Second Life

[NovaSquirrel]

I really like Second Life and would like to have more people to hang out on it and other text chat focused virtual worlds like it. Anyone else use it? Any favorite places on there?

I've got the pony version of my character Sherbet made as an avatar, because it's very easy to make ponies!

I would like to make one of my sonas or something but it's hard to justify putting in lots of effort to retexture stuff or model anything when it's hard to find people to hang out with on there, and getting to see myself as a cute pony is pleasant enough hehe. Of course the downside is that most furniture does not work with my character. When that's the case I can be Isabelle from Animal Crossing, or Spamton, or the Kool Aid Man, or whoever else that's bipedal.

Here's my house:
You can visit it here! It's extremely cool to me that I can have a house in this huge connected virtual world and leave a mark on it. I like treating Second Life as an exploration game and just wandering around and checking out different areas. I love that for anything in the mainland, I could take a journey starting at my house and going all the way out to whatever it is. I can look at a map of the whole world, point to a spot on the Heterocera continent, and go "there's my house!!".

[Enbyeon]

I've always found Second Life fascinating as an onlooker, but by the time it was something I would have sunk time/money in, I ended up just playing regular MMOs/VRChat.

That said, I always love learning new things about it.

Also the pony avatar is much higher quality than I thought SL had the capability of. I guess it's just been improving visually over time. It looks very nice.

[Mixi Blacksand]

Also the pony avatar is much higher quality than I thought SL had the capability of. I guess it's just been improving visually over time. It looks very nice.

Linden Labs made an ill-fated attempt at making a VR product some years back. After it failed and they sold it off, instead of firing the dev team they folded them into the SL team, and they've been making tech improvements since. It just finally got PBR materials recently.

I'm not an SL user anymore but I've got a friend or two who are still dedicated to the platform. Some folks are not willing or able to surmount the huge walls to getting into VR, so SL still has a place.

[NovaSquirrel]

I've always found Second Life fascinating as an onlooker, but by the time it was something I would have sunk time/money in, I ended up just playing regular MMOs/VRChat.

That said, I always love learning new things about it.

Also the pony avatar is much higher quality than I thought SL had the capability of. I guess it's just been improving visually over time. It looks very nice.

For me there's enough differences in areas I care about that I don't feel like anything else I've found is really an SL replacement, so it's stuck around as enticing outside of just continuing to play it, though it still leaves me wanting people to hang out with and go exploring with on there.
I like that text chat is the primary way people talk on there (and there's many areas with voice chat disabled) since listening to a group call can be a bad sensory experience for me and can often leave me with a headache; I can put on some nice cozy instrumental music and relax as I take things at my own pace and engage however is comfy.
I like that instead of cracking down on third party mods, the client is open source (and open source servers exist) and third party clients are welcome and encouraged.
I like that there's just this single big world that's continuously being simulated whether or not there's people in a location, making it feel more real, especially since things within this continuously simulated world can interact with the rest of the Internet.

My avatar is built on "OpenPony" which only came out in 2021 and was a big deal for being both high quality and free, so now there's this big ecosystem of clothes and manes and other addons for it. I have one that basically turns Second Life into a skateboarding game and the movement is totally changed, letting me ride on walls and do tricks while sound effects and graphics appear, and I can just do that anywhere in the world where outside scripts aren't disabled.

Yeah there have been ongoing improvements in the tech (and I imagine people have been just using models with more polygons over time too); recently rendering was redone to enable "physically based rendering" as said above, and there's been work being done on adding Lua as an available scripting language.