VICS-II is the next generation of VICS, which was originally developed by Fujio Izumi and Ruben A. Dilanian as a part of VENUS. VENUS stands for Visualization of Electron/NUclear densities and Structures. They started VENUS project in mid 2001.

Although basic features were almost completed when I first knew about VENUS at the end of 2003, early version of VICS/VEND had serious performance issues and could not run well on my PC. So I started checking the sources and tried to fix it. I committed some fixes to them but could not fix all issues because some of them are originated in programing model and some are originated in toolkit itself. At the end of June 2004, one of the main developer Dilanian leaved the project and both VICS and VEND became unlikely to continue its progress. Then I decided to create new programs from scratch using some of original code and new toolkit called wxWidgets.

VICS-II runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and is contributed free of charge for non-commercial users.

The VENUS package comprises four independent programs:

• VICS: VIsualization of Crystal Structures
• VEND: Visualization of Electron/Nuclear Densities
• PRIMA: PRactice Iterative MEM Analyses
• ALBA: After Le Bail Analysis

Please refer to Home Page of Fujio Izumi for the further information about VENUS.

Crystal structures are represented with ball-and-stick, space-filling, polyhedral, wireframe, stick, dot-surface, and thermal-ellipsoid models. Ball-and-stick and stick models may be enclosed in dot surface spheres with van der Waals radii. Boundaries for drawing structures are specified in sophisticated ways similar to convoluting sphere and reiterative convoluting sphere in ORTEP-III. Selection of objects (atoms, bonds, and coordination polyhedra) makes it possible to obtain fractional coordinates, translation vectors, equivalent positions, interatomic distances, bond angles, torsion angles, and information on coordination polyhedra (volumes, quadratic elongations, bond angle variances, and bond valence sums of central metals). Arrows indicating magnetic moments and positional shifts may be added to any selected atoms.

Some of novel features:

• Open multiple files with tab without consuming system resources.
• Support multi window with single process.
• Virtually unlimited number of atoms, bonds, polyhedra. (Theoretical limit on 32bit system is 1,073,741,823)
• Transformation of General equivalent positions (GEPs) from conventional to non-conventional setting.
• Export high-resolution graphic images exceeding Video card limitation.

Note: File format of VICS-II is slightly changed from original VICS for enhancement. Following data are incompatible with each other.

• Hidden objects.
• Lattice planes.
• Vectors.
• Transformation matrix (only supported by VICS-II).
• Depth-cueing.

Both old and new formats can be read by VEND correctly.

Supported input files

1. Original format of VICS (*.vcs)
2. American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database
3. Chem3D
4. CIF (Crystallographic Information File)
5. CrystalMaker text file
6. ICSD-CRYSTIN
7. CSSR (Crystal Structure Search and Retrieval)
8. CSD/FDAT
9. GAMESS input and 3D surface data files output by MacMolPlt
10. Gaussian Cube format
11. ICSD (Inorganic Crystal Structure Database)
12. MDL Molfile
13. MINCRYST (Crystallographic Database for Minerals)
14. MOLDA
15. PDB (Protein Data Bank)
16. User input file, *.ins, of RIETAN-2000
17. VASP
18. WIEN2k struct
19. XCrySDen XSF format
20. XMol XYZ
21. asse
22. F01 for SCAT and C04D for contrd
23. MXDORTO FILE07.DAT
24. FEFF input file

Supported output files

1. Original format of VICS (*.vcs)
2. Chem3D
3. CIF (Crystallographic Information File)
4. PDB (Protein Data Bank)
5. User input file, *.ins, of RIETAN-2000
6. XMol XYZ
7. VRML

Pixel based graphic formats

1. BMP
2. EPS
3. JPEG
4. JPEG 2000
5. PNG
6. PPM
7. RAW
8. RGB (SGI)
9. TGA
10. TIFF

Vector based graphic formats

1. EPS
2. PDF
3. PS