Shadows on Really Old Macs!

Shadows on a Mid-2007 iMac, a photo by Milla Janick on Flickr.

Shadows have finally hit the official Second Life viewer! Yay! But real time shadows come with some pretty steep hardware requirements. Many graphics adapters capable of displaying shadows simply aren't capable of doing it at a tolerable speed.

More good news is the Macintosh viewer finally gets shadows. If you have a fairly new Mac. If you have a brand new Mac, they look great and run fast. Older Macs (like last year's models) not so much. There are two graphics preferences requirements for shadows, atmospheric shaders and hardware skinning. The hardware skinning box has always been greyed out on Macs with HD2xxx series graphics adapters. However, with a little editing of the graphicstable_mac.txt file, you can enable it and get shadows on your HD2400 or 2600 equipped iMac! Huzzah!

Right click the SL app, and select show package contents. Open the Contents folder, then the Resources folder. Open the featuretable_mac.txt file in TextEdit. Towards the bottom of the file is the section labeled

"// Avatar hardware skinning causes
// invisible avatars on HD 2600... so I masked
// out other possible bad ones till it's fixed"

Remove the entry for your Mac's crappy graphics adapter, save it and start the viewer.

Go to Preferences, graphics, and select advanced. Hardware Skinning should be available now. Check it, and Lighting and Shadows becomes selectable (as long as Atmospheric Shaders is checked, too).

Yay shadows! At about 4fps, so it's probably not something you'll want to run all the time. It's nice to have for snapshots though.

Oh yeah, do this at your own risk. I didn't see any problems, but I didn't run it much, either. Linden Lab apparently disabled hardware skinning on these adapters for a reason. Maybe it's fixed and they just forgot to turn it back on. Maybe not.