A new bugfix release, Sculptor Version 1.2.1, is available. Several small bugs were fixed and some smaller new features introduced, including the following:

1. Cg updated to the latest version 2.2 / October 2009 (the old version in the previous package caused problems on newer Linux distributions).
2. Changing the voxelwidth does not trigger Sculptor to regard the document as being altered. Spider files do not store the information about the voxelwidth in the file, so the user has to input this information in Sculptor manually. The previous versions of Sculptor have then forced the user to save the file, as the program regarded the volume as being altered.
3. Various small bugfixes around the volume-rendering. Under some conditions the direct volume rendering could become out-of-scale. The rendering of the cross-sections was improved.
4. The overall scaling of the scene is now stored in the state files.

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A new Sculptor release, version 1.2, is available. This release includes ¨interactive global docking¨ as a major new feature, but also adds programmable-GPU accelerated rendering of atomic models, other smaller improvements and bug fixes.

Interactive Global Docking (IGD) is a novel technique that permits an interactive peak search in score-maps generated from exhaustive docking tools like Situs/Colores - please see also the new Situs release 2.5, which has support for IGD built into Colores. In experimental volumetric maps with a heterogeneous density distribution, or significant areas that are not accounted for by the atomic model, multi-resolution docking can be problematic. The correct solution is then difficult for the automatic algorithms to detect, as the docking contrast - the numerical difference of scores of false and true positive solutions - can become very small. An interactive screening of the scoring landscape allows the user to select carefully the potential solutions, which then can be further optimized using an off-lattice refinement technique. Please click on the image below to see a video with the interactive global docking in action:

Programmable-GPU accelerated rendering and shading of tube, cartoon and van-der-Waals representations. The new code is optimized especially for low-end machines with inexpensive graphics cards (for example netbooks with integrated Intel GMA950 graphics chips, like the Asus EEE PC) and does not only lead to a higher-quality representation, but at the same time also achieves a significantly higher performance. It also permits the investigation of large pleiomorphic systems, especially in combination with the efficient flexible fitting technique which was introduced in Sculptor 1.1 / Situs 2.4.

Speed improvements and code-cleanup in the areas of the cross-correlation coefficient calculation, loading and saving of volumetric maps, display of the coordinate system and clipping planes. Rendering problems under Microsoft Vista were also fixed.

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