Procreate 1.0 Released!

I just released the first version of my protein visualisation program 'Procreate'.

You can head over to here and check it out. Some of the features include:

• Highly optimised 3D rendering engine using DirectX
• Suite of display modes including space fill, ball & stick, sticks, cartoon, wireframe, backbone and more
• Suite of colouring modes including element, group, structure, ordinal, chain, electrostatic and more
• Suite of post-process effects to alter the appearance of the scene such as depth of field, depth visualisation and more
• Ability to combine display modes for individual atoms/bonds in the protein
• Processing framework to modify the protein's structure
• Powerful API for writing extensions
• Completely FREE!

Ive been working on various incarnations of this program over a period of about 5 years now (on and off) so it represents a big milestone for me to finally get this program out and available for people to try. I actually finished it sometime last year but adding the finishing touches necessary to create a polished product took a lot longer than expected. The program aims to be well designed and utilise the best practises i have learnt throughout my C# career, so i hope to be able to write some good posts about the lessons learnt while writing it. It is designed to be extremely extensible by using interfaces for every area of functionality or 'decision point' as i like to call them. Custom addins will be automatically loaded and integrated when the program starts by putting the assemblies in predefined subdirectories so i hope the community will get behind it and invest some effort to develop numerous visualisations and data manipulation addins that i am having a hard time finding the time to develop myself!

Stay tuned for posts on my experiences in XNA, shaders, releasing an application, localisation, automatic updating, concurrency and numerous other topics.