFF check for Tru64 now that the vtkTIFFWriter works on that platform.
- HDF5 database reader plugins are not built on some platforms
- Scalable rendering crashes the viewer if the engine is closed.
- VisIt does not set the axis labels properly for very narrow 2D meshes.
- The 2D view is not set properly when switching datasets after doing a lineout.
- Tools are sometimes obscured by transparent geometry.
- Picking with vector expression variables outputs scalar information too.
- Rewrite VTK's TIFF file writer so it outputs compressed TIFF files.
- Create parallel host profiles for gentoo.
- Information for Species not returned by Pick when some materials are turned off.
- Can't tell when a plot is 100% opaque.
- Exported color tables cannot be modified.
- The Host profiles window drops values as I go between tabs.
- Restoring a session with a user-defined colortable does not work.
- Gradient progress in Compute engine window bounces around.
- Plots are automatically copied to windows when all windows are filled by restoring a session.
- Printer attributes are not put into the Printer options window on startup.
- Document -dir option so users won't be confused.
- Odd default values in the Slice attributes object.
- The CLI needs operations to query information from a database.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version of VisIt: VisIt 1.2.4 Release Notes.

Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version of VisIt: VisIt 1.2.6 Release Notes.