Dave,
I’m cc’ing the avogadro-devel mailing list as well as Patrick Avery and Marcus on this. I’m quite sure you don’t need to build Qt for Windows before compiling OpenChemistry on Windows, but I don’t use Visual Studio. (I install a binary version on Mac, which saves loads of time.)
Patrick, Marcus, and anyone else… Dave would like to contribute to Avogadro2 development and has offered to help me with the new force field framework. He’s building with Visual Studio, but has had some trouble getting everything compiled. I had pointed him at http://wiki.openchemistry.org/Build but that doesn’t cover much.
Yes, the mini project involves simply allowing users to set the two tolerances (i.e., making them parameters in the method first, eventually to allow a small dialog for the GUI to set them). No, not terribly complex, but a lot of features turn out this way. “Oh, you want X… okay, I guess that makes sense.”
Once we get things building for you, I can point you at the new forcefield code - I’m hoping you can help with a new type of minimizer that’s based on concepts from MD. (As in, it uses the gradients as forces, uses the masses to compute acceleration and velocities, then heads “downhill”.)
Thanks,
-Geoff