To EVERYONE having issues with the Mac client, READ THIS

I have an iMac that I purchased in November. It had been running SL wonderfully until May. Then, everything stopped working. It seems as though some data is not getting through. I cannot cross a sim border, whether teleporting, flying or walking. When I try any of those, I crash.

I am premium member and own land. I am unable to see land information. It all comes up blank. Also, my group list is sometimes empty. The graphics are still great and the speeds are good as long as I stay in the sim that I log into.

I have had a support ticket in with the Linden's since the beginning of May and have met with much frustration. There is still no resolution to my issue and now, they have stopped responding to my comments on the ticket.

I am pretty much a techno idiot. This is why the Mac was a good choice of computer for me. I would so love to play sl on my 20 inch wide screen again. Has anybody had these same issues? If so, has anyone found a solution?

Another thing worth trying might be to switch from full-screen mode to window mode. For practical reasons, I keep SL in its own window, and my Mac has virtually none of the problems others report. Occasionally others have reported making problems go away by switching to window mode. You can always enlarge your window till it fills the whole screen, and as far as the Mac is concerned, it is still just a window. ; )

I'm a techno-idiot too, so I have no idea why this tactic should make any difference, but apparently it does.

I always run SL in a window. That is part of the joy of my Mac. I can have email and a web browser open under sl and be able to see them all on one screen. SL still has serious issues. Does anybody have any other solutions other than bootcamp?

Did you try the latest 1.20 release candidates? At least the ones after the lindens included the braindead memory size check fix run totally smooth with 20-40 frames per second on my rather new Mac Book Pro (2.5 Penryn, 4GB RAM) with nearly no glitches or hangs at all (besides the usual slowdown when you need to fetch a ton of new textures after tp'ing till all is rezzed.)

Okay, its a self compiled viewer from the RC sources (because i wanted to use Marine Kelleys RLV version and 1.19.4 just doesn't cut it, so i patched an RC with the RLV patches and compiled in xcode and all is fine). But in principle it should work with the standard RC viewer too, at least for Intel processors.

I have tried every viewer out there, including the onrez one. None of them work.

Kal? Which version of Mac OS X are you running? The current release of Leopard with the newest Leopard drivers should work fine.

If you have the current version (and a November purchased iMac is most likely running Leopard and at or close to the latest release on both OS and drivers), my next suggection will be to locate your preference files for SL and blow them off. Search for your avatar name, with an underscore character between first and last names. This should locare a folder in with your application data, that is seperate from the SL application install. This is where your user-specific preferences and cache data are stored. Delete that entire Second Life folder and restart the second life app after emptying trash. You should go nack to "newbie" settings for all the firts time action messages, but this should clear out any corrupted files related to your account, as opposed to the specific client you are trying to run. Even the OnRez client tries to use those application preferences.

Stupid question time, but where did you move the files?? Are they files you need to keep? Does moving them mess up SL at all?

I'm having the same issue with the beachball and my MacBook Pro freezing up in high lag/prims sims, etc. I lowered my graphic card memory to 128mb, tried reducing my bandwidth to 400, unchecked the VBO and the anisotropic filtering options. Seems to be better as far as the freezing, but now I seem to have a bit more lag, which I'm not understanding why that would be the case.

Short of running SL with Bootcamp or switching back to a PC, I'm outta options.

How do you update the drivers on a mac? Do they get updated from the system update?

Secondly .. I have a problem with all the pics I take were prims just disappear .. pixelate .. like a fractal .. especially happens when I ctrl 0.


Any ideas?

Great news! Sorry I didn't post this sooner, because I thought someone already mentioned it here. I didn't realize that some people didn't already know this.

I have had great luck running the Cool SL Viewer 1.19.1 (4)e for the past few months. It solved all the freeze issues that remained after the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 with the MacBook Pro with NVIDIA 8600M GT. This viewer is available here:
http://radio-boomslang.shacknet.nu/~bb/articles/cool-viewer-mac/

Here was the guy describing how he fixed this bug:
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-May/009923.html

I have had NO regular freezes. Frames per second is halfway decent, and while I don't think it's as high FPS as the Windows client, it definitely is stable and does not freeze up all the time -- and that's good enough for me to use it for development, roleplay, etc.

Here is what it says in Help>About Second Life:

Second Life 1.19.1 (4) May 30 2008 22:56:45 (Cool SL Viewer)

CPU: Dual i386 (Unknown) (2400 MHz)
Memory: 4096 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: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 NVIDIA-1.5.28
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.17256 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Viewer Digest: 692f4d52-8a19-5a3c-bc41-e8ec4f202d97

I like how it doesn't even know what kind of CPU I have. Dual i386's? What the hell?

Here are the stats on my computer:
MacBook Pro 2.4GHZ Core2Duo NVIDIA 8600M GT w/256MB VRAM

I found these graphics settings on some blogs, tried it and I get pretty good results:




But anyway. The sad thing is I tried LL's new 1.20 release and it is right back to the same crappy problems we've been having since February (the 10-30 second freezes, real high lag, etc.).

Does anyone know of a new version of Cool Viewer?

hey

finaly i have fixed all this bad freezes / powerrestart - and i can stay on nearly 24/7

what i have done :
sl runs in windowmode only
ive set my videoram in hardwareoptions to 32mb (1/4 of atix1600/128mbVram)
VBO to ON - antialiasing OFF - anisotropicfiltering OFF

shaders:
bump mapping and shiny ON
basic shaders ON
athmospheric shaders OFF
water reflections OFF
avatarimpostors OFF
hardwareskinning OFF
drawdistance 256m
max particlecount 256
post process quality LOW
meshdetail -> all exept trees(lindentrees) set to high
lighting detail : nearby local lights
terrain detail : high

bandwidth 750kbps (2048kpbs_cable/business acoount)
cache is set to 500Mb
cache_folder is located in SL_folder on my apps_partition not on my Macintosh Hd_partition (i have 4 partitions on my HD)
chatlog is set to OFF

VoiceChat OFF
StreamingMedia OFF

when i use more viewers cos of developing the windows should not overlap especially when the player with the other viewer comes in view - overlapping windows CAN cause a crash/freeze in this case.

machine : iMac c2d 2Ghz/1GbRam/atix1600/128MbVram
osx 10.4.11
viewer 1.20.15


i also can "run" sl with my real old g4 and no freezes
machine : eMac G4 700Mhz /1GbRam/NvidiaGeforce 2MX/32MbVram
osx 10.3.9
viewer 1.19.05 (fullscreenmode 800x600)

however as a resume i can say some gameengines have problems with OpenAL
so maybe to dissable streamingmedia can fix problems too?

This helped my new iMac immensely.

In my shop, I was getting 40-45 FPS (Atmoshperic Shading on, water reflections off, most other settings average). But I could turn or cam just a little, and the FPS would suddenly plunge to approximately 9 FPS. I'd turn back or zoom in, and the FPS would immediately rise again.

I replicated this numerous times, took off attachments, and replicated with an alt. It would not always occur while looking at exactly the same area; had it, I would have assumed one of my objects was giving me problems. I temporarily removed several objects, played with "hide selected," and never found a solution until I lowered the memory setting by half.

iMac 2.66GHz
Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn
2GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB VRAM
Mac OS X 10.5.4

I always use the lowest setting. Still slow.