Will Second life Work On My Mac?

[Tmac Calcutt]

Second Life is freezing rite after I log in. I barely move a inch and it freezes and the computer to.

Here's some of my Mac's info.

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name: MacBook                        

  Model Identifier: MacBook3,1

  Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

  Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz

  Number Of Processors: 1

  Total Number Of Cores: 2

  L2 Cache: 4 MB

  Memory: 1 GB

  Bus Speed: 800 MHz

  Boot ROM Version: MB31.008D.B00

  SMC Version: 1.24f2

  Serial Number: W8747GH9Z63

  Sudden Motion Sensor:

  State: Enabled

Intel GMA X3100:

  Chipset Model: GMA X3100

  Type: Display

  Bus: Built-In

  VRAM (Total): 144 MB

  Vendor: Intel (0x8086)

  Device ID: 0x2a02

  Revision ID: 0x0003

  Displays:

Color LCD:

  Display Type: LCD

  Resolution: 1280 x 800

  Depth: 32-bit Color

  Built-In: Yes

  Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

  Main Display: Yes

  Mirror: Off

  Online: Yes

  Quartz Extreme: Supported

Display Connector:

  Status: No display connected

That's what I have in my Mac. It's not working should I use boot camp?

[Jensen Vayandar]

What OS version are you running, and what network do you have (modem, high speed cable, wi-fi)?

[Rayne Keynes]

Your computer is fine for specs, mine is much older and works well. The achilles heel of your system is going to be the GMA video. If you are using SL Viewer 1.23.x, try downloading one of the older versions. I had to go back to 1.22 when I had a similar freezing issue after upgrading to 1.23

 

Older versions of Second Life can be found here; http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions

[Tmac Calcutt]

Close but no cigar It says I need to download the latest version. Which one would you recommend?

[Linear Planer]

You can open prefs before logging in; Ctrl-P. Get things to their very basic before logging in. Select the Graphics tab and click Hardware options. Make sure Anisotropic Filtering is off, disable Antialiasing and uncheck Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects (likely the culprit). You might want to run texture memory to maybe just 50% of available  just for now. When the settings take effect, your screen may glitch for a bit or show weirdness. Just note where the OK button is and click it and It should clear up. Go ahead and log in now and see if that helps. Once comfortable with everything, you can go back and fiddle with these settings to get better performance or find what freezes it.

[Tmac Calcutt]

It froze again... Should I have done anything else. I had the texture thing at 48 should it have gone lower? And the other two things were unchecked like you said. Kind of getting mad at the game lol. Could be just don't have a good enough computer.

[Rayne Keynes]

I'm using 1.22.x on a G5 17" iMac,.. I don't know it's insisting you upgrade to 1.23,... It may say theres an upgrade available, that doesn't mean you have to use it.

[Tmac Calcutt]

You must have downloaded the older version at the rite time.

 

Here's what it's saying.

 

A newer version of Second Life is available

Required Version 1.23.4.123908

You must download this update to use Second Life

Download to your application folder?

 

This is the version that's messed up on my mac. They made older versions useless...

[Tmac Calcutt]

Sorry for the double post the 1.22 works a little bit better then 1.23 so your rite about using a older version. I'll tinker around with it more.

[Boroondas Gupte]

The minimum system requirements as well as recommendations can be found at http://secondlife.com/support/sysreqs.php

[Tmac Calcutt]

I think my Mac at least has minimum and maybe a little higher.

[Boroondas Gupte]

Tmac.Calcutt wrote:

 

It says I need to download the latest version

As long as the chosen old, unsupported Viewer is still compatible to the current server version (as is currently the case for 1.22) you can work around that by following http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions#Setting_the_channel_version

 

Note that when your viewer is too old and you use a custom channel, you won't get warned about that, either. Things might silently fail or just not work at all. So when 1.22 still doesn't run well enough, it might be worth to try one of the open source forks which maintain viewers with the old (pre-windlight) rendering system (e.g. the "legacy renderer" variant of the Cool SL Viewer), while keeping them otherwise up to date, especially protocol-wise, so they stay compatible to the servers.

 

Of course you should only run Viewers (or any computer application, for that matter) either compiled by someone you trust or compiled by yourself from sources which have been reviewed (by yourself or someone you trust).

[Tmac Calcutt]

Wish I was that techy lol. Well the 1.22 works okay it still freezes but not as bad as the new version that's out now. If I was smart with coding and stuff I would fix but I'm not sadly.

[Rayne Keynes]

The problem may be the GMA onboard video. If you can, slap another 1GB stick of RAM in that Mini, should help a bit. Between what the GPU is taking and the system, you may be a little light on memory.

 

Despite what Apple says the oldest mac mini's can still take 2GB of total memory. Might require you to open the case though.

 

The issue with 1.23 isn't limited to Macs either, I've seen several people complain about it. If they dont fix it before the next update and obsoleteing 1.22 I wont be able to play SL anymore. If I try to use 1.23 and have Glow enabled, "Basic Shaders", I cant move below 1k meters.

[Trinity Bailey]

I am running the 1.22.11.113941, and never got the "mandatory update" message so far (thank god....).

I am using a MacBook Pro, increased the Memory to 2G.

 

Here is a note card I got inworld, and I found it helped a lot.

 

 

"If you find Second Life crashing or behaving badly on your system, there's a good chance that there is something you can do to fix it.  In a nutshell, I believe SL crashes because your viewer overwhelms your video card.  It tries to send it too many things to draw/render, and eventually the system can't take it anymore and you get a crash. 

=========================================

#1 Tip for Leopard users... Update to 10.5.6 ASAP!

Graphics drivers on most machines were given an update. 

For some users, this update alone fixes all problems with crashing!

=========================================

Before Section 1: Housecleaning!

-------------------------------------

Mac computers are kind of like self-cleaning ovens.  They handle all the day to day stuff without you ever having to do anything.  But if programs are misbehaving, you may want to give it a hand.  First and foremost is Repairing Permissions.  In Finder, go to your Applications -> Utilities folder and run Disk Utility.  On that screen, choose your hard disk on the left side and then click the Repair Disk Permissions button on the right side.  Your system will then check your drive to see if it can find any trouble, and fix any problems automatically.  Once that's done, restart and give things a go.

Clearing your cache in SL is another easy thing to check.  To help improve performance, SL tries to keep copies of things on your local machine in a cache.  Then when you need it again, it grabs the file from cache instead of having to download it all over again.  Problem is, if something happens to a file in your cache, you'll have a problem whenever SL tries to use it.  The fix is EASY... clean out your cache.  Cmd-P to bring up Preferences, and then Network tab.  See that Clear Cache button?  Give it a click, and then restart SL.

Section 1: Debug Menu

--------------------------

By default, the Debug or Advanced menu is hidden.  To enable it, press CTRL-Option-D.  Now you should see it on the top of your viewer screen, to the right of the Help menu.

If you have either multiple processors or a multi-core CPU, you can change a couple settings to put all that horsepower to work for you.  Click on Advanced -> Rendering -> Run Multiple Threads. This tells SL to use all of your processors/cores.  Next, click on Advanced -> Debug Settings and from the drop-down menu choose RenderAppleUseMultGL.  Change the setting from False to True.  This tells Second Life to use all your processors/cores for rendering OpenGL.  Now you need to restart Second Life for these settings to take effect.

This next tip is something I recommend only in case of emergency.  I'm organizing it up here because it's part of the Debug Menu, but try everything else first.  Not that it's dangerous to try, it's just that it will introduce a slight delay to your frame rate.  And if you can get away without having to do that, things will be faster.  Go to Advanced -> Debug Settings, and then choose YieldTime from the drop-down menu.  Change the value to 20.  This tells Second Life to delay each frame by 20ms.  While that may not seem like much, it helps to keep the video card from being overwhelmed.

Once you've done that, press CTRL-Option-D again to hide that advanced menu (you won't ever have a need to mess with most of that stuff anyways, so may as well keep it out of the way). Next, quit and restart SL for that change to take effect.

Section 2: Preferences

-------------------------

Next step, you need to adjust hardware options. Cmd-P to bring up Preferences, then click on the Graphics tab, and click on the Hardware Options button. You should then see a slider for texture memory. Make sure that's set to no more than half of the total amount of video memory in your machine. For most people, setting to 128MB is ideal. If you run other programs at the same time (especially big graphics apps like Photoshop), you may want to set the number to a lower value.

In that same window is a setting called Fog Distance Ratio (Note: for some machines this setting is grayed out - if that's the case, skip ahead).  It tells SL how far away to make the horizon foggy/hazy.  Lowering the number can improve performance greatly.  On my old PowerBook G4, I set that number to 2.0 and it really made a difference all by itself.  Close that dialog by hitting Okay.

On the main Graphics tab, tick the little checkbox marked Custom (if it's not already ticked). That opens up a tangle of additional graphics settings. Here are my suggestions on changes to make.

If your machine is from before the end of 2007, uncheck Hardware Skinning while newer machines will want to check the box.  It tells SL to have your graphics chip handle the process of rendering skins.

Avatar Impostors is a subjective choice.  Turning it on tells SL to use pixelated bitmaps called sprites (similar to old Super Nintendo game characters) to draw the avatars further away from you, instead of rendering each one (with all their attachments and bling).  Turning it on speeds up performance, but doesn't look as nice.  If you do enable Avatar Impostors, then the slider on the right for Avatars lets you adjust the distance SL uses to switch things out.  Go to a club or someplace crowded and play with this setting :-)

Make sure that your particles slider is 4096 or less. If you're really having performance issues, you can drop that down to 2048 and still see plenty of sparkles, poofs, and flame effects.

Section 3: Draw Disance

---------------------------

Yeah, this is part of preferences, but Draw Distance is such an important one I figured it was worth its own section.  Draw distance tells SL how much stuff to draw. Imagine drawing a line starting at your avatar and then moving away in a straight line for the distance you set with that slider.  SL then takes that number and uses it as a radius to draw a giant sphere around your avatar. It will then try to draw every single prim and load every single texture inside that sphere. The bigger the number, the more it has to load. If you hang out in crowded sims and clubs and stuff, drop this way down to 64. If you're on less populated sims that are highly detailed, set it to 96. Otherwise, 128 should be the most you really need to see. Most of your interactions and explorations are probably happening within a 20 meter radius, so even the lowest setting should be fine.  Higher numbers on the slider are ideal for things like flying planes or airships at altitude, where you've got very little to see in your nearby vicinity

Once you've done that, hit okay to close the preferences dialog box. Now restart SL one more time. When you restart, it saves all those settings, and now if you should happen to crash, SL will be able to remember all the stuff you've just tweaked.

Section 4: Play Around

-------------------------

You can continue to tweak the other sliders from here - adjusting detail levels as you see fit to get better or worse performance.

Many thanks to everyone in the Macintosh User's Group and on the SL Forums who have given me tips, explained things, and pointed me in the right direction when I needed it.  Hope that helps! 

TriloByte Zanzibar"

[Oliver Szondi]

Indeed you can also look at lower spec clients made by 3rd party vendors (Linden Lab only support there own Clients so if you have an issue with the 3rd party client you would need to contact the complier)

 

Link for the wiki artical is here (didnt want to spam the Q&A blog)

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Downloads

[Tmac Calcutt]

Fixed for now. updated my mac to 10.5.8