Guide for Second Life users
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While the author of this page has been in Second Life for a while, they don't have much experience with it, so this page might not be maximally useful for those who have. Please contribute with a seasoned player's perspective if you can!
This page aims to catalog the Resonite equivalents to Second Life features, as well as major differences between the two, in order to help people used to the latter with getting started in Resonite.
General
- Resonite isn't the host, you are.
- When you create a new instance of a world (e.g. when there are no existing public instances), your computer is responsible for serving anyone else who joins. If you leave an instance you're hosting (or crash), everyone else will be kicked out as well. (Some users host dedicated headless servers for common worlds.)
- You can be in multiple worlds at once.
- Avatars are flexible to a fault.
- There's no agreed-upon human base, so clothes and the like will often need to be adjusted outside of Resonite. If you want a base that's easy to customize in-world, you can try NeoRoid or NeoFur, which have a "floating torso" style, or VaLP Avatar Maker, which is a full body, but low-poly.
- This is a mature, tight-knit crowd.
- According to Resonite's terms of service, all players must be 16 or older. Adult content is explicitly allowed in private or hidden sessions, as long as all players within are 18 or older and have consented to it; see Adult Content Session Matrix for details.
- The userbase is "quality over quantity"; there's not nearly as much going on as in Second Life, but those you do meet are by and large friendly and welcoming. You'll likely even get to talk to the staff directly, whether during Office Hours, on the Discord, or in-world.
- Almost nothing is paywalled.
- Paying money for Resonite will give you more storage space, access to the headless server software (but not hosting), bragging rights (through badges and shoutouts), and nothing else. Uploading assets is free, as long as you stay within your storage quota. There's currently no in-world currency, but avatars and accessories may be sold on external websites as importable files.
- Modding is allowed and encouraged.
- Users are welcome to mod the software to nearly any extent they wish. From basic quality-of-life changes to entire alternative renderers, most users run at least some mods. However, you must still comply with Resonite's Modding Policy.
- This should fulfill most of what you'd use a third-party viewer for. Resonite is a complex beast, acting as a server unto itself, and it's not open-source. That being said, custom renderers such as Renderide do crop up sometimes, and ReCon serves as a light text-only client for mobile devices.
- Don't be afraid to ask for help!
- Mentors (players with a green lightbulb badge) are volunteers certified for helping new players get a hang of Resonite. Don't worry about "taking up their time"; if anything, there are more teachers than students[citation needed], so be wary of a potential mentor swarm!
Features
Many features built into Second Life are instead implemented as user-created items in Resonite. If you install something to your avatar and you want to keep it, you will need to save the avatar so that you don't have to install it again in future sessions.
| Second Life feature | Resonite equivalent |
|---|---|
| Camera | Camera item in Resonite Essentials / Quick Photo Capture gesture |
| Text chat | Mute Helper / Contact messages in Dash menu |
| Quick mute button | Context Mute |
| Animation overrides | Arti's Avatar Poser |
| Marketplace | RedX / Resdex (free); external sites (paid) |
Avatar/world creation
Main article: Tutorial:Avatar creation
Main article: Tutorial:World creation basics
- Everything is open by design.
- Any object can interact with (and, to some extent, modify) any other object. For example, the original author of this article has their avatar automatically inject a custom LOD into a supported world's culling system. Use this power responsibly, and be aware that others may use it irresponsibly in your game worlds.
- With very few exceptions, everything you make is full-perm.[note 1] The SimpleAvatarProtection component (added by default) blocks equipping, saving, and exporting of an avatar, but it's not bulletproof (e.g. users with builder permissions can inspect it and access its textures). Note that copyright is still in effect, as are basic manners; if someone uses your creation against your will, report them to the moderation team.
- Note that this goes both ways. If you're curious about how something works, and you have builder permissions in the instance, you're usually more than welcome to whip out a dev tool and learn how it's made, and maybe even tweak it to your liking.
- Be careful with resource usage.
- Resonite can be heavy (especially on the CPU) due to how flexible it is. In particular, since there's no "compilation" step, you'll have to deliberately seek out optimizations such as culling or baked lighting (e.g. through Lumos). Check out the optimization guidelines article for more detail.