Resonite

Resonite
Information
Type	Social VR
Industry	Social virtual reality, user-generated content
Developer	Yellow Dog Man Studios
Written In	C# (.NET)
Operating System	Windows, Linux
License	Free-to-play; selected components open source under the MIT License
Supported Devices	PC VR headsets through SteamVR and the Oculus runtime; desktop mode without a headset
Release Date	October 6, 2023 (Steam Early Access)
Website	https://resonite.com

Resonite is a free-to-play social virtual reality sandbox platform for PC, developed and published by Yellow Dog Man Studios, a company based in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Users meet in shared worlds with custom avatars, and they can build worlds, avatars, tools and games inside the application itself, in virtual reality or in a desktop mode, while other users watch and edit in real time. Its in-world scripting system is a node-based visual programming language called ProtoFlux.

The platform was created by Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík, the principal developer of the earlier social VR platform Neos VR, after a split with the publisher of Neos. Resonite entered Steam Early Access on October 6, 2023, and as of September 2026 it is still in Early Access, with builds released several times a month. It is funded through crowd support such as Patreon subscriptions, and it runs only on PC; there is no standalone headset version.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Checked every citation against its source: the Steam listing and appdetails, 19 official Steam news posts, the Neos Cloud Services Farewell post, Resonite wiki FAQ/Linux/ProtoFlux/FrooxEngine pages, GitHub repositories and discussion, the company imprint, and Road to VR and UploadVR reports from 2023 and 2025. About review dates.

History

Origins in Neos VR

Before Resonite, Mariančík was the principal developer of Neos VR, a social VR and creation platform published by Solirax. Neos had included its own cryptocurrency, and Road to VR described a "cryptocurrency-fueled rift" between Mariančík and Karel Hulec, the chief executive of the publisher. According to UploadVR, Mariančík resigned in late April 2023 after a long dispute between the Neos development team and Hulec. Negotiations between the two sides later failed, and the team saw mass resignations; in a joint statement it said that "we no longer see a path to successful reconciliation". Hulec continued to manage Neos, while Mariančík formed a new team to build Resonite.

In September 2023 Road to VR reported that Neos's Patreon income had fallen from an all-time high of over $18,000 a month to a little under $5,000; by October 3, 2023, it reported that Resonite was receiving more than US$25,000 a month through Patreon. On August 20, 2025, the Neos team announced that it was winding down the cloud services of Neos VR, which remains playable in local, LAN and virtual LAN settings.

Early Access launch

Yellow Dog Man Studios announced on October 3, 2023, that Resonite would launch on October 6 at 6:00 PM GMT (11:00 AM PDT) on Steam. On launch day the studio announced that Resonite was live on Steam and scheduled a launch stream on Twitch. The Steam listing names Yellow Dog Man Studios and Frooxius as developers, and Yellow Dog Man Studios as publisher.

In its Early Access notes on Steam, the studio said it expected "roughly 2-3 years of active development" before leaving Early Access. The goals it listed for the full release include a marketplace for creators, UI and building-tool improvements, a switch to "a fully custom graphics engine and modern runtime", and possible WebAssembly integration. The studio also stated that Resonite "will remain free to play".

In January 2024 the studio published a security incident report after discovering that a successful login wrote the user's session token to the local log file, so a user who shared that log could expose their account. It published a client that no longer wrote the login data to the log, cleared existing sessions that had only a single login, and stated that tokens could leak only through log files that users shared themselves; its cloud stores only salted hashes of session tokens.

Performance work and the "Splittening"

In May 2024 the studio ran a community survey on whether its next major project should be a rework of the inverse kinematics system or performance. It received 2,579 responses: 72 percent of respondents named performance as the main thing keeping them from enjoying Resonite, against 12 percent for IK, so performance became the next priority. The studio said at the time that it was leaning toward a process-based architecture and a modern .NET runtime.

The work moved systems that had relied on Unity into the studio's own engine, FrooxEngine. An in-house particle system, PhotonDust, arrived in experimental form in December 2024, and in May 2025 an in-house audio engine, Awwdio, replaced the previous hybrid system, which the studio described as about 80 percent its own code and 20 percent Unity's.

On August 20, 2025, the studio released what it called "The Big Performance Update (aka The Splittening)". FrooxEngine was taken out of Unity's Mono runtime and run as a separate process on the .NET 9 runtime, with Unity kept mainly as the renderer. The studio reported "massively improved framerate", less hitching and faster startup and loading, and said it planned to replace Unity with a different renderer in the future. It described the multi-process design as inspired by the architecture of web browsers. An upgrade to .NET 10 followed on November 24, 2025; the studio reported gains ranging from minimal to "up to 40 %" in certain cases, such as its ProtoFlux benchmark.

Open-source components and a new renderer

During 2026 the studio released several parts of Resonite as open-source software under the MIT License. ResoniteLink, a WebSocket and JSON protocol for reading and writing a hosted world's data model from external tools and scripts, was introduced in beta on January 8, 2026. A Resonite SDK for the Unity Editor, built on it, entered beta on March 11, 2026; it converts worlds and avatars from Unity to Resonite and can mirror Unity Editor changes live. On April 16, 2026, the studio open-sourced the Unity part of its renderer (the Renderite.Unity.Renderer project) to support community custom renderers, work on a new official renderer, and forks. Elements.Core, the library of core FrooxEngine data types such as vectors, matrices, quaternions and colors, followed on July 28, 2026.

The replacement renderer is being planned in public. The first phase, a call for requirements opened on GitHub in November 2025, asked what features a new renderer must support so that existing content does not break; it closed on May 12, 2026. As of September 2026 Resonite still ships with the Unity-based renderer.

Features

Social features

Resonite runs in VR or on a desktop with keyboard and mouse. Its Steam listing describes low-latency voice chat, fully custom avatars that can be imported and edited in-game, instant messaging, dynamic avatar scaling, drag-and-drop media sharing with synchronized playback, an inventory for saved items, self-moderation tools (silence, kick, ban, mute and block), and session visibility settings from public to private. Users can be present in several worlds at once and switch between them, which the studio compares to tabs in a web browser.

For avatar expression the platform supports full-body tracking with up to eight trackers (feet, knees, hips, chest and elbows), eye and face tracking, and haptic vests such as those from BHaptics. The official FAQ states that it supports up to 64 SteamVR trackers and Leap Motion finger tracking. In May 2024 Mariančík added native eye and face tracking for the Meta Quest Pro when it is connected through Steam Link. A screen-sharing feature entered beta in the main build on August 11, 2026, initially on Windows only; stream data is relayed through the session host rather than the studio's servers.

Building and ProtoFlux

Worlds, tools and avatars in Resonite are built inside the running application, alone or together with other users in real time, and the engine keeps changes synchronized between players. ProtoFlux is the platform's node-based scripting language. Its nodes are spawned and wired together in 3D space with an in-world tool, and it is used for anything from avatar and world interactivity to complete games. Road to VR noted that the depth of these tools means they require a high level of skill to use well.

Other creation features added during Early Access include:

Date	Feature	Details
June 2024	Resonite Package format	Exports any item, with its assets and ProtoFlux, to a standalone file that can be shared outside Resonite and imported by drag and drop
December 2024	PhotonDust	In-house multi-threaded particle system, released as experimental
March 2025	Gaussian splats	Import, rendering on desktop and in VR, basic clipping and export, with PLY and SPZ file support
May 2025	Awwdio and Spatial Variables	In-house audio engine, plus a system of spatial values for interactive zones and effects
January 2026	ResoniteLink	Open WebSocket JSON protocol for external tools (beta)
March 2026	Resonite SDK for Unity Editor	Open-source converter for Unity worlds and avatars (beta)

Architecture

Resonite's core is FrooxEngine, a custom engine written for the platform. Since the August 2025 update it runs as its own process on the modern .NET runtime (.NET 10 as of 2026) and communicates with a separate Unity renderer process through inter-process communication and shared memory. The open-source renderer is built on Unity 2019.4.19f1. The released components, including the renderer and Elements.Core, are written in C#. FrooxEngine uses BepuPhysics2 for physics. A headless server version lets users host sessions without the graphical client; official support for ARM-based Linux machines such as the Raspberry Pi arrived in December 2025, and the studio said this work also mattered for possible native support on Valve's Steam Frame.

Supported devices

Resonite is a PC application distributed through Steam. The Steam listing gives Windows 10 as the Windows requirement and lists VR support through SteamVR and the Oculus SDK; recommended hardware is an eight-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 or equivalent. The official FAQ states that it runs on Windows and Linux and supports "SteamVR/OpenVR, Oculus, and Windows Mixed Reality" headsets. On Linux the renderer runs through Valve's Proton compatibility layer, because of the limited Linux support in Unity 2019, while FrooxEngine itself runs natively.

At launch Road to VR reported that the studio did not appear to plan versions for Quest, PlayStation VR2 or mobile hardware. As of August 2025 it remained a PC VR-only application, with no native version for standalone Meta Quest headsets.

Business model

Resonite is free to play. The studio sells optional supporter subscriptions that add cloud storage and perks; according to the FAQ, the US$1 per month tier adds 5 GB of cloud storage. The FAQ also states that the platform has no cryptocurrency or NFT features and will not add them. Subscriptions were originally handled through Patreon; payment through Stripe was added in early 2025, together with a public endpoint that reports aggregate funding statistics per service. In August 2025 Road to VR reported that the studio was bringing in over $25,000 a month from crowd support, with paid tiers from $5 to $75 a month; UploadVR put the Patreon community alone at more than $11,000 a month.

Reception

Road to VR has described Resonite as a competitor to VRChat and Rec Room. In August 2025 Road to VR headlined its coverage "Social VR's Most Powerful Creator Platform Just Got a New Lease on Life" and wrote that being PC VR-only had "critically limited" Resonite's reach among Quest users. UploadVR wrote that the performance update should shorten loading times for maps and avatars and let more users share an instance without frame drops.

See also

• Social VR
• VRChat
• Metaverse
• Neos: The Universe