Avogadro 2025 Roadmap

Following the Avogadro 2024 Roadmap

Avogadro 1.100

Released 21 January 2025

Avogadro 1.101

Released 14 September 2025

Next Release (23 October 2025)

Particular focus will be on:

Avogadro 2.0

This will mostly concentrate on bug fixes, performance and polish, including documentation.

  • Improved user documentation (i.e., nearly complete)
  • Bug fixes and polish
  • Further optimization improvements
    • Auto-optimize tool
    • Constraints for distances, angles, & dihedrals
    • Recording trajectories
    • Possibly simple molecular dynamics
    • Ensuring consistent units in energies / gradients
  • Plotting / spectra improvements
    • Improved spectra dialog
    • Band diagrams (beyond Yaehmop)
    • X-ray diffraction
    • Density of states / partial DOS
    • Energy / conformer plot (e.g., multiple conformers, trajectory, etc.)
    • Orbital energy diagram
  • Atom and bond custom properties
    • Example calculator scripts (e.g., NMR signals, polarizabilities, etc.)
  • Scripting improvements
    • Multiple examples of each type (commands, charges, energy, etc.)

Future Plans

We intend to move to a scheduled release plan, with regular releases on 06 Feb (06 / 02 in DDMM format), 02 June (6 / 02 in the US) and 23 October (10/23 in the US - “Mole Day”)

  • Optimization with point group / space group symmetry
  • Improved conformer / trajectory support
    • “Merge frames” into multiple layers
  • Graphics / rendering improvements
    • Support for OpenGL 4.0 core profile
    • Volumetric orbital / charge / electron density shaders
  • Improved builder tools
    • Peptide builder
    • Polymer builder
  • Building / editing features
    • Editing / building with symmetry (e.g., retaining point group and space group)
    • Micro-solvation / solvation “fill”
    • Materials interfaces / heterojunctions
    • Find-and-replace options (e.g., replace 50% of gold atoms within 3 A of the center)
  • Trajectory / dynamics analysis
    • Support for “streaming” large trajectories rather than loading all in memory
    • Timeline view with properties
  • Python / Scripting improvements
1 Like

What of this remains for feature parity with 1.2? Or are we already there?

The main feature would be the auto-optimize tool. Certainly 1.2 has a peptide builder as well, but in terms of “hotly requested features” it would be auto-optimize.

Avo 1.2 also had polygon and ring rendering, but I haven’t been hearing a lot of requests for those. (Polygon rendering is nice for crystallographic materials though.)

Oh, and building slabs from crystals. But I’ll post a slab builder plugin script that uses pymatgen and is definitely better than my code in 1.2. I’m not opposed to porting the old code, but again, I’m not hearing a ton of requests.

1 Like