My ongoing love hate relationship with Windlight
Posted by myg
UPDATE: Well, hey, you CAN use the new Windlight with Tiger! And that’s a great thing because it is much better than the previous release. Thanks Ordinal Malaprop for pointing that out.
I love Windlight again. A much, much better release.
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I love Windlight. I hate Windlight.
First, data. I run Second Life on a Macbook Pro that I purchased in January 2007. It’s a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. It’s got an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card. I do not have a problem telling you, I am not sure what all of that means. But I will tell you, it runs great and it runs Second Life quite well, even using a wireless network (which Alex and I both do at home).
The Mac OS I use is Tiger, 10.4.11.
The latest version of Windlight had a lot of little things that were problems for me. The friends’ list was messed up - black names on dark gray background, and I couldn’t highlight any names of friends or groups. That was the biggest complaint. I don’t love some of the little interface changes they made much. But all in all, I was using it because I LOVE WINDLIGHT.
Now there’s a new Windlight viewer, but it requires me to upgrade my OS to Leopard. I’d love to hear from other Mac users here, because the gab I’d heard about Leopard was DON’T DO IT!!!!! It was the only time I’d heard such backlash from the Mac community against an OS upgrade from Mac. I’d also heard that Leopard 10.5.2 breaks Second Life. This article was from back in December, and since then there’s both a new Leopard and a new Windlight. But I imagine some of you can feel my dilemma here. I just don’t trust it.
Now just two days ago Apple released the latest version of Leopard, which might fix things. No problem - I’ll wait and see what the early adopters say and stick with what I have. So today I go to log in:
What was Wrath saying about mandatory options? Can someone please tell me what the hell is up with telling us it’s optional when it’s mandatory? Is it mandatory for some people?
Now I got no Windlight. Here I was, braving the bugs and glitches like a good First Looker, and now I’ve been locked out of the First Look club because I don’t want to risk an OS Upgrade that has had less than stellar reception.
If anyone out there is using Leopard on a machine similar to mine, please weigh in here. Should I go for it?
I have an iMac with a slightly slower processor than that, and the same graphics card, and not only is Leopard terrific and has never broken anything (I wish that I could say the same thing about SL - the only application that has managed to cause a kernel panic, and still does so sometimes, but it did with Tiger as well) the latest Windlight and the latest Leopard are both noticeable improvements. 10.5.2 includes new OpenGL drivers apparently, or something along those lines.
In any case you would not _have_ to use Leopard. I understand that that was just a piece of advice for people who _were_ using Leopard to get the latest updates.
One can always use the official release version of the client anyway, there is no update for that, though quickly, Windlight is becoming the standard version anyway.
My understanding is that because Windlight clients are “First Look” (test) clients, they’re not considered optional in the way the regular client is considered optional.
I use the same MBPro as you do and I am still running Tiger. I upgraded to the latest WL viewer today without realizing that I would be advised to upgrade to Leopard (oops). It works fine, much better than the last 2 upgrades, both of which caused the same pbs you describe. Quite happy with the new WL and can not go back to the normal client because of the considerable graphics upgrade.
BTW, I just ordered a new Mac workstation and planned to upgrade my MBPro to Leopard. I’ll do it slowly to make sure everything keeps working.
Well, thanks very much everybody. That makes me feel much better. The way I read the Linden blog post, I thought you had to be using Leopard for the new Windlight to work. Also, Ordinal based on your testimonial I may go for the Leopard upgrade anyway. Thanks for the feedback.
Please advise as we have the 2008 Macbook with Intel driver, Leopard, Windlight updates and still freezing the system. Is there a way to play SL on this new Macbook? Have looked in all the forums and this issue still appears unresolved??? Many thanx
Does it freeze in the main viewer or just windlight? The latest update (after the one posted here) seems a lot less stable for me, but it’s sort of usable. My machine will freeze too, though it will eventually come out. I need to use windlight on medium graphics setting with a draw distance of about 128 meters, and it’s almost like, why bother with windlight at all?
Myg, just to follow up, I installed Leopard 2 days ago on my MBP and have been inworld most of the day using the WL client with no problems, but also no considerable improvements over Tiger. Although I get considerably better performance than you’ve been reported (I keep my draw distance at 512m with my shader settings high), I attribute the gains in stability to recent client updates rather than Leopard. Anyway, upgrading seems inevitable, and certainly it won’t hurt. On the other hand, don’t bother with the Dazzle FL client, it’s a waste of bandwidth.
I tried Dazzle today and it does look nice, but it had some weird problems. Like our land settings being wrong in Dazzle but not in the normal browser…so yeah. Also the latest WL is a lot laggier and crashier than the version I was writing about here. A real disappointment.