Socket based molecular dynamics visualization
This project aims to be a simple graphics tool for visualizing custom molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo simulations of non-spherical objects. The idea is to have something with no additional dependencies to avoid complicated compilation issues when compiling on headless machines such as supercomputers, but still allow real-time display of computer simulations for debugging or visualization purposes.
Currently bobviz is implemented in python using the Panda3D library.
pip install Panda3D
pip install numpy
should suffice if python3 is your default python environment. If you are using conda, you might elect to install numpy via conda instead, though you've probably already done that.
Bobviz is a simple client software. It relies on unix domain sockets to communicate via a simple protocol.
A simple test server test_server.py is included to demonstrate how drawing commands are submitted to the client.
To try bobviz, in the same directory, call test_server.py and then background or open a new terminal, and run bobviz.py
in the same directory.
Eventually, it would be nice to be able to use bobviz.py directly without sockets, as a proper library, and with sockets as a real-time extension to some other software. A simple C-library that manages the socket will be included to simplify the drawing process when using low level codes.