I am DONE with Force Quit!

Seriously now. This new version of Windlight is causing super major problems with Leopard. I am getting serious beachball's every time. Give me 5 minutes inworld and I have to force quit due to beachball loops and ultimate freezing for my MAC book pro (intel).

This is a brand new laptop with lots of drive space left and memory. I really have no clue what is causing this. I also deleted the Application Support > SL folder. Any other pointers?

Nathan

What Mac model and what video card? And are you certain you have the very latest video card drivers?

Many Leopard users have found that to get their system to be stable in SL, they have to set their VRAM preference in SL to one half what they card actually has. So if you have a 256 MB VRAM card, set it to 128 in your SL preferences.

I'm running Leopard on a Mac Pro tower, ATI x1900 card with 512 MB VRAM, and it's running well without having to cut back the VRAM. But some other cards are not doing so well.

I had the same problems on my MBP with Windlight, but today I downloaded the latest version and my MBP is running a lot better!

Again, I hate to be a jerk here, but what's so great about Windlight that forces you folks to put up with horrible performance all the time?

I'm resigned to the fact that SL is still an unstable platform on ANY computer, and we in the Mac community always get the short end of the stick anyway. Why not just run the regular viewer until Windlight gets to the point of being more stable for the Mac? At least you can stay in world for more than a few minutes at a time. Personally, i'd go insane if I had to force quit SL that often.

I will not run Windlight on my newly brand new MBP running the latest OS. I can't even imagine trying on a lesser Mac.

Not sure if this applies to your system, but LL did mention the MacBook Pro's in a recent blog post.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/23/new-windlight-viewer-77495-mac-talk/

"This does not solve two major issues that are known with these machines:

* VWR-1979 - Memory leak with 8600m GT on MacBook Pro
* VWR-1749: Second Life viewer client freezes on MacBook Pro

These are major issues that can cause the viewer to crash and system resources to get taken up, to the point where a system reboot may be necessary. These are bad issues. But there’s good news. Apple knows of the cause and a fix is on its way- trust us. These issues shouldn’t remain in the wild for long. So, to all of those with 8600s, play for the first time, but it may be in short spurts for now"

I too have the same issues, often triggered by crossing SIMs, either walking or flying. That's not to say it doesn't happen just out of the blue but I'd say I'm at 50% while crossing. What's interesting that during the first part of the crash voice still functions, or I should say 'sounds coming to me' continues for as long as the app is running before it completely crashes. Thankfully it doesn't take out the OS.

It goes like this, walking along, I hear disk chatter, the spinning ball-o-death shows up. At this point nothing can be done, even menus are dead. I can wait as I listen to friends still talk, about 25 to as much as 60 seconds later the whole app goes down in flames and the crash alert pops up.

Mac OS X 10.5.1 9B18
Processor Name: PowerPC G5 (1.1)
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number Of CPUs: 4
L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
Memory: 8 GB
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Dual monitors


The prior version of Windlight while fussy at times DIDN'T crash near as often.

That's the thing, performance isn't horrible on most machines, in fact on my machine (PowerMac G5) it runs much more smoothly and in the newer builds I'm able to run it with all the new features on and still get higher frame-rates than I do in the non-windlight viewer.

Obviously there are some serious issues still to resolve for the MacBook Pros on Leopard, but once they are out of the way it will be a huge step-forward. It is however currently still a firstlook viewer, which means beta.

Good point. In the meantime, until they get past beta, I'm content in running the regular ol' viewer... it's not perfect, but it allows me to remain in SL for hours (as opposed to minutes) at a time without getting the Beachball of Doom.