Moni Duettmann

The new Firestorm viewer now works with the SN. All is good.

I have been experiencing poorly loading textures, some blurry, some almost not rendering at all, and all of them loading and unloading all the time back and forth in the current Linden viewer. I tried some fixes with texture debug settings et al, but nothing helped to improve the unsatisfactory performance. I changed then to the latest Firestorm viewer and found none of these issues there. Everything performed fine. Now, I don't believe the Linden viewer can't do it right. It must be some kind of settings problem, but I can't figure out what it could be. I'll stick to Firestorm, until I find a solution. May someone here in the forum has an idea where to look for.

I figured it out now. Space Navigator won't work in Firestorm, but it does work in the Linden viewer. Not really solving the problem, but I can live with it.

Ok, thx, wow. Moving the sun somewhere... that's interesting. I actually did not know, that is possible in SL. Gotta check it out. Sounds like it can be very useful, when you take photos or film videos.

What does "sim sun override" do? It's in the world pop down menu in the developer settings. What I really want to know: how can I override the daylight settings a sim provides, while I'm there?

11 years later.... For the first time I got a computer with satisfactory capacities: the new M2 Mac mini.

I got a new Mac Mini m2 computer and while the performance is overwhelming, there's a downside: I don't get the SpaceNavigator working. I downloaded the latest driver software, which is for MacOS 12, but I'm not sure, if the 13 can possibly be the reason it doesn't work. What happens is, that my avatar swirls around uncontrollably, flies to the sky or slips into Mouselook mode. I read a few comments on such issues in different fora, but the suggested "solutions" didn't work for me. They included, not download any driver at all (because it isn't needed - wrong!), and warnings regarding running other joystick devices on the same computer. Which I don't, unless a graphic tablet counts as a joystick. At least that has never been a problem in the past; I always had a graphic tablet running. So I'm already on my wit's end, how to approach this problem. SpaceNavigator is crucial to my SL experience: I can't build or film without it. Would be interesting to hear, if anyone has the same problem, any solutions, or about people who successfully run a SpaceNavigator on their new Mac, and how they managed to get it running.

I observed something today: while on my desktop Mac, objects and textures often do not completely rezz, resp. it takes a very long time, today I tried logging in with a new Macbook I just bought. While the overall framerate wasn't very diffferent, the rezzing was really fast and complete. BTW: the desptop is connected via a LAN cable, while the Macbook uses WLAN (Wifi). Both have a similar amount of memory. So what's really the difference? It's not the router, it's not Wifi vs. LAN, it's not a much better graphics card... there seems to be something in the configuration of my desktop, that stops it from finishing the rezzing in time. Of course I also tried to delete cache and all that, but that never made a difference. What is it??? Perhaps it's the graphic card itself. The Macbook has a 750 NVIDIA, whlile the desktop only has its inbuilt intel graphics.

I deleted all previous notifications. Nothing changed. But I intentionally let an object being returned from a different parcel and the notification came under notifications, not via the IM chat with the parcel owner. So this is weird behavior on side of the viewer.

I will. Meanwhile, do you have an explanation, why these notifications happen in the chat with the person who auto-returned the objects? Is that normal?

Exactly. I did just that and there was nothing in the official SL viewer. So I assume it's a Firestorm bug then. Perhaps I will try a clean reinstall, once these messages begin to unbearably go on my nerves. Thanks for your helpful answer!

For a couple of weeks now I am getting false notifications, in IM chat with the new owner of parcels I had previously built, about objects returned to lost & found due to auto-return. The thing is: there are no objects left by myself, nothing disappears from there and nothing actually arrives in my L&F inventory. But these chat notifications come every day. What is this? We can't seem to develop any reasonable idea about this.

The two Shermerville sims have different sea levels at their sim border. That's pretty annoying and does not make any sense. But support has long gone. You don't get anything done here anymore.

Can anyone help? Although activating voice, I can't get avatar lips to animate. The mic is all connected correctly, I can see the incoming signal in the prefs panael. But the avatar lips won't move. I desperately need this for machinima. Please, any suggestions may help! Thanks in advance!

My Mini runs fine, unless I switch advanced lighting model on. Then framerate drops dramatically. But yours is a REAL graphics card! What machine do you have those compnents in?

Thanks for your detailed replies, esp. Natales. I see much clearer now, why "memory" isn't everything about a graphics chip. That was the mssing information I needed to get a picture. I would have gone for a PC instead of a Mac, for Second Life only, if I had not got stuck with a blue screen every 3 days. That Window system is really tricky. But for what you pay you probably get a better deal hardware-wise.

I'm trying to answer your questions as precisely as I can: The main load seems to be the advanced lighting setting itself. When I disable shadows, the frame rate gets a little bit better, say, from 6 to 10 fps. Still only a third from my 30fps without "advanced". I don't see how avatar shadows have an influence on the frame rate. When I disable them entirely, the framerate just stays where it was - no effect whatsoever. I'm trying to keep my framerate tests comparably. There are no other avatars around and the landscape is quite low prim. I always keep the same draw distance (128) to get comparable results. When you say the graphic work is done by the CPU: that would be the best part of my computer. A quad i7 is more than many of my SL friends have, who run SL on Windows. If you are right, then it must have something to do with the viewer software not making use of the power of the computer. Actually I heard people say, that the Mac version of SL isn't programmed very well. But that's beyond my tech skills. Seriously I doubt it, because the advanced lighting feature would be such a basic thing to build in a viewer. They would not miss it. Others say, it's the graphic card model. However the graphic cards that Linden itself is recommending, have less memory RAM than mine. 1.5GB may not be a gamer monster card, bit it isn't so bad either. So still looking for a better solution...

I've got a Mac Mini with a 2.3 GHz quad core Intel i7 processor, 8 GB RAM and an Intel HD 4000 graphic card with 1.5 GB memory. So not bad at all. It's running super-smooth as long as I don't enable shadows (advanced lighting model). I know, that for every graphics feature you add, there will be a certain slow-down of the framerate. But this is insane: without shadows I have a framerate 5 times (5x) (!) higher than with shadows. So, if I go with 30 fps, which is perfect, I drop to 6 fps, when enabling shadows. Can it be THAT dramatic? I can't believe it! Why is that? A friend who plays SL on a Windows PC has less CPU and less graphic memory than I have, still his SL runs much better. What's wrong? Is it my graphic card? Or is the Mac viewer not programmed properly to address the graphic card? Nobody could yet explain to me, why there is such a tremendous difference in performance, when it comes to the advanced lighting setting.

Not sure what the issue really is, but what happened to me is, that objects I rezzed inside a mesh house simply disappeared. They weren't where I rezzed them and they weren't in my inventory. Only after a relog they reappeared in the inventory. What I do is rezzing them outside the house and dragging them in, works. Strange issue though, but not lethal.

I got a driver recommendation from 3Dconnexion for the use under Yosemite - and it worked. Those who said, they had problems with it under El C I don't know from what version they had upgraded; i.e. if they had made it working under Yosemite at all. I'm currently having quite a few issues with SL, lots of crashes, but everybody keeps telling me I should upgrade to El C.

Have you upgraded to El Capitan, Madelaine?

Firestorm crashes when taking a snapshot, or even when I try to make photo settings. I'm on a Mac. Does anyone perhaps know a workaround or solution?

I can't confirm that. "Dropping the internet connection"? I haven't even heard about it. I'm pretty sure, that, if you experience that, it must have other reasons. I used Snow Leopard until 3 months ago and my experiences are, that Yosemite is faster with the graphics. Of course there are many other settings that you can toggle with, so without knowing your exact computer configuration it is hard to tell. Snow Leopard is quite old now and doesn't support some things anymore. F.i. I always had problems with playing Flash videos on 10.6.8. So if you don't have any specific reason to stay with the old system I'd rather recommend upgrading.

I have been using Firestorm for a good while now. It's the perfect viewer for me, mainly because I can still run it in 1.0 mode, like the Second Life viewer was in the early days. It still makes more sense to me than all following viewers by SL. Just one example: With the old viewer you can toggle audio and video inworld content seperately, in the SL viewer you can't! Isn't that ridiculous? But there's much more to Firefox that you can do. You should check it out.