With VRChat's recent push for age verification, I feel I have reached my limit with what I am willing to deal with. It feels as though VRChat is slowly getting worse and worse and I recently had a similar moment to when I realized I HAD to move away from Windows and onto Linux. As such, I am officially moving to Resonite.
I had been on Resonite before and even joined a few times when it was still Neos. However, I had never actually made an effort to learn how it worked or what it had to offer. So, this is my opportunity to do so!
To begin, I had to move my avatar to the game. I already had the basics set up, the avatar itself, full body.. that's about it. I still had to add all of the gestures, material swaps, clothing, and blendshape options. I had no idea where to start, so I went to the Discord and asked for help. There was a mentor who was more than happy to help and after some confusion with a new Steam beta update on Linux, we got to work.
Almost immediately things seemed like they were going to be more difficult than on VRC. Something that would be a simple animation setup on VRC, was an annoying task involving Protoflux (Reso's scripting language.) Gestures were quite difficult. Because I am using the Valve Index, which is far more limited in the gestures it can make in Reso than it is in VRC. However, we got several things working.
My main two gestures work, albeit the eyes closed gesture should be bound to a peace sign but I had to bind it to only my thumb touching a button and all other fingers off the controller. Breathing works just fine and I can even control if it is working or not. My squeak works as well as the toggle for it. So, now I can squeak when I do the open mouth gesture and I can turn off the squeak and just silently do the open mouth gesture. My body slider works too, though that was something I got working with another mentor a while before this attempt.
Ultimately, this is still a relatively new game, that's in beta, managed by a few people and the community itself. It will get better and easier as time goes on and I hope to help make that happen. There are many amazing things planned for this game that I am very excited for and I am having fun learning the way this game works. I am also working on a world that I will write an article about as I make progress on it. If you haven't yet and you enjoy social VR games, definitely give it a try. Especially if you are the kind of person to enjoy total creative freedom and the challenge that comes with it.
