v1.12.0 released
Daniel Price
'tis the season of goodwill, and I hereby announce the birth,
though not via angels and trumpets, of SPLASH v1.12.0 (could it be a
saviour?). The main new things are as follows:
* A second quantity can be plotted as contours on top of the rendered
quantity (ie. they no longer have to be the same). A contour plot will
appear if you turn on the "plot contours" option in the r)ender menu.
* Pressing backspace over annotation in interactive mode deletes it.
This is a bit clunky at the moment but improvements are planned. You
can also quit interactive mode with 'esc' or 'ctrl-c' as well as the
usual 'q'.
* You can now invoke SPLASH from the command line directly, mainly
this is so it works better in scripts, but it can also be used as a
shortcut. For example to render whatever is in column 6 to the screen,
I would use:
splash -render 6 -dev /xw
where the x (-x) and y (-y) axes can also be specified, and/or a
vector plot (-vec) and/or a contour plot (-cont).
* There is now a new "splash calc" utility for calculating global
quantities (e.g. energies) as a function of time. Basically I got sick
of trying to work out how to read weird formats (sphNG) in my analysis
tools in order to just calculate a few things, so I made SPLASH do it.
You can also calculate the minimum, mean and maximum of all columns as
a function of time, and (because I needed to do it), the mass above a
series of density thresholds, also as a function of time. The results
are put into plain ascii files and can then be plotted using asplash -
e (with the -e option to give the best defaults for this kind of
plot). Please send suggestions for "calc" options if you have any as
they are now quite easy to add.
* Can plot the natural log of a quantity.
* All bugs have been fixed^.
There are a few other things that have not made it into this release
but are on my post-Christmas to-do list. Apologies if your suggestion/
request hasn't quite made it into this one. In particular I have a
basic HDF5 reader working for the FLASH tracer particles format, so a
GADGET HDF5 reader should be forthcoming...
v1.12.0 can be downloaded from the usual place:
http://www.maths.monash.edu.au/~dprice/splash/download/splash-1.12.0.tar.gz
Merry Christmas!
Daniel
^ or redefined as "features".