OpenSim land area passes three million regions with Ireland simulation

Okay, so, at first, I thought Wolf Territories Grid had grown to the equivalent of 328,456 standard regions — up quite a bit over the 44,161 it was reporting last month.

The grid had a simulation of Ireland up. Yes, the entire country.

I was torn on whether to include these regions in my region counts but decided to go ahead with it. After all, the whole point of OpenSim is to make it easy and inexpensive for people to spin up virtual land. What’s a better example of that than having the virtual equivalent of an entire country up and running on a grid?

It did make the chart look like it had a giant spike this month, but you could still see all the previous months on it.

But then I emailed the grid’s owner, Lone Wolf, to double-check the numbers. The actual total wasn’t 328,456 but 3,284,564. Yes, that’s over three million regions. It didn’t just put a big spike on my land area chart. It made all the previous months and years pretty much invisible.

You see, their version of Ireland is a giant square, 1,800 standard-sized regions on a side. Multiply that out and you get, yes, more than three million regions.

So I’m subtracting that 1,800-by-1,800 region square out of their stats, which leaves a much more normal 44,564 regions. It’s still the biggest grid in OpenSim by quite a large margin, but no longer insanely big.

OpenSim’s total land area nearly tripled this month, to the equivalent of 447,317 standard regions — but almost all of that growth is a single region on Wolf Territories Grid that is an exact replica of Ireland.

With those revised numbers, the total size of the public OpenSim metaverse goes to 163,425 standard region equivalents, a drop of 535 compared to last month. That was due to OSgrid, which was down 961 regions.

Speaking of OSgrid, the oldest grid in the OpenSim metaverse announced on Monday that it is shutting down at the end of the year. The announcement came too late to show up in this month’s numbers. In fact, the grid’s active user count actually went up slightly, by 16, to 4,013 — possibly people logging in to save their stuff.

Active users were down by 25, to 48,344.

The total number of registered users went down by 6,145, to 453,388, mostly because Logicamp, which had over 7,600 registered users last month, did not report any user numbers this month.

The biggest gainers this month were New Life Italy, up 279 active users, and Wolf Territories Grid, up 246. LinkUp Grid, which was only added to our database last month, is already in the top 25 with 342 actives.

The following grids were added to our database this month: Sav’s World and The Oar Shop.

The following six grids were suspended this month: Dream Life, Gabngio, Margoon Grid, MS Axiom, Pleasant Retreat, and WKDVR.

If these grids do not come back online within the next month or two, I’ll mark them as closed.

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free, easy-to-use version of OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. If you offer region rentals and are not on this list, email me!

Top 25 grids by active users

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier, the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 13,882 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,013 active users
3. Groovy Verse: 3,848 active users
4. GBG World: 2,748 active users
5. DigiWorldz: 1,815 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,683 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,443 active users
8. New Life Italy: 1,387 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,211 active users
10. Sciattisi Grid: 1,048 active users
11. Cave Grid: 1,005 active users
12. Trianon World: 764 active users
13. Friends Grid: 743 active users
14. BloodMoon: 725 active users
15. AvatarLife: 717 active users
16. AviWorlds: 696 active users
17. Craft World: 623 active users
18. SpaceGrid: 487 active users
19. Free Life: 479 active users
20. Funny Rides: 420 active users
21. Virtualife: 419 active users
22. Jungle Friends Grid: 362 active users
23. ZetaWorlds: 345 active users
24. LinkUp Grid: 342 active users
25. Astralia: 341 active users

OSgrid is shutting down after 19 years

OSgrid will shut down at midnight on December 31, the grid’s board announced on Monday.

The board blamed a malicious actor who used inventory archive uploads to flood the grid with junk data. The grid’s asset server grew from 5 terabytes to 17 terabytes in less than a year, and the database table that tracks residents’ inventory items went from 3 gigabytes to 139 gigabytes, according to the announcement.

New registrations are already closed. The grid will hold a last membership meeting on Sunday, October 18, at 11 a.m. Pacific time at Hurliman Plaza.

hg.osgrid.org:80:Hurliman Plaza

Grid owners say residents should export their regions and inventories now, not in December — but some grids won’t accept inventory archives coming out of OSgrid, since that is how the attack worked. Other grid owners say every open grid should now assume the same attack is coming, and residents are hoping to save the grid’s historic builds before it closes.

Free ghost story stream for Halloween venues

Storylink Radio has launched a free, round-the-clock audio stream of narrated ghost stories that land owners in Second Life and OpenSim can set as parcel audio for their Halloween regions and events this fall.

To use it, open the About Land window in your viewer, go to the Sound tab, and paste http://s7.reliastream.com:8044 into the music URL field. Live sessions run on Thursdays at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. SLT.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

As of October, there are 21,961 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,828 product variations, of which 37,519 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 698 OpenSim grids to date.

All of these numbers are up from September’s data.

Kitely is also in the middle of a major upgrade to its software infrastructure, Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

“This upgrade is happening in a QA environment separate from the servers running the Kitely grid and Kitely Market,” he said. “Once we complete testing we’ll roll out these upgrades to our production system so people can enjoy all the performance, security and stability improvements they enable.”

Historically, all the Kitely Market growth has been in exportable content. This means that buyers can have their purchases delivered directly to avatar inventories on other grids, and that they can travel to other grids with the content.

In the early days of OpenSim, many creators considered this to be a security risk, and non-exportable content dominated. But creators quickly realized that most copybotted content actually comes from Second Life, where everything is non-exportable. And, in general, copybot tools and content thieves don’t bother to check item permissions before committing their thefts. Instead, allowing people to purchase exported content legally, conveniently, and at reasonable prices destroys the copybot economy entirely, leaving only a handful of freebie stores on grids that haven’t yet noticed that they exist and taken them down.

Another source of legitimate content on OpenSim is Linda Kellie’s products, and those of other creators that give them away for free under Creative Commons and similar licenses. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.

This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming services dramatically reduced online movie piracy.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of commercial legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

Top 40 grids by land area

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

There were a total of 324 active grids this month, 231 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,160 grids.

Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.

The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.

You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.

• Wolf Territories Grid: 44,564 regions
• OSgrid: 25,009 regions
• Groovy Verse: 18,428 regions
• Kitely: 17,526 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 17,152 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 11,190 regions
• Neverworld: 3,546 regions
• DigiWorldz: 2,515 regions
• GBG World: 1,929 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,625 regions
• Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,577 regions
• ArtDestiny: 1,089 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
• Craft World: 880 regions
• Exotic Realities: 776 regions
• Kinky Haven: 677 regions
• AviWorlds: 664 regions
• New Life Italy: 635 regions
• AvatarLife: 620 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 562 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 425 regions
• Furry World: 358 regions
• EdMondo: 310 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 296 regions
• Migrating Coconuts: 267 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 215 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 203 regions
• Funny Rides: 196 regions
• Maze of The Mind: 196 regions
• Sense Limits: 185 regions
• Spartans Keep: 185 regions
• I Love You Grid: 178 regions
• Dynamic Worldz: 170 regions
• Kater and Friends: 167 regions
• Adreans-World: 165 regions
• Twiztid Timez Grid: 159 regions
• Outworldz: 140 regions
• Utopia Skye: 138 regions

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that I don’t have in my database? Email me at [email protected].