The Secret

The secret to SL viewer happiness on OS X: throw away your Linden-built viewer and use Hyang's build instead:

http://hyangreflections.blogspot.com/

If you just need a viewer that works as it should, without fiddling about with settings, without rattles and feathers and incantations, read no further. Follow that link, download the viewer, and enjoy SL. If you can spare a few minutes for some soapboxing, please continue reading.

I have been using Hyang's 1.21-1-based build of Cool SL Viewer for OS X for over two hours (!) without any stalls, hangs, or crashes. I tried everything I could think of to stress test it: Ahern and Waterhead welcome areas, the Shelter, the Particle Lab, the Cyber Bunker mall -- one of the most texture-heavy, glowy places I've ever visited -- and many more. I got out all my HUDs and scripted items, my primmiest avatars. I have all the shaders turned on, local lighting turned on, Avatar Impostors turned on, VBO turned on, and half my VRAM allocated to the viewer. My MacBook Pro has the NVIDIA graphics chipset that allegedly fails with Avatar Impostors because of some alleged bug in OS X. Despite all this, I could not make this viewer die.

Yes, you heard right. You can use whatever settings you like with this viewer, so long as you don't tell it to use more VRAM than you actually have.

Henri Beauchamp, author of the Cool SL viewer code fixes, has documented them publicly and released them under a GPL3 license. Henri's code simply updates the LL-released viewer source. You can run a stable viewer on your Mac RIGHT NOW.

Companies release their source code for many reasons: to gain trust from a community, to allow users to maintain a project the company is ready to abandon, to get bug fixes and new features and other kinds of fertilization from open source developers, just to mention a few.

Most of the time, such companies integrate third party improvements back into their official binary distributions. In the case of the OS X version of the official SL viewer, this has obviously not happened. The question remains: why not? If a stable OS X viewer exists now, in the wild, based on LL-released source, with the changes required to create it made public, then what prevents those changes from being included in the official binary release?

Try Hyang's build and see the difference for yourself. If it works better for you too, ask LL to incorporate the Cool changes. LL has, at least in theory, a commercial motive to distribute a Mac viewer that doesn't scare off (and piss off) so many customers, and it wouldn't hurt business either to make the die-hards like us an awful lot happier.

Executive summary for LL: there are still plenty of people and businesses who are not already using SL who would find value in the SL experience and spend money on your product. If their initial experience with SL leads to a cold reboot five minutes after installation, you have a problem. The solution to that problem exists. Carpe diem.

This has been a public service announcement.

Haha, found this thread over jira!
Its not secret, folks, both Henri and Boy has link to my blog on they sites

I had had the beachball freeze happen to me too. In particular when I start to pan around the camera, the LL view go beachball, and I have to force quit it.

The Cool viewer is - well cool - set drawing distance to 400, zap around a whole sim, before, while, after things load and rezz. Nothing seems to kill this viewer. After a couple of hours I get a beach ball - but guess what - after 10 sec it goes away - hey it goes away - I thought it was a one way switch in the viewer.

Get this thing - it will change your SL.

/me runs a MB pro

Does this version include an autopoker?

What's a beachball freeze?

And why the hard sell?

It's the OS X counterpart to Windows' hourglass.

Eh, people get just as ga ga over all the other patched viewers too

no autopoker, Sindy!
and there new build based on latest 1.20.16 source.

For some of us the standard SL viewer is next to useless. Before I changed, I consistently experienced that the viewer would stop working - sometimes after a few minutes. The only chance was then to make a force-quit. Then one has to wait a minute or two before SL allows you back on. Needless to say that is a rather annoying situation.

If someone then gives you a new viewer that has none of those problems you get raving madly happy.

The strange thing was I used to have no problems - but in one of the many upgrades to the SL viewer it suddenly broke...

I have been using the Cool viewer for the past couple of days now and have been very pleased with it so for. The only odd thing I have noticed is the texture being used when a texture is missing or being loaded. It is some sort of odd blue and white image with a smaller picture in it.

Is there a way to change that to a missing texture or a plain gray?

PU: Dual i386 (Unknown) (2400 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Darwin 9.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.4.0: Mon Jun 9 19:30:53 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.5.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.5.28
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.18578 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

Builds created when using Standard Mac Viewer are not displayed on any SL Viewer if the distance is greater than about 128 meters. This was tested with draw distance set at 512 meters in an almost empty private sim and creating cubes 8x8x8 meters using the latest Standard Windows Viewer, the latest Standard Mac viewer, and the Cool SL Viewer. The cubes created when using the Standard Windows Viewer and the Cool SL Viewer could be seen as far away as 512 meters, the one created with the Standard Mac Viewer could only been seen from about 128 meters.

Thanks for giving us the Cool SL Viewer for Mac

PU: Dual i386 (Unknown) (2400 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Darwin 9.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.4.0: Mon Jun 9 19:30:53 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.5.20~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.5.28
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.18578 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

Builds created when using Standard Mac Viewer are not displayed on any SL Viewer if the distance is greater than about 128 meters. This was tested with draw distance set at 512 meters in an almost empty private sim and creating cubes 8x8x8 meters using the latest Standard Windows Viewer, the latest Standard Mac viewer, and the Cool SL Viewer. The cubes created when using the Standard Windows Viewer and the Cool SL Viewer could be seen as far away as 512 meters, the one created with the Standard Mac Viewer could only been seen from about 128 meters.

Thanks for giving us the Cool SL Viewer for Mac

Builds created when using the Standard Mac Viewer are not displayed on any SL Viewer if the distance is greater than about 128 meters. This was tested with draw distance set at 512 meters in an almost empty private sim and creating cubes 8x8x8 meters using the latest Standard Windows Viewer, the latest Standard Mac viewer, and the Cool SL Viewer. The cubes created when using the Standard Windows Viewer and the Cool SL Viewer could be seen as far away as 512 meters, the one created with the Standard Mac Viewer could only been seen from about 128 meters. Ask Kyle and Molly Linden for for details as they checked this out on 03 Oct 08. JIRA was filed on that date.

Question: Do I now have to redo the 63 Objects and 1,230 primitives of my builds with another viewer than the Standard Mac Viewer or is there an alternative solution ?

Thank you for giving us the Cool SL Viewer for Mac

Does it cause triple posts?

Sorry all, I don't know why it came out that way

Crash
unable to login
unable to login
Crash

/me deletes cool viewer

They are on mine.

I can see objects smaller than 8x8x8 well over 128 meters away using the standard 1.20 viewer on a Mac.

/me sets her draw distance to 128M anyway most of the time.

I can't seem to use the Cool SL viewer with command-line shortcuts (I use scripts to sign in my accounts easily), it complains about not being able to resolve DNS or something.

Wow.
After 7 months trying to have a normal SL experience using a MBP (consistent beachball hell), I finally enjoyed a 2 hour clean session using Hyang's Cool Viewer.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Feedback to Linden Lab by all means.

Yesterday

I made a 1.19.0.5 build for Mac. It's in CoolRelease 32 now, R33 with Teleport History will be ready soon.

http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/cool-viewer-1-19-0-5-for-mac

Let me know if it works for you.
Boy