[Chimera-users] Strange and inconsistent Chimera behavior recently on W7/Nvidia OS

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Boaz,
As far as I know we haven’t had anybody report this, but the type of distortion looks like when the “horizontal field of view” angle is abnormally large.  This parameter is in the Camera tab of the viewing tool, the same dialog that has the Side View, and can also be adjusted continuously if you drag to widen the “vee” when the Side View side is set to “top”.

You can also change it with a command, e.g.

set fieldOfView 20

<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/set.html#fov>

There is no one default value for startup, but some calculation based on the window size and computer screen size occurs.  I haven’t heard of it going berserk spontaneously, but maybe Chimera gets confused about what the window and/or screen size is at startup when you see that distortion.

When that happens, at least for now as a stopgap, look in the Camera tool to see if it is abnormally large and if so, reset to something smaller, like what you get when the image looks normal.

If it continues to happen spontaneously,  please use menu: Help… Report a Bug so that it gets logged as an issue.

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Feb 8, 2019, at 12:16 PM, Boaz Shaanan <bshaanan at bgu.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I started to have strange and inconsistent behavior of chimera when I open PDB's. My system is W7 with Nvidia 840M graphics card (which has been functioning fine for nearly 3 years).  I am running the latest daily build but noticed this strange behavior with previous versions as well as the production one.
> 
> I attach 3 snip pictures, the first two are of pdb files opened, one OK (as usual) and the other distorted. The 3rd snip pictures is of the Nvidia debug when I start Chimera in command file as chimera.exe --debug-opengl.
> 
> It became quite a lottery for me as for how pdb file will open. The .py files open OK so far as I recall.
> 
> Please help me with this recent mystery.
> Thanks,
>           Boaz