Technical issues with Mac OS X
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Using Second Life on Mac OS X
First off, forget Ctrl-Clicking in Second Life! Cmd-Click (Apple-Click) is how it's done here, and note that the Mac Option key is equal to a PC Alt key. If you have a two button mouse you'll find SL a lot easier! Apple's Mighty Mouse can be configured for two-button operation, and a variety of inexpensive two-button mice are available from third parties.
Optimizing the Second Life viewer for Mac
Based on Resident experience, it seems the lowest Mac configuration that is acceptable for Second Life is a PowerBook G4 or iBook G4 with a 1GHz processor, 768MB RAM and a 64MB Video card. Under this configuration and similar configurations the following settings are advisable in the Second Life viewer preferences:
Graphics tab
- Display Resolution: Check Run in a window, since fullscreen mode on Mac may be unstable. Leave the resolution pop-up menu as is (it should be disabled), and leave Fullscreen aspect ratio as is, and leave auto-detect checked.
- Draw Distance: In general, 64 meters is good for busy locations. If you want to take a picture of a beautiful scene you can up it much higher, up to 512 meters. For low traffic areas, 96 is good.
- Performance Options: Check AGP if it's not grayed. If it's not able to be checked your Mac's video card does not support AGP, which greatly accelerates video. Obviously you want this checked!
- UI Size and Display Options can be set as you prefer, and will not affect performance.
Graphics Detail tab
- Shaders: uncheck all settings except Shiny Objects.
- Shaders: Avatar Vertex Program: This option can cause some problems on some Macs, and is currently disabled in the Mac viewer. If you check it and see that your avatar is not displayed properly for more than a minute, turn off this setting.
- Avatar Rendering: Set to Normal.
- Lighting Detail: Set to Sun and Moon only.
- Terrain Detail: Set to low for better performance at the expense of better looking terrain.
- Object Mesh Detail: Move the slider to the middle.
- Flexible Mesh Detail: Move the slider to the middle.
- Tree Mesh Detail: Move the slider to the middle.
- Avatar Mesh Detail: Max it out if you can, but anything at the middle or above is good.
Advanced Graphics tab
- Filtering: Uncheck Anisotropic filtering.
- Gamma: Don't worry about this, your Mac controls it. Only useful for full-screen mode, which is inadvisable on a Mac.
- Enable VBO: Leave this off if you experience crashes of the viewer. May cause instability for some graphics cards.
- Graphics Card Memory: Max this out! It only goes up to the total amount of VRAM you have.
- Nighttime Brightness: set as you prefer as it will not affect performance.
- Fog Distance: This feature fades out things that are on the threshold of your draw distance. 1.5 to 2.5 is good for this option. if you have your draw distance down at 64 meters set the fog to 1.3.
- Max Particle Count: Depending on you Mac you can increase or decrease this. 2048 is a good option.
- Outfit Composite Limit: This has to do with texture complexity for an avatar's clothing. 4 is a good option.
Getting more information about Second Life for Mac users
Macintosh user groups in-world
To find a Mac user group, click the Find button then the Groups tab. Type in Mac and hit Search. You can join the group from that window. Other Mac users will be happy to help you out, and group IM is a good way to keep abreast of changes to the Mac viewer. As of May 2007, the "Macintosh Users" group has over 1,600 members and active group discussions. Other groups exist for non-English speakers, and for Mac-centric locations in-world.
Macintosh technical support on the SL Forums
The Mac Discussion forum in the Technical Talk section of the SL Forums provides Mac users with an avenue for finding more help and discussing issues and questions about Second Life on the Mac. [[