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
- Worlds are not quite Sims.
- Instead of one big grid made of individual 'sims' that are always kept running, each world is it's own self contained bubble running either on yours or someone else's computer. Most worlds don't save state automatically when they are shut down/restarted so once a world is closed/crashes it will revert to the last saved state.
- A future planned feature called 'Domains' is planned that will eventually allow multiple worlds to be connected together as one, but there is no timeline for when this will happen.
- Avatars are flexible to a fault.
- There's no agreed-upon human base, so clothes and other things that need to distort with the mesh 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. More static accessories such as hats/banges/earrings are freely attachable in game in nearly any imaginable way.
- 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.
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.