New iMac + Leopard = not able to play secondlife?

I have a brand new 24inch iMac

System Overview:

* 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2GB memory
* 500GB hard drive1
* 8x double-layer SuperDrive
* NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB memory

Running Leopard 10.5.2

I just signed up for second life and I downloaded the application, installed it, started it up and it dropped my girl into orentation island and then i started to move forward everything was fine then it froze and just kept showing the circling rainbow icon for the arrow and never stopped. I had to force quit my Mac and then started it up again and tried to start second life again and and now it's getting stucking at the loading screen. It shows that it is all loaded it says Second Life Precaching... but it does not go anywhere.

I know my requirements are more than enough to play this game. Is there a patch for leopard or anything that might help? I just want to play the game I will try anything

i think i'd heard that leopard had just updated, 10.5.3 or .4?? and has better video support so sl runs better supposedly, thought i'd heard... if it's running bt slowly then you might wanna try setting the graphics prefs to 'low' and work your way up. :\ also the hot tip's been to make sure the graphics card usage is set a little lower than the maximum - if 512 meg, set it a notch lower than that and see if that helps... (that's an extra button under 'custom' graphics tab in preferences, i think a button called 'hardware options')

p.s. i can't remember if you can preset the options before logging inworld, but if you can't log in then try setting the options first before logging on, quit the program (just to save the prefs) then restart it and try loggin' in... good luck ) maybe others with more modern macs'll be able to better contribute... some threads going around lately about new mac probs with sl :\ search around the forums a bit... good luck!!

thanks it's 10.5.3 i am downloading it now, i hope this works!

I'm not sure about how to do the other stuff you said but i will give something else a shot if this does not work.

i guess i should also mention that i upgraded my second life to 1.19.1.4 and downloaded nicholaz-ec-f.dmg and installed that patch as well.

Hi Ildia,

I have the same configuration and have the same problems using the Release Clients. Those are pretty much unusable. I also didn´t stick with the Regular Client for long. The Nicholaz Viewers are a LOT more stable than the official releases.

When I am just building, and not admiring the scenery, I mostly use the bleeding edge viewer.

I strongly suspect that there is something wrong either with the viewers or with the graphics card drivers. Upgrading to 10.5.3 didn´t make any difference. Lowering the graphics card memory has not helped either, though I understand that it has helped many.

But all in all, the game is certainly playable on the machine. If you keep crashing with the Nicholaz viewers, i would suspect there is something else amiss - installation, conflicts with other software or an iffy internet connection.

Just to confirm others' impressions: don't rush to upgrade from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3. The beachball freezes are still there, and the movement has, if anything, deteriorated.

Well, i really don't know ifthis willl work for your cpu's...

I have a 3 years old Power Mac G5 with a nvidia 5200 card under Tiger 10.4.11 and had the same problem. Constant crashes, lots and lots of beachballs... really a crap

Seems that i solved the problem doing the following:

Changed the viewer by the nicholaz edition. if you are using 1.20 (not me, doesn't work under PPC, seems that only on Intel) downgrade to 1.19.1.4 and patch the app.
This only step improved A LITTLE the freeze issues, but not completely in any way.

I also reduced the draw distance to 96 m. and tried different draw configurations and qualities (preferences>graphics and check "custom" and improved ANOTHER LITTLE the performance.

Also, i activated the "advanced menu" (ctrl+alt+d) and checked the following options: advanced>rendering>fast alpha and advanced>rendering>run multiple threads. This made the performance to be less choppy (i got values between 12-20 fps, enough to have a better experience than the crappy 7-9 fps without checking these options)

Finally, as i've seen that the freeze issues are still there, although not so often, i decided to mess with the opengl renderer, emulating another graphic driver for second life and i finally solved the freeze problems! YAY

You must install the application "opengl profiler" from the X11 developer apps (they are inside the OSX install dvd).

When opened the app, you must add the application "second life.app" to the upper section of the window by clicking the "+" sign.
Then, open the "launch settings" by clicking the triangle below and in the pop menu (by default "native graphic driver" you must choose one of the ATI cards (don't know which will work better, in my case the ATI 128 worked fine, but you may try what driver works better for you, every computer is a world ).

This means we are "cheating" the SL app telling it that we are using a different graphics card.

I hope this is helpful to you

I have a brand new 8-core Intel Power Mac with an Nvidia 8800 graphics card and, while SL in general runs fine, hi-rez snapshots lock up the entire client. I can get one shot after five minutes of being locked up, but the client returns to an all but locked environment where my avi can spin in place but nothing else.

On my old 1.8 dual G5 I could take hi-rez snaps in 5-10 second per even under ultra graphics in windlight (but SL ran at about 11 fps even at mid-level graphics).

Has anyone experienced this? Any solutions?

Reducing draw distance is a must I think, anything from 128m and above kills my performance and gives me huge freezes, and I'm on a top-of-the-line Mac Pro! IMO the Second Life viewer needs re-written from scratch, minus the weird open-gl library they use that seems to be incompatible with all graphics cards ever made, and the dinosaur code written in the days before testing was invented which seems to cause every viewer update to be a catastrophe. For a client that is trying to be working cross-platform, it seems to have far too many incompatibilities.

If I understood more of what the code did in some areas then I'd be tempted to try writing my own stripped-back viewer to try and maximise compatibility, and add features back in from there. Maybe I'll investigate anyway, I've got some free-time atm.

Okay, this is odd, but it solved the Mac hi-rez snapshot screen freeze for me (your experiences may vary).

Use the normal snapshot window, rather than CTRL + (tilde). In the "what image size do you need?" section, go to Custom, then type in the dimensions you want (e.g. if your SL window is 1,667 x 1,002, like mine is on a 21" monitor, double that to 3,334 x 2,004 -- remember to double both dimensions or you'll get a distorted image.) THEN -- AND THIS IS THE REALLY, REALLY, IMPORTANT PART -- Un-check "constrain proportions."

If your experience is like mine, when you hit Refresh, your screen image will hop around five or six times almost as if it's sampling the various quadrants of the image, then settle back to your original crop. Hitting save will then save to disk without a hitch.

The hopping around thing is a bit weird, but non-damaging a far as I can tell and the save to disk takes less than a second (so maybe the hopping saves time, who knows?).

All I know is that now I can take hi-rez pics without crashing. /happy sigh

(this solution was provided by Andrew at Linden Lab support, thank you Andrew!)