The KirstenLee MAC R16 is here!

[OpenLife at OLX]

By Digital Dreambuilder

Remember November 27, 2008 as a notable date in the history of Openlife as it marked the pre-release of the native Mac viewer, bound to please all Intel Mac owners who foray into Openlife.

This review will be short, merely because it's a pre-release almost ready for prime time, firmly establishing a Mac platform for the grid, and in my opinion is a very stable viewer so far.

Here are my first impressions.

The downloaded zip file 3dx_R16_1_Openlife_imac.pkg.zip unzips to an installer that installs the viewer as Open Life.app ( 152mb ) in the Applications folder. The support files are currently placed in ~/Library/Application Support/SecondLife so a change to the default path is required here (to ~/Library/Application Support/Openlife) though the viewer does not yet allow the user to change that.

The first time to launch the application took ages, long enough to prepare myself to submit a bug report, but it launched eventually. All subsequent launches were fine.

So far it is doing everything we would expect it to do. Sometimes performance is poor but that is often attributable to server side issues (e.g. slow connection to a region), not the viewer.
It also has a cool feature that Windows users don't have yet on R16 - the scanner. Ever looked at the map and seen nearby green dots and wondered who they are? If they are within 500m then bring up from top menu 'World -> Scanner' and a panel opens showing names of nearby avatars and their distance away from you in meters ( to many decimal places :-) ). Click on the avatar names in the panel and that displays their profiles. You can even offer them a teleport if they are lost friends needing rescue. The Scanner feature is illustrated in these screen shots together with other graphic detail that the viewer sees

The application is a memory hogger (Activity Monitor, reporting the application as Second Life, shows the viewer consuming an average 50% of CPU) and this is likely to be problematical when other cpu intensive applications are running. (see top photo for resource monitor - ed)

There will no doubt be issues and problems with the viewer that are not specific to the Mac version but are also in the R16 viewer. For example I was unable to drag a selection of textures onto Kylie's avatar nearby; this may also be a problem with R16.
If, as I imagine, the Mac viewer is a port of the R16 code then any problems that are R16 based will have transferred to the Mac version ( correct me if I am wrong on this assumption) and no doubt bugs in both ( and the forthcoming Unix version) will be swept up in future releases. This might also explain why the Mac Viewer is Intel only. It won't run on pre-Intel Macs and this will disappoint those who don't have Intel based Macs. A solution is needed (and not a recommendation to switch to Windows) while legacy solutions need to prevail ( SL viewers modified for OL use or the Cool Viewer series)

In summary this may be a pre-release viewer but as far as I can see its almost ready for prime time, firmly establishing a Mac platform for OLG access. Non-Intel Mac owners however should not be forgotten in future plans for the Mac version.

Thanks KLee and Sakai for making it happen.

Digital Dreambuilder

Running Mac Viewer for Openlife on Mac OSX 10.4.11 on a Mac Pro, Dual-Core Intel Xeon (2 x 3 GHz) with NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT, 256 MB

[Aviana Pacem]

Here are a few photos taken using the R16 on my 13in MacBook with NVIDIA graphics card. Most are at ultra settings. Location is Hollowbrook.

http://www.olgexchange.com/photo/photo/slideshow?albumId=2311325:Album:7239