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.

[TimeChaser]

I've been active on Second Life on and off for... oh god 18 years I'm actually old lol


VRChat avatars look nice and all, but it can't replicate the dress up and decorating fun of SL for me

[NovaSquirrel]

Dress up is fun! I love that I can buy clothes and then add them to my character directly in the game itself, or directly change colors and textures and such right in there. Same for creating objects or setting up an area, though meshes and textures do push that creation process outside to some degree.

I think I only really got into it in 2015-ish? I missed out on it being big and popular in the 2000s because I was not an adult yet, and it took a long time for me to even be able to afford a computer that could run it at a double digit framerate. That's unfortunate, but I'm glad it's still around and I have this cool new tech to play with. Once Lua scripting is actually properly released in SL I want to play with making some small games again, and I'm excited for it. I don't mind LSL but it's definitely clunky.

[linuxavali]

Man I haven't been on SL in years. My pony models doesn't work great (it's one of the Equestrian pride ones, pre-openpony) and I don't have a version of my fursona on there. I do want to get back on there eventually but I have never found time

[gardevoir]

I used to play SL! I had a lot of fun just going and exploring with friends-—one of my favorite nights was “make a shitty Halloween costume out of only free stuff,” so I stuck a bunch of parts of someone’s prim-built Optimus Prime avatar on my limbs, so it’d look like one of those awful kids costumes. It was really fun!

One of the things I definitely miss about SL when I’m playing other 3D chat games is the ability to just tweak things on the fly. Want to fit in at the rave? I’m sure I’ve got some baggy cargo pants somewhere, and I can make the side stripe electric blue. But after the Utilizator Kemono base fell out of style, I was never able to find a base (and accompanying clothing-ecosystem) I liked quite as much.

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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.

You’re so right, and you should say it. This is the biggest thing I miss about SL—-trying to make yourself heard and parse out who’s talking about what is a nightmare sometimes…

(Lately I’m kinda excited about the potential of Resonite—-it has a similar “build and edit everything in-world” attitude, and not having to deal with Unity’s editor is a huge selling point to me. I don’t think it’s there quite yet, but it’s on a really promising trajectory…)

[Rua Whitepaw]

I used to spend a lot of time on Second Life, and I met some good friends there. But over time I kinda became less active, and eventually I just stopped going. I haven't really had an interest in going back since, I think I've just moved on?

[NovaSquirrel]

I used to play SL! I had a lot of fun just going and exploring with friends-—one of my favorite nights was “make a shitty Halloween costume out of only free stuff,” so I stuck a bunch of parts of someone’s prim-built Optimus Prime avatar on my limbs, so it’d look like one of those awful kids costumes. It was really fun!

Hehe making something cursed on the fly is fun. I haven't done a ton of that, mostly just setting an alpha that hides myself and wearing an object to make that object "me", though there's lots of creativity I could play into.

You’re so right, and you should say it. This is the biggest thing I miss about SL—-trying to make yourself heard and parse out who’s talking about what is a nightmare sometimes…

(Lately I’m kinda excited about the potential of Resonite—-it has a similar “build and edit everything in-world” attitude, and not having to deal with Unity’s editor is a huge selling point to me. I don’t think it’s there quite yet, but it’s on a really promising trajectory…)

Getting a word in and figuring out when I have room to talk is tricky, but I can usually just post chat to get a word in any time I want. But that doesn't solve having to tell the difference between people whose voices are very similar, ambient noises, eating sounds, people interrupting and talking over each other (which is physically painful for me) or sometimes needing to just slow down a bit and pause because I'm getting overwhelmed. Voice chat being pushed so heavily sucks for accessibility!

I have tried Resonite a bit but it being yet another proprietary thing felt like a step in the wrong direction (paying a subscription to be able to host your own server on your own hardware? really?), and it made my computer the hottest I've ever seen it haha. But it's cool to see at least some of SL's stuff be carried forward into new things.

[DizzyTheVoid]

I've been in SL on and off since ... before Sonic 2006 came out. A lot of things have changed! I'm bad at finding good hangout spots though, heh.

... Also at finding a good furry head, I haven't found something that really speaks to me.

[EpsilDelta]

Don't play SL too much anymore; my old group basically disbanded after some drama that fractured the community. Was absolutely in love with it, though!

[Lilium Mortem]

OOOOHHHH second life thread!!! I play second life! I make things for second life!(am I allowed to promote that stuff here?)

A friend of mine got me into it, they have a long history with it and we have a little group of creatives that work in a store collective. its been nice just making things and putting them up for sale, even if they don't actually get me much money. but its easier that trying to do stuff for vrchat or whatever lol.

uhhhh here's some screenshots:

[NovaSquirrel]

OOOOHHHH second life thread!!! I play second life! I make things for second life!(am I allowed to promote that stuff here?)

A friend of mine got me into it, they have a long history with it and we have a little group of creatives that work in a store collective. its been nice just making things and putting them up for sale, even if they don't actually get me much money. but its easier that trying to do stuff for vrchat or whatever lol.

uhhhh here's some screenshots:

Having a group to play with really seems to help with making SL more than just something you check in on and move on from; I've found a few that I like to check in on now and then. I like the pixely look of the second avatar.

I'd love to see the stuff you've made! I've made some stuff but it's mostly just scripts, like I made a platformer game with some public domain graphics, and various fast versions of Conway's Game of Life, and a trip logger then can then put a line of the path you took on a map (like real life GPS logger apps.)

[Lilium Mortem]

I'd love to see the stuff you've made! I've made some stuff but it's mostly just scripts, like I made a platformer game with some public domain graphics, and various fast versions of Conway's Game of Life, and a trip logger then can then put a line of the path you took on a map (like real life GPS logger apps.)

I've never messed around with scripts, I've been doing 3D modeling. low poly stuff, like that hat from the screenshots on my last post? thats mine. I really enjoy it. been using blockbench, its nice and simple and not a nightmare of complexity like blender, even though I do need to use blender to process things before I upload them.

anyway here's what I've made so far:

[Lilium Mortem]

Apologies for double posting but I completely forgot. There's an event going on my store collective is partiparing in later today to the 31st. Nothing big, just like, 20 or so small booths/tables. It's at this really cool and weird sim I've been meaning to check out.

There's gonna be music, a textures workshop, and a fishing tournament. As well as the actual market. Come check it out!

https://conejo.website/events/yayemarket0schedule

[Weasel]

I used to spend a bunch of time in SL, but it was less of a game and more of an art museum for me, I enjoyed seeing what people built, and making stuff myself.

At the time it was released I had already spent years RPing on MUCKs, and I held some resentment towards SL as it felt like it killed the text RP scene with its arrival. Between clunk and relying on poseballs for complex interactions RP in it always felt so stilted to me compared to pure text where you controlled everything in the scene.

Unfortunately, as time went on the "hey, you bought the game when it was new!" stipend slowly got stingier and stingier, and required more and more work to get. It also started feeling like it existed solely to push virtual land sale, with parcels often entirely surrounded by impassable walls making exploration impossible, so I lost interest.

Still, I do feel nostalgic to this day.

[Lilium Mortem]

Yeah SL is kinda what you make of it. Literally in a lot of cases. You can find RPers, Ravers, Artists, Writers, Photographers, fashionistas, Vehicle enthusiesits, and any other niche you can think of. well it's hard to actually find them, but they exist. Second Life is more of a platform. yeah the land system sucks, yeah its not always great for exploration(Though it does have some nice spots), but at the end of the day you find a group of people and/or a fun activity, and you can have a lot of fun.

I know that's a tall order, but it's a lot like VRChat in that way. You need a group, and friends, to really enjoy it, since the apeal of it isn't in the nature of the game, but what it enables between people.

[gardevoir]

Yeah SL is kinda what you make of it. Literally in a lot of cases. You can find RPers, Ravers, Artists, Writers, Photographers, fashionistas, Vehicle enthusiesits, and any other niche you can think of.

You’re so right. Also including hardcore PvP gamers, weirdly? I spent a couple months deep-diving on an action game someone built in SL and had a blast… until the creator just gave their friends objectively better weapons so they could win the PvP faction wars every single time. Which is honestly pretty funny to me—-that’s some appropriately old-school-style drama, y’know? Some things never change!

Also, your items look fantastic. I’ll have to pick some up next time I go back!

[Linzolle]

oh gosh second life, i was pretty into it back in like 2019 cuz i had a friend i went on it together with all the time but we haven't talked much in recent times. though, i do have a different friend i do still occasionally go on it with and he shows me around to neat things. i've never been like super duper deep in the culture, i've always kinda just felt like a tourist but i've really enjoyed what time i've had with it
this is my current avatar, i quite enjoy being a pretty ninetales girl!