So, NeosVR effectively died, as it was announced in their discord that negociations with the crypto brain worms CEO had fallen through and the entirety of people who matter on the development team had effectively resigned.
I was expecting it, and this made me much sadder than anticipated.
Fortunately, it seems everyone started a new thing that's yet to be announced (Resonite).
This seems like as good a time as any to Wax Lyrical about why Neos mattered.
NeosVR was a strange animal, but also maybe one of the most innovative in the social VR space.
It's difficult to really explain why I held it so dear, but it had, at its core, an absolutely rad idea: you should be able to create content while in the world, and that aspect should be multiplayer.
So it was something akin to vrchat meets garry's mod meets old school MU* systems.
It's hard to explain just objectively how absolutely baller and full of potential that was, so I will instead just recount some tales of my time in neos that left a strong impression and explains why there's a neos shaped hole in my soul that I just hope Resonite might fill.
I met up with a friend who was, at the time, residing in China in the welcome lobby. I had done the tutorial prior but only had a vague understand of how all the (early, crude) panels worked.
We started dicking around and we realized we could do the tutorial together which was wild.
Then we invited more of our friends to come check it out.
Then Nexulan, the community manager, joined our lobby to say hi and proceeded to show us a few things about it. Slowly the intro world populated with a bunch of veterans who were all very kind, and started pulling out all sorts of cool user-made gizmos and contraptions from their inventory.
Afterwards we were all glowing from the experience and returned to make small worlds and gizmos ourselves.
I recall a very cool moment where I joined my friend's homeworld, and he was importing a diamond shaped mesh.
We both crouched next to it and started trying to hook parameters to a shader to make it change colors and rotate, and seeing it happen in real time on an object we could hold in our hands, together, was an incredible experience.
Often, if you saw a buddy hanging in their friends-only homeworld, you could pop in and see them comfortably taking apart a copy of their avatar or some object, panels floating around, a video panel with a tutorial angled above them, and a twitch stream in background (that you could also see and watch) going.
It really felt like a workshop, and you could look over their shoulder and poke at it with them.
I remember at some point I was hanging out in a public world with a bunch of people and someone had a cool flare gun that had to be loaded from a box. We got curious.
We took it apart and started spreading out the graph nodes to understand how it worked.
We had it neatly laid out and were working through it until I somehow had the genius-tier idea of firing it, and half the code went up in the sky at that moment, never to be seen again.
There's also something wild about iterating on a copy of your avatar while looking at it, trying it on, going "that's not quite right" and returning to your previous body to iterate some more.
There's also something weirdly sad about grabbing your avatar by the face to delete it form the world.
Building a whole world with friends in real time while shooting the shit is also incredible. It's hard to describe how universally fun that can be.
It had a bunch of weird mechanics too like the privacy bubble, where you could spawn a sphere around your head and only people inside it could hear what y ou were saying. Smart, intuitive implementation of a whisper system.
But mainly, how rich and deep everything was, made the potential feel limitless. Every space inhabited with friends suddenly became a blank canvas for us to inhabit.
That touched a small, atropied place in my heart from having a builder bit on a MUD/MUCK system years ago.
Vrchat has a nice SDK. But everything you visit feels so flat and read-only in comparison. What you can do is what whoever built the world intended, instead of limitless potential.
I had not been active on Neos for a while because locking in what you create to a closed, possibly dying ecosystem felt wrong and sapped any desire to invest time and effort.
I firmly believe there will always be a space for this specific experience, and it would be extremely sad if no one stepped up to fill it.
Hopefully Resonite will be that. I am eager to have that experience again.
@mr_daemon all of this sounds pretty cool minus the VR part which makes me horrendously nauseated after a few minutes and which is my least favourite way of physically interacting with content. if they bring the idea back with a regular keyboard and mouse and screen I'm definitely up to try it. (assuming it's in a form that is ethical; presumably that will be the case based on your dissenting tone re: the CEO)
@gsuberland Not unlike vrchat, there was (some) support for interacting with it flatly, but most of the experience being around touching things with your hands means it doesn't fully translate.
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