Make mseries slider record button not overwrite existing file

[rf2366@…]

Dear ChimeraX team,

I would like to report two minor bugs I\u2019ve noticed in ChimeraX 1.61 for Mac.

1. The record button for the mseries slider always saves movie.mp4 to the default directory and overwrites the file if it already exists.

2. The tile command changes the graphics to the \u201csimple\u201d preset. 

Neither of these issues are prohibitive or urgent. Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Ryan Feathers
rf2366@princeton.edu

[Tom Goddard]

Those are both the intended behaviors. I see they are not described in the documentation.

It would be better if the Record button on the mseries slider, coordset slider, and other sliders put a numeric suffix on the file so it does not overwrite an existing file. This is what the Snapshot toolbar button does. I have changed it so it does that.

The tile command switches to simple lighting because the mouse rotation mode switches to rotate each model about its own center of rotation. If you do that with the ambient shadows of full or soft lighting then it becomes very slow to rotate because it has to constantly recompute the ambient shadows. You can reenable full/soft lighting (e.g. with the Toolbar icon) if you want -- for a small molecule (< 5000 atoms) or with fast graphics it may be plenty fast enough. But for most uses I think switching to simple lighting is the best behavior. We will add that to the tile documentation.

[Tom Goddard]

Done.

The mseries slider (and coordset slider and other sliders with record button) now saves movie1.mp4, movie2.mp4, ... always adding a numeric suffix to use a suffix 1 higher than existing files in the directory. This is the same behavior as the toolbar snapshot and and spin movie buttons. Also the "snapshot <dir>" command changes the default directory for the slider recorded movies.