How to Be a Happy Mac User in SL

....how else you think it runs on intel hardware, black magic????? Just go away PLEEASE you will not like it when the Mac users start hassling you inworld for your obstructionism.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT MACINTELS NOT ABOUT PCS ITS ABOUT THE POWERPC, AND SL. There are too many freaks on SL with ego agendas and Einstein was right....

Great Spirits receive violent opposition from mediocre ones........

Keep responding lets see just how mediocre you are shall we?

Now I gotcha I'm gonna digest you at leisure, cmon whatcha want?

There are lots of arrogant people like Kerunix Flan and Missy Malaprop on Second Life.... First Life too. They are the types that code viruses and release them because they have some ego issues and they have to prove they are superior to others. They also HAVE to have better hardware than other people (not a need) because it makes them feel superior in some way to others. The only thing people like that accomplish is to be isolated by others because they do not act in others best interests but merely advance their own ego agendas. People are generally not like that.
It has always been my lot in life to attract instable people to me like moths to a flame. They burn out and their foolishness is revealed. If they had an ounce of stability they would just shut up and get a real life. But no they press on ever into nowhere where nobody appreciates them.
This is the kind of person who populates Second life, not to help people but to be obstructionist and difficult to deal with. It's a good idea we all avoid those people inworld as their issues are clear for anyone else to see, except maybe them.

In other words you two you are SCUM. Glad we had this little understanding. Hope that was plain enough for you both.

If LL ban you, is it because of this highly offensive personnal attack or just because you are a PPC user ?

There will be no more flaming in this thread.
I'm locking this thread and marking it for Linden review.

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This thread has a lot of constructive talk about being a *happy* Mac user in SL. Up until more recently--where personal bickering and hostility has entered the fray and cluttered the topic.

I'm reopening the thread in hopes the positive discussion will continue, but I simply don't want to see any more violations of the Guidelines here, or there will be further disciplinary measures.

Please keep it focused on each other's improved enjoyment of the SL experience. And, hopefully, *happy*.

......is a rewrite accessing the velocity engine for object vectors and textures be rendered through the gpu. EVEN if openGL is used by the Mac client gpu it still needs to be written this way.

Thank you. Open GL should thus be an afterthought for object vectors in the gpu unlike the way it is currently written.

The problem with the Mac client having poor performance is it is gpu related for object vectors. Which is why Mac users are experiencing acceptable performance on MacBook Pro and iMac core duo machines in the beta universal binaries versions as these machines utilize Radeon x1600 gpus with at least 128mb vram.

This is my understanding of the situation and if held to the light of logic and reason it should be confirmed as the reason for the poor performance of the PowerPC client. I would thus REALLY like some feedback from the Linden Labs coders on this situation rather than deprecation or speculation or otherwise derogatory issues reflecting egos PLEASE.

too much work for too few of people. It works good enough (yes poorly, but works), and I havent noticed standard GCC compilers being able to use the Velocity Engine. i really dont think you understand how much work your talking about doing here, and how much money they would spend doing it, to not make the money back, let alone a profit. This is a company, dont expect them to take on a money losing proposition that adds very little benefit to anything. Its as simple as that.


editing, someone told me that GCC can be made to use the velocity engine, but it takes customizing the code a lot, whichis also a cost factor.

There are a significant number of Mac users on SL. The ones who have left because the program is poor quality is also significant. Mac People are VERY unhappy with Linden Labs. Too few Mac users? Well if Linden Labs does NOT improve the Mac client I can assure you there will be a LOT fewer. The way to be a Happy Mac user on Second Life is to demand better software. Or else buy a new iMac core duo or Macbook Pro. Or ( if you have a G4 tower) buy a radeon 9800 video card for your G4 then put in a gigadesigns 1.8 ghz G4 upgrade cpu and max out the ram to 2gb. Don't use a Mac Mini for SL or an ibook or a macbook (not pro the lower end model) (as it has the same feature set as a Mac mini) or any Mac with less than a Radeon 9600 video chip or card. As that is a large majority of current Macs (I expect that Linden Labs is either not aware of how bad their software is or they don't care). Exception would be to upload textures or something LOL. Linden Labs is incapable of making any average Mac run SL they really need to upgrade their recommendations as they are deficient in their abilities no matter what they CLAIM.

If you have a G5 tower get a Radeon x800xt video card and run that with at least 2gb ram.

The real trick is to get the tallest video card you can use on your Mac

All the software tweaks in the world that Linden Labs recommends are futile at best.

If you are a Mac user with a high end nvidia graphics card in his G5 tower LUCKY YOU.

Anything less than an Nvidia 6800 is unacceptably slow for SL.....The 5200 just dosen't have enough punch.

If you have an ATI video card then download the ati displays utility from atitech.com Mac driver section and in the 3d section select secondlife.app.....set secondlife.app to performance settings and turn ON vertical sync it helps a lot with open gl.

Then forget about the pc users they aren't worth your time effort or interest, even those who post here in the Mac section because they happen to own a Mac. They don't get it they LIKE pain-hard to configure and maintain computers...... they use Windows machines. Just ignore PC users just as you do anyhow.

Linden Labs has a good thought that they want to offer a Mac 3d VR chat client as this is the ONLY one available in any way for a Mac. Shame!!!!!!!......... its nothing but a Port of the Windows client as that will NOT get the average Mac user to run their software as the REAL requirements are such an investment in video cards, ram and cpu upgrades.

Object Cocoa according to Apple Computer guidelines are how Mac cocoa programs are to be written. Neither open source Gnu or Codewarrior is NOT the way to code Powerpc or UB. If Second Life would just ASK Apple how to code their software or at least attend a WWDC and LEARN how to write to the vector engine there would have been no problem. If you write terribly coded software on Codewarrior you will get terrible software as a result. And I suspect NO ONE speaks for Linden Labs but themselves.

Forget Gnu or Codewarrior......for the Mac.........IF you ask Apple you will see this is true!

As it stands the Mac client is a failure as it is incorrectly coded. After pushing that "software" on every Mac user others claim to speak for Linden Labs and say its not possible do they?

They have NO business speaking for anyone but their own opinions, and I suppose thats what they are doing but that is not what Mac users want. We want good software in order to be happy on Second Life. So....where is it please?

I am NOT speaking from opinion it should be noted but from facts and reality.

Those who venture their own opinions so as to speak for Linden Labs are making Mac users unhappy.........

Not GCC ?
What then ?

much of the MacOS APIs are in a language called Objective C, an early object oriented language. In many ways it's cleaner than C++, even though it's just some object-oriented features grafted on C with very peculiar syntax.

dont forget rendering is done by the softwares ENGINE. secondlife uses the havok engine, something LL didn't code, so maybe you should be yelling at the havok company too. Unless you think linden labs should get a whole new engine just for macs, which i dont really see how it would work with everyone else on a different one. Second Life would probably get along just fine as a windows app but they decided to let other platforms experience SL too. You should be happy there is something at all.

It's about what Mac users want to be happy on Second Life. What I hear back is people acting defensively about something they think they have to defend.....like bad software. Apparently those types settle for bad software. You want to further frustrate Mac users by telling us we should be happy with second-rate software that behaves badly? We don't, sorry we reject that totally. Don't like it? Too bad we don't either.......YOU should be happy I'm behaving as there is no point answering naysayers any more aggressively than NO. Your answer is NO.

I and other Mac users are not really looking for a fight. Unless we receive unreasonable resistance. And I am not yelling just stating a position backed up by facts.

The FACT is that Second Life on some Macs gets 3-4 fps maximum. That is unacceptable especially on a 1.42 ghz cpu that has a specific engine in hardware that manufactures SO many vectors your head would spin trying to calculate how many. It was the basis of the "supercomputer tank weapon" Mac ads a few years back.

The FACT is that on an athlon 2400 2ghz computer with an UNSUPPORTED Radeon 7500 I could pull up to 18fps. This is where I realized fully that Linden Labs is doing disservice to Mac users. It now has a Radeon 9600SE.

The FACT is so long as Mac users who do not wish or cannot upgrade their Macs with expensive hardware upgrades are faced with that situation they will go elsewhere rather than run Second Life.

I assure you that without a cheap PC to run SL or a new 20" dual core iMac 2.16 ghz Radeon x1600 128mb vram
with 1.5 gb ram machine due end of next week I would not be on Second Life.

Either Linden Labs has to correct their software or raise the hardware requirements to run this program as 3-4 fps is intolerably slow.

I do NOT understand those who disagree with these facts or otherwise have emotional issues with something they have no stake in. Nor will I.

I have offered two ways for Linden Labs to respond to this which is to (again) raise the hardware requirements OR correct the software.

To tell prospective and current mac users that their hardware is ok to run Second Life at 3-4 fps is such a disservice it bears no further discussion. Linden Labs would not allow the thread "How to Be a Happy Mac User In SL" nor would there be this thread if everything is ok. It is not. Period. The answer for any future defenders of the current situation is NO. Something is wrong it stands correction the answer will be very grateful Mac users once corrected but currently the answer to the Mac client is NO.
Caveat Emptor.
My position is that for other Mac users the situation bears correction. No one needs buy a new computer so it can run ONE program-as I assure you the computer that does not run SL well runs everything else including 3d games at an acceptable enough rate. Nothing earth shattering mind you but the FACTS are that Second Life needs real help. Just agree with the truth people and either help or move on ok? Because I and the Mac community COULD be happy with probably a change to make object vectors called to the velocity engines on the G4 and G5 cpus or possibly the intel core duo graphics engine in the cpu. As it is the Mac client uses the gpu for vector calls because the software is a PORT of the Windows client and object vector calls were added as an afterthought..........and textures are written through the cpu which is all ass backwards and unacceptable as is.

....wondering how to make the Mac client run at an acceptable level. Any of you responders to my other posts want to tell him how he can be helped? Well?

Well? You sure had plenty to say to me maybe you can take it up with him...explain it to someone else that they don't matter, that they need to buy another computer........

Whatever I am SO beyond my "detractors" so you can just all tell ALL the other Mac users on SL how it is ok?

Yeah...I thought so.......

a 1ghz processor G4 or better........Radeon 9600 video card or better.....1gb of ram or better........7200 rpm hard drive......These are minimum.........

None of this would be an issue IF Linden Labs wrote a proper Mac client software.

I run this game on a Power Mac G4 (AGP graphics) 400 MHz with an ATI Rage128 graphics card. Really, it should not work. But it does. Even with a frame rate that is somewhere below crawl, I'm happy.

Until 1.9.1., I'm sure. That scares me.

Mari

*Hands Christopher Black a nicely mixed Pina Colada*

Relax, Chris - you're going to blow a gasket. I know you are upset, so is my girlfriend over the performance of here mac, and believe me that impacts my quality of life rather directly!

I remember tthe Good Old days, when Macs were, pound for pound, superior to PC's. I worked in a mixed Mac/PC environment, and since I was the Sysadmin, I was very familiar with the propensities of both machines.

Now, due to inexcusably bad managemnt at Apple, that is no longer true. A modestly priced PC can blow the doors off an empesive Mac. And why is this - one simple amswer : Market Share.

Mac sales are now down to 3.2% of the US market, and sliding. So, if any company outside of the professional graphics world (the one area where Macs still truly shine)even bothers to make a Mac version of it's apps, they have no economic incentive to spend very much time on it - either that or the Mac version would have to be many times more expensive than the PC version.

So what is the solution for the SL world?

My proposal is this: Convice Linden Labs to make the Mac client open source, and let all you Mac gurus and wizards have at. I am sure that you folx could create a really spiffy Mac client that would make your in world experience shine. You can do the job that, frankly, LL doesn't have the time or money to do right.

LL? Torley? You reading this?

Just for the record, My system is a PC, an Athlon 64 PR 4000, with 1 Gb of dual channel DDR, and a BFG 6800 Ultra OCX with 256 MB of DDR2 VRAM, and I get from 45 to 50 fps at 1280 x 960 with most everything maxed, and a draw distance of 128. I am currently going to 2GB of DDR, and will be curious to see if that makes any difference.

I sincerely wish the best outcome for all you Mac users. I hope this effort takes off and gives you good results.

well Chris got his wish, they got rid of the sucky PPC client, its gone now, never to come back.

This is somewhat offtopic, and understand that I'm flaming nobody, but people quoting percentage of marketshare need to look at the size of the market.

Apple may have had a bigger *PERCENTAGE* of marketshare "back in the day" so to speak, but how big was the market?

take this random example:

In Hypothia, there are two major suppliers of widgets to the populace, Foo and Bar

in 1996, Foo had a marketshare percentage of 10%, and bar had 90%, the number of active consumers in the market for widgets was 100,000. In real numbers, Foo had sales of 10,000 widgets, and Bar sold 90,000

In 2003, Foo's marketshare percentage dropped to 5%, and Bar's rose to 95%. The number of active consumers had swelled to 1,000,000. Foo had sales of 50,000, and Bar sold 950,000.

Soo, even though Foo's marketshare _PERCENTAGE_ dropped 5% between the dates, their total consumer base rose by 40,000, a fivefold increase.

the point of this long winded explaination of an economy that doesn't exist in a madeup world is to illustrate that the personal computer market has grown significantly since Apple had a bigger percentage. Without doing the math, I'm willing to bet that with their "pitiful" marketshare of today, they're selling more machines than they did back in the heydey of high marketshare percentags. People've been singing about the death of Apple for umpteen years based on the somewhat ambiguous marketshare percentage figure. In truth, it's about as useful as your bellybutton until you look at the numbers it represents

CCC

<edit>ARGH! in my infinite wisdom, I posted this under the money-handler alt for a business venture, this has been Clinton Oddfellow posting </edit>

Missy, it's not really a problem. You still have the PPC client as part of the Universal Binary client. Apple used a similar approach because of the transition from 68000 to PPC architecture. The Universal client contains *both* the PPC and the Intel version of the code. The only downside is increased download size.

I'm not saying PPC doesnt work, but they didnt take the old PPC client and just put it in the UB. the UB is a single compile with changed code thats been reworked. Yes you can still run SL on PPC machines, but the old PPC client has been killed, and onnly the UB remains. Chris kept going on and on how they need to re-write the PPC client and we kept telling him its useless as everything is switching. I even pointed out they could help the PPC portion in the UB client work better, but rewriting the PPC client the way he wanted wouldnt happen, but he wouldnt listen. Now maybe he sees why we kept saying drop it about the PPC client, because Linden sure did.

This article unravels the MYTH about the obsolescence of the PowerPC and thus why Second Life needs to get their "act" together............

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/F2155356-71C8-4A95-9A0C-3EA63B1EF959.html

My girl has a PowerPC with 7200 rpm drives, a radeon 9800 128mb vram over a gig of sdram and a 1.33 ghz G4. She gets about 4 fps at best with the new software. Thats so bad its ridiculous.......and she has no faith in Linden Labs anymore than I do that they will ever EVER code decently for the PowerPC, so her next Mac will be a Macintel rather than a 2ghz G4 upgrade..........

Currently the way to be a happy Mac user in SL is get a used 2ghz athlon or so with a radeon 9600 agp card. Cheap WAY TO GET SOME DECENT FRAME RATES. or BUY A MacBook Pro or iMac core duo.
A 7200 rpm hard drive will get you better performance than a 5400 or 4200 rpm by a factor of 1fps on a G4 much more on MacIntel.

Whatever other argument can be used the fact remains THAT THERE WILL BE plenty OF Powerpc Macs around well into 2010.

They just won't be running Second Life. Not with all the attitude coming from smug end users and Linden Labs. Bah humbug......

does not excuse either Linden Labs smug attitude nor that of other end users that feel that it is ok for PowerPC Macs to have poor performance. The case remains that the PowerPC should have more optimized code. Linden Labs dosen't even bother post on Versiontracker.com anymore OR Macupdate.com as it is well known that their software runs so badly on the PowerPC.
It's really a joke that Linden Labs "supports" the Mac as their "support" has been a dismal failure. And the attitude of end users is abominable really. Does anyone else hate arrogance as much as I? I mean I have to "give up" because thats the right thing to do, with so many PowerPC Macs being well into use far into 2010?
Tell you what Mac Powerpc users. rebut anyone gives you attitude about your computer not running SL well. Give measures of frustration for arrogance. Really! Maladjusts who are nothing but arrogant need an upbraiding badly. Linden Labs has simply incorporated the PowerPC client into the Universal Binary version it can still be fixed!!!

PS my girl who has a superb PowerPC Mac will have her breast expander removed as it failed. She will have to get by with one breast now. It just underscores for me how Linden labs has failed at the PowerPC client. Its shameful behavior that a simple request to correct bad software, which is entirely reasonable has drawn such attitude. Shame on you for that!!!!! No love left now.....NONE.

Its not that we disagree that what you what is good, we just understand the industry and how it actually works. The world (SL or RL) is not an ideal place.