Author: Maria Korolov

Posted on

OpenSim activity up with the new year

All the OpenSim stats were up this month, as both land area, active users, and registered users all increased compared to mid-December 2024.

The land area of the public OpenSim grids went up more than 100 standard region equivalents, active users were up by more than 600 — and the grids reported over 4,100 new registrations.

Active user are the total number of unique visitors to a grid, both local and hypergrid. Registered users are people who have signed up for accounts on a grid, and is usually a positive sign of people’s commitment to a grid — and an early indication of future land rentals.

The numbers were up even though some grids didn’t publish their stats this month, including Moonrose, which had more than 900 actives in October. In addition, the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid lost nearly 300 actives because the grid hosted an annual conference the month before, and that traffic is now gone.

I am now tracking a total of 2,670 public grids, of which 300 were active this month and 246 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 35,873 standard region equivalents, with a gain of more than 250 new regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,932 unique visitors over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for January, 2025. (Hypergrid Business data.)

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Discovery Grid leaves OpenSim for new virtual world platform

Discovery Grid is still in the process of shutting down, but a few people are still visiting the grid, probably as part of getting all their stuff migrated.

You can read more about it here.

Hypergrid Business now on BlueSky

And we now have a BlueSky account: @HypergridBusiness.

Here are a few other folks to follow:

You can see everyone HGB is following here.

Leave a note in the comments if you have a BlueSky account and want people to be able to follow you, or if you know of a grid that does.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,932 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,743 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,512 active users
  4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,277 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,253 active users
  6. DigiWorldz: 2,068 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,531 active users
  8. Sciattisi Grid: 1,451 active users
  9. AvatarLife: 1,041 active users
  10. Trianon World: 998 active users
  11. Neverworld: 922 active users
  12. AviVerse AlterEgo: 915 active users
  13. AviWorlds: 871 active users
  14. Littlefield: 825 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 811 active users
  16. NakedWorldz: 797 active users
  17. Groovy Verse: 689 active users
  18. Eureka World: 570 active users
  19. Craft World: 556 active users
  20. Herederos Grid: 546 active users
  21. Astralia: 541 active users
  22. Gentle Fire Grid: 512 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 495 active users
  24. Vivo Sim: 478 active users
  25. Kitely: 456 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41071 product variations, 35833 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 637 OpenSim grids to date.

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

Last month, the numbers went down a little bit.

“Unfortunately a few stores were disabled because their owners passed away a long time ago and we lost the ability to transfer their sales earnings to them,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “In most cases, we don’t do this as people’s next of kin take over their accounts and shut them down themselves, or keep those accounts active and update the PayPal payout address in order to enable us to transfer those stores’ earnings to them.”

This is a reminder to all of us to make provisions for our online accounts, especially those that are generating revenues.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: BloodMoon, Doghouse, Gaming Friends, Life Grid, Medieval Fantasy, New Horizon, SpaceGrid, The Hub Grid, and Xenolandia.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following grids were marked as suspended this month: 3World, CyberCity, CyberDataStorm, Eenhgrid, KittyBlue, Mysterious Grid 2, SunEden Resort, Virtual Gay Pride, and Virtual Grid.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

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.

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.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Posted on

OpenSim land area, active users up for the holidays

Both land area and active users increased this month in OpenSim, possibly because people are spending more time inside, where it’s warm.

But who knows, really, why people do what they do?

Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,6617 public grids, of which 290 were active this month and 231 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 35,614 standard region equivalents, with a gain of more than 2,700 new regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,737 unique visitors over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Dec. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.)

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Discovery Grid leaves OpenSim for new virtual world platform

This big news today is that Discovery Grid is shutting down. The plan is for it to reopen on the O3DE platform, which Amazon created then donated to the open source community.

You can read more about it here.

Hypergrid Business now on BlueSky

And we now have a BlueSky account: @HypergridBusiness.

Here are a few other folks to follow:

You can see everyone HGB is following here.

Leave a note in the comments if you have a BlueSky account and want people to be able to follow you, or if you know of a grid that does.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,737 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,262 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,548 active users
  4. Alternate Metaverse: 2,357 active users
  5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,192 active users
  6. DigiWorldz: 2,140 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,633 active users
  8. Trianon World: 1,142 active users
  9. AviWorlds: 1,073 active users
  10. Neverworld: 1,065 active users
  11. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,018 active users
  12. Sciattisi Grid: 830 active users
  13. Party Destination Grid: 826 active users
  14. Littlefield: 761 active users
  15. Craft World: 717 active users
  16. AvatarLife: 656 active users
  17. Gentle Fire Grid: 621 active users
  18. Eureka World: 615 active users
  19. Groovy Verse: 613 active users
  20. Herederos Grid: 582 active users
  21. ZetaWorlds: 529 active users
  22. NakedWorldz: 512 active users
  23. Kitely: 511 active users
  24. Astralia: 484 active users
  25. Kishaki: 455 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,998 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,138 product variations, 35,902 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 634 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

Last month, the numbers went down a little bit.

“Unfortunately a few stores were disabled because their owners passed away a long time ago and we lost the ability to transfer their sales earnings to them,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “In most cases, we don’t do this as people’s next of kin take over their accounts and shut them down themselves, or keep those accounts active and update the PayPal payout address in order to enable us to transfer those stores’ earnings to them.”

This is a reminder to all of us to make provisions for our online accounts, especially those that are generating revenues.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.

New grids

No new grids were added to the database in the past 30 days.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 10 grids were marked as suspended this month: Alterlifes, Bernicia, Dominator, DowGrid, Goldor Grid, GorGrid, Nova Space, The City, Thrae, and Uzuri Virtual.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

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.

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.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Posted on

Discovery Grid moves from OpenSim to O3DE alternative

Discovery Grid. (Image courtesy Discovery Grid via Facebook.)

Discovery Grid, which had been in OpenSim for more than a dozen years, is moving today to the Open 3D Engine platform, also known as O3DE.

In his announcement, grid owner Rene Vega — also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world — cited declining user engagement and the limitations of OpenSim technology as key factors in the decision. Statistics showed active accounts had dropped to 26 percent of their 2019 levels, while monthly active users fell to 19 percent and total regions decreased to 55 percent of their previous numbers, he said.

“It is clear to me that this grid needs new experiences. It needs the means to ease the development effort by creatives; modern tools are required,” Vega said. “Unfortunately OpenSim lacks these tools.”

The transition to O3DE promises significant technical improvements, including more land space—equivalent to 32,768 standard-sized regions—along with advanced features like realistic ocean dynamics, volumetric clouds, and PhysX5 physics simulation.

To ensure an orderly closure, Discovery Grid implemented a 90-day transition plan, offering free region backups to all landowners and coordinating with the Utopia Skye grid to facilitate inventory transfers for users.

Rather than a complete shutdown, Vega positioned this move as a strategic pivot, stating the business would continue under a new virtual world platform based on O3DE technology. However, no specific timeline was provided for the launch of the new platform.

The closure reflects broader challenges within the OpenSimulator ecosystem, particularly regarding viewer compatibility issues and the platform’s struggle to keep pace with modern virtual world capabilities. Discovery Grid’s transition marks one of the first major moves by an established virtual world from OpenSimulator to the newer O3DE platform.

What is O3DE?

O3DE initially began as Amazon Lumberyard, built on top of the CryEngine game platform technology.

Amazon donated the project to the Linux Foundation in 2021, and O3DE became fully open sourced, with an Apache license.

It is a partner of the Linux-based Open Metaverse Foundation, which was launched in January of 2023, so, at some point, it might support teleports between worlds.

 

You can check out the showcase of O3DE examples here. There’s not much there yet. A couple of empty city builds, some robotics simulations, and a couple of game demos. None link to anything you can easily access online, though a couple do take you to a GitHub project page. I can’t find any examples of worlds built with O3DE that you can actually visit.

Plus, Unity and Unreal both have free options. Unreal, a high-end game development engine, is free if you have less than $1 million in annual revenues. Unity, popular for web and mobile apps, is free for individuals and companies that have less than $200,000 in revenues.

Is OpenSim losing steam?

Back in 2007, Second Life users figured out how the viewer communicated with back-end servers. This enabled people to build bots for Second Life, and to create alternative viewers to the official one.

Meanwhile, enterprises were getting very excited about the possibility of using Second Life for productivity, training, product prototyping, marketing, and customer support. However, they didn’t want their users in the public Second Life system, with all its gambling and nudity and financial scams. They needed a secure, private environment for their customers and employees.

So IBM and Intel and a few other companies and volunteer developers built a brand new server infrastructure that used the same viewer communication protocols as Second Life. That way, it could be accessed through all the Second Life-compatible viewers. On the back end, however, it was completely different and built from scratch. It even used a different programming language and architecture.

People were excited about being able to have their own private worlds — and to build commercial alternatives to Second Life.

Then, in 2008, Christa Lopes, a computing professor at UC Irvine, invented the hypergrid, and many of these new worlds became hyperlinked.

But then something bad happened.

Companies realized that there wasn’t all that much benefit to doing stuff in virtual worlds. There were better platforms for virtual prototyping and video calls were much more convenient for meetings. OpenSim had a high learning curve.

The way big, complex open source projects normally work is that they have a big community of developers that contributes new fixes and bug fixes. These developers generally come out of the user base. The more users, the more developers. Since most users are not themselves developers, and even those who are have other stuff to work on, you need a very large user base in order to continue innovating.

In particular, having large enterprises like IBM use the platform is key, because they can assign developers to work on the project. It’s not just out of the goodness of their hearts, of course — they want to make sure that a project they use a lot isn’t abandoned, and also that it evolves in a direction they like.

Without corporate backing, and without a large, passionate user base, OpenSim development slowed down significantly.

But so did Second Life.

The learning curve was too steep, the usability wasn’t there, and the benefits were not readily apparent. The technology was supposed to go viral but never did. People tried it out, says, “hey, that’s cool,” and then never went back to it.

Kind of like me with my giant collection of virtual reality headsets.

And OpenSim is way too slow and expensive to be used as a gaming engine. Successful video games need to be able to support thousands of players, at least, with no lag. And, of course, OpenSim has no built-in game mechanics.

As a result, there have been only minor, incremental improvements over the past decade. Teleportation improved. Stability improved. Graphics slightly improved. But basically, anyone who used Second Life or OpenSim ten years ago will find it pretty much the same today.

The usability hasn’t improved. The learning curve is no shorter. There’s still no decent web viewer or mobile viewer.

And, other than some kind of emotional connection to OpenSim and the desire to see it survive, there’s no real motivation for change. For current users, OpenSim and Second Life are fine the way they are. They liked it ten years ago and they still like it.

There’s no killer use case out there that people are clamoring for.

For me, OpenSim is now retro. Like text-based games or eight-bit graphics.

I’m a little sad about it. I’ve spent 15 years writing about OpenSim and used to think that it was the future of interactivity. But I don’t have my own grid anymore, and rarely go into OpenSim for meetings or events these days — so I can see why grid owners might be looking at alternatives.

The one big thing I’ll miss if there’s a big migration to something like O3DE is the hypergrid. Maybe Crista Lopes can take a look at it and see what she can do.

What about you? Are you planning to check out O3DE? What do you think about the future of OpenSim?

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OpenSimulator Community Conference starts today

(Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)

The OpenSimulator Community Conference, starts today with music and celebrations, then gets off to its full start tomorrow morning with a welcome panel with OpenSim core developers at 7 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow morning.

You can see the full schedule here.

You can also watch the presentations live streamed at AvaCon’s YouTube channel.

The conference is free to attend in person on the Open Simulator Conference grid, and you can register here or hypergrid to attend.

The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002.

Follow @opensimcc on X or on BlueSky and use the hashtags #OSCC24 or #oscc, and post your conference pictures and snapshots on our Flickr and Facebook group, or join the Discord server where you can also chat with other attendees during and after the event.

This year’s conference features over 55 speakers sharing innovative content, dynamic short presentations, and panels that all take place on Saturday, December 7, and Sunday, December 8, within the grid’s OSCC Keynote regions.

The schedule also includes live music, community and social events, and plenty of Expo regions to explore over the weekend. Don’t miss OSCC presenter booths located in OSCC Expo Zone 3 and the special hypergrid resources located in the OSCC Expo Zone 2 region with many how-to’s and scavenger hunt landmarks to interesting destinations where you can learn to hypergrid visit throughout the OpenSimulator metaverse.

There is also the chance to attend live music during Friday afternoon and Saturday evening #OSCC24 Music Showcase and on Sunday at the virtual venue of Maritime Club Belfast, as well as many post-conference community events and simulation tours.

Read more about the conference here.

Posted on

OpenSim user growth cools down with chilly weather

The weather’s been getting cooler here in the US where I live — some days, at least. The weather’s been a little wonky lately. And there have been other things happening in the country that make me want to spend less time in the real world and more time in a virtual one. So it makes sense that registered users and land area both went up in the public OpenSim grids.

What’s more surprising is that the total active numbers went down — by more than 2,700 users.

Sure, Moonrose, which reported over 900 active users last month, seems to be having website issues and did not publish its stats this month. In addition, Vida Dupla, which had 375 actives last month, did not report its active user numbers this month. And Great Canadian Grid, which had over 600 actives last month, is now closed.

But several grids also reported significant drops in active user numbers. OSgrid reported a drop of more than 800 actives compared to last month, Craft World saw a drop of over 200, and five grids lost more than 100 actives each.

So there’s something going on beyond just a grid closure and some reporting issues.

Maybe everyone went out partying for Halloween and spent less time in-world? Or maybe other people like the cooler weather and are enjoying the fall leaves and brisk walks while wearing cozy sweaters?

Nope! According to reader Paul Clevett, from Wolf Territories, OSgrid is down for maintenance. And I found the announcement. Thanks, Paul, for the heads up!

Apparently, OSgrid is currently offline, and has been since November 7, because it’s storage cluster was running out of space.

“OSgrid has 17 years of data which is approx several hundred million assets,” the announcement said. And it gets worse. The grid stores both the asset data and a redundant copy, but they’re not stored at the actual size — every asset looks bigger than it actually is.

To fix the problem, the grid’s storage needs to reconfigured, which involves moving millions of assets and scrubbing out the phantom extra space to free it up again. Doing this while people are using the grid would create a bad user experience, so they put it into maintenance mode during the bulk of the work.

The bad news is that they don’t know how long it’s going to take. The good news is that they don’t expect any assets to get lost.

Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,677 public grids, of which 295 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 32,867 standard region equivalents, even though it lost more than 2,000 regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,379 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Nov. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.)

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,379 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,046 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,498 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,190 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,058 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,011 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,497 active users
  8. Trianon World: 1,092 active users
  9. Neverworld: 1,042 active users
  10. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
  11. AviWorlds: 994 active users
  12. Astralia: 867 active users
  13. Littlefield: 861 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 822 active users
  15. AvatarLife: 672 active users
  16. Groovy Verse: 605 active users
  17. Eureka World: 595 active users
  18. NakedWorldz: 576 active users
  19. SunEden Resort: 553 active users
  20. Gentle Fire Grid: 514 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 494 active users
  22. Kitely: 462 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 452 active users
  24. Jungle Friends Grid: 434 active users
  25. New Life Italy: 434 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,973 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,105 product variations, 35,866 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.

 

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.

Kitely also announced support for PBR materials and larger textures earlier this month.

New grids

I added one new grid to my database this month: NakedWorldz.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following nine grids were suspended this month: Angel Grid, Ares World, Binders World, Cajun Grid, DreamNation, Ghost Area, Homeland, KubwasWelt, and Nosso Lar.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

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.

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.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Posted on

Kitely adds PBR materials support, larger textures

Kitely has added support for physically based rendering (PBR) materials in both its virtual worlds and on the Kitely Market, the company announced this week. The update also includes support for textures up to 2,048 by 2,048 pixels in size.

PBR materials allow for more realistic textures by simulating how light interacts with different surfaces, such as mud or metal, creating the appearance of raised and lowered areas with realistic light reflection.

(Image courtesy Kitely.)

The feature requires Firestorm 7.1.11 or newer to use.

Kitely is one of the first grids to support PBR materials, having ported the features from the upcoming OpenSim 0.9.3 release into their current OpenSim 0.9.2.2-based system.

“PBR isn’t yet supported in all OpenSim grids,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely co-founder and VP of R&D, in the announcement. “This is a feature that will be part of OpenSim 0.9.3, but that version of OpenSim isn’t finished yet so many grids — including Kitely — are still using the latest stable release, which is OpenSim 0.9.2.2. The reason that Kitely can support PBR now is that we ported the PBR features from OpenSim 0.9.3 into our version of OpenSim.”

The Kitely Market has been updated to accommodate the new feature, with the “Textures” category renamed to “Textures and Materials.” Merchants are advised to mention PBR usage in their product descriptions since items using PBR materials may not display correctly on grids that don’t support the feature. Alternatively, merchants can include regular textures as a fallback to ensure their products look okay on all grids.

“Kitely Market is the main marketplace serving the hypergrid so we decided to support the latest graphics options from OpenSim 0.9.3 even before they have been officially released,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

The update also brings support for reflection probes through LSL scripting, with new PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE parameters added to GetPrimParams and SetPrimParams functions.

PRB makes reflections seem more realistic. (Image courtesy Kitely.)

While PBR materials can technically be used for terrain textures, Kitely reports encountering several issues during testing. World maps will show objects using PBR materials but display only the basic color texture, not other PBR properties like normal maps or roughness. PBR terrain textures are not currently displayed in world maps.

For content creators, Kitely has added a new “Materials” folder to user inventories for storing PBR materials.

Creators interested in learning more about creating PBR materials refer to Second Life’s documentation on the subject.

Posted on

OSCC 2024 Submission Deadline Approaching

Olivetree Ghaelen Elli Buffy Beale Petlove and Marcus Llewellyn. (Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)

The clock is ticking for virtual world enthusiasts and creators looking to share their innovations at this year’s OpenSimulator Community Conference. Potential presenters have until October 29, 2024 to submit their proposals for the twelfth annual gathering of the OpenSim community.

“We hope that you can join us for our twelfth year celebrating the current and future use of open source virtual worlds through creativity, technology, artistry, and education,” said conference co-chair Cynthia Calongne, also known as “Lyr Lobo” in-world.

The two-day event will take place on December 7 and 8, featuring presentations about creative, educational, technical, and experiential topics related to OpenSimulator and the open metaverse.

“We’re interested in your wonderful content, insights, and accomplishments,” Calongne told Hypergrid Business.

Core Developers of OpenSim. (Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)

Organizers are particularly interested in presentations that showcase innovative content, significant accomplishments in the OpenSim ecosystem, future visions for open source virtual worlds, and creative applications of OpenSimulator technology.

Each speaker session will be 20 minutes long. The conference will also feature community-sponsored tours, an Expo, content giveaways, and hypergrid exploration.

Proposal acceptance emails will be sent out on October 31. Accepted speakers must register for the conference by November 7 to secure their spot in the program.

The conference will kick off on December 6 with music and art events, followed by the main program on December 7 and 8.

Visit the OSCC’s Call for Proposals page to submit a presentation idea.

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AvatarLife Viewer adds video calls, screen sharing

AvatarLife Viewer. (Image courtesy AvatarLife.)

The AvatarLife Viewer now supports video conferencing for up to 5 participants, audio conferencing, screen sharing without video, and six-language support.

“We believe in empowering our users with the tools they need to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. Whether it’s for a small group chat, a business meeting, or sharing work on screen, our new features make AvatarLife the ultimate virtual platform for staying connected,” AvatarLife CEO and co-founder Sushant Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business.

These new features are available at no additional cost for both Mac and Windows users.

AvatarLife Viewer. (Image courtesy AvatarLife.)

Video conferencing allows real-time video calls with up to five participants directly through the viewer, perfect for small meetings, virtual hangouts, or group discussions.

For those who prefer voice-only communication, the audio conferencing feature enables crystal-clear voice conversations for private chats or group meetings without the need for external apps.

The screen sharing feature allows users to share their screens without video, ensuring those who wish to stay behind the scenes can still actively participate. It’s ideal for presentations or project collaborations while keeping personal visuals private.

Language support has been expanded to include Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Russian. Users can easily switch between supported languages for a smoother experience.

To access these new features, users can download the latest version of the AvatarLife Viewer for Mac or Windows here.

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Spooky season brings more visitors to OpenSim worlds

It’s the spooky season here in the United States, with Halloween coming up soon and all sorts of creepy scary stuff happening, and cooler weather outside. Also — we’ve got the elections. So, three reasons for people not to want to leave their house and spend time in OpenSim as well.

Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained nearly 3,000 new active users compared to this time last month. However, with grid outages and stats changes, total registered users dropped slightly — and land area went down by the equivalent of 24,000 standard regions.

But the drop in land area is easily explained. Simation Grid, which reported 25,408 regions last month is now down to 1,024. Simation is a tiny grid — well, not in size, but in users — with just 3 actives this month. So the land area was most likely a test of server capacity. That happens. People try to see how many regions they can cram into a server, play around with it for a while, then eventually shut it down. After wall, why keep servers running for regions nobody is using?

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which an even 300 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Oct. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

As you can see from the chart above, the Simation regions created a spike in land area this summer, but the land growth is now back to normal levels.

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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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: 7,122 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,910 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,435 active users
  4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,206 active users
  5. DigiWorldz: 2,186 active users
  6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,980 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,593 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,081 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
  10. Neverworld: 965 active users
  11. Trianon World: 963 active users
  12. Astralia: 943 active users
  13. Moonrose: 916 active users
  14. Littlefield: 862 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 807 active users
  16. AvatarLife: 735 active users
  17. SunEden Resort: 692 active users
  18. Great Canadian Grid: 675 active users
  19. Craft World: 673 active users
  20. Groovy Verse: 597 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
  22. Kitely: 523 active users
  23. Gentle Fire Grid: 499 active users
  24. OpenSim Fest: 432 active users
  25. Eureka World: 427 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,048 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,164 product variations, 35,920 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 13 grids were marked as suspended this month: Angel Souls, Free Life, Insight Concepts, New Life Italy, Nordlicht Grid, OB, Phantom Rose, Pineapple, Planet, ProxyNet, TinkerLand, Trans Sidera, and TUIS Open Grid.

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

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.

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.

Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

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Storylink Radio plans fall events in Kitely and Second Life

(Image courtesy Storylink Radio.)

This year’s Storylink Radio’s October celebration is more ambitious than ever before, organizers told Hypergrid Business.

There will be live in-world Halloween storytelling all month long and dozens of YouTube exclusive presentations, including short Halloween tales every night on Storylink Radio’s YouTube channel.

All the videos were filmed in virtual worlds.

The live Halloween stories begin on Thursday, Sep. 26 and run through Nov. 2.  There are three different stories every night at 6 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9 p.m. Pacific time in-world and on YouTube.

There will also be a special, live, Halloween Trick or Treat story, and a Dia de Los Muertos storytelling.

“We will be presenting simultaneously at the Storylink Radio estate in Kitely and the Seanchai Library in Second Life, with a live intergrids chat connection,” StoryLink Radio owner Shandon Loring told Hypergrid Business.

In addition, there will be exclusive Edgar Allen Poe presentations on YouTube every Monday, a Frightful Classics full-length novel every Friday, and Short-n-Spooky tales on Saturdays.

For more details, check out the full calendar on the Storylink Radio website.