Category: OSGrid

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Users up, land down for holidays

Hypergrid Business Data December

OpenSim’s public grids reached a new high in active users this month, as traffic went up more than 7 percent, or nearly 2,500 actives.

There are now 34,881 active monthly users on the grids that report these figures.

The OpenSim Community Conference last weekend accounted for 335 of the new actives, but the rest were distributed among 90 other grids.

The gain in active user numbers was the highest since July, and does not include data from several large grids including InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid which no longer publish traffic numbers.

Land area dropped by more than 9,500 regions. OSgrid’s land area fell by more than 11,000 regions, so without that cleanup, OpenSim land area would actually have increased.

OSgrid runs a regular clean-ups where unused region slots are removed from the grid map.

Hypergrid Business Data December

Total OpenSim land area in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business Data.)

Virtual Worlds Grid gained the most land area, the equivalent of 964 standard region, followed by ZetaWorlds with 447 regions, 3rd Rock Grid with 231, Kitely with 221, and PMGrid closing the fifth spot with 48 regions.

Despite the cleanup, OSgrid retained its place as the largest OpenSim grid by land area, with 18,921 regions. It was followed by Kitely with 17,332 regions, Metropolis with 6,943 regions, Atek Grid with 6,270 regions, DigiWorldz with 5,257 regions, and Lost Paradise with 4,354 regions.

OpenSim also recorded an additional 8,469 new user registrations across all the grids this month.

Kitely was the most valuable grid this month when it comes to bringing in new users with 1,354 new registrations. It was followed by InWorldz with 1,026, and education-focused grids Emilac with 849 and Eureka World with 804. Eros Resort added 789 new registered users, and OSgrid added 708.

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids.

According to the latest DreamWorld stats, there are more than 3,256 grids, out of which 1,132 are hypergrid enabled and 15 percent being mini-grids created with this installer alone so far. out of the 1,132 are hypergrid enabled.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

You can also add your grid in the stats if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. OutWorlds also provides OpenSim users with free  mesh items, OARs and free seamless textures that you can download and use on your grids.

Popularity

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.

The greatest gainer in active user numbers in the last one month was Eureka World with 406 users, followed by OpenSimulator Community Conference with 335, Sacrarium with 267 and AllCity with 146. Craft World also gained more than 100 active users.

Eureka is an educational grid, the OSCC grid was the site of this month’s big conference, while Sacrarium is a new Russian grid that has been criticized for lax content protection policies.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 4,262 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. Metropolis: 3,368 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  3. AllCity: 2,191 active users (HG login.allcity.com.br:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,049 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. GreekLife: 1,930 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  6. Eureka World: 1,303 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  7. Sacrarium: 1,221 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  8. Island Oasis: 1,191 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  9. Kitely: 1,034 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  10. Lost Paradise: 908 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  11. Dorena’s World: 814 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  12. Craft World: 797 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  13. Exo-Life: 685 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  14. Virtual Brasil: 630 active users (HG mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002)
  15. DreamNation: 551 active users
  16. Genesis MetaVerse: 508 active users (HG grid.genesismetaverse.com:8002)
  17. Logicamp: 481 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  18. OpenSimulator Community Conference: 434 active users (HG cc.opensimulator.org:8002)
  19. YrGrid: 404 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  20. EdMondo: 397 active users (HG slw.indire.it:8002)
  21. FrancoGrid: 392 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  22. Nextlife World: 392 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  23. Party Destination Grid: 387 active users (HG partydestinationgrid.com:8002)
  24. Eros Resort: 356 active users (HG opensim.bci3d.com:8002)
  25. 3rd Rock Grid: 326 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)

Metropolis saw the biggest drop in active users this month,  with 502, followed by Moonglow with 261, GreekLife with 200, Islands of Enlightenment with 124 and Kitely with 119.

Dreamworld stats

The Hypergrid Business database currently tracks 1,277 grids, of which 269 were active this month.

OutWorldz has another system for tracking grid counts, and currently has a total of 3,256 grids. This is up by 735 from last month. Out of the 3,256 grids, 1,132 are hypergrid.

The total tally includes 15 percent of DreamWorlds or grids created with the DreamWorld software that allows users to easily create and run grids at home as well as to connect to other OpenSim grids.

Of the 3,256 grids, only about 367 grids are online — 12 grids less from last month’s tally. The test to determine whether sims are online runs every hour and offline grids tested every four hours.

The details of statistics can be found on Hyperica directory of grids. and the daily summaries here on the OutWorldz website.

Any grid owner can add their grid into the list on the OutWorldz website if OutWorldz is not currently tracking its online status.

Kitely delivers to a record 240 grids

There are currently 11,014 products listings in  Kitely Market containing 20,858 product variations, of which 16,005 are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 240 OpenSim grids to date.

Exportable products on Kitely continue to increase. (Kitely Market Data.)

Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.

However, non-hypergrid grids can also accept Kitely Market deliveries, giving their residents ready access to a wide, legal, and ever-growing collection of content.

Kitely also last night updated its servers yesterday during a low usage period between midnight and 4 a.m. Pacific Time. The upgrade took four hours instead of the planned 12 hours, Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

“The result is that our system is now running on faster servers that it did previously,” he said.

VirTec network starts to show recovery

VirTec, a network of vending machines that work on multiple grids and support a variety of currencies, contiued on the growth path is began in September.

The value of transaction on the network increased in the last month by more than 48 percent.

The network also attracted a total of 78 merchants, the highest since February this year.

Value of transactions on VirTec Network started to rise last month since (VirTec Data.)

VirTec vending machines allow merchants to sell goods using their choice of currency, and also provide sales statistics and other functionality over and beyond the built-in sale function available in OpenSim.

DigiWorldz bought the vending machine service in April and runs the product as a separate brand.

HIE Expo will be held this weekend at Craft World

The Hypergrid International Expo has changed its conference venue to Craft World grid. The event will take place at 9 a.m. Pacific Time on December 16 to December 17 in the new Auditorium regions.

One of the four regions is for the stage, and three for the public.

Those willing to participate can also visit the new location and join Language Groups that will be used to transmit presentation in various languages — French, German, Italian and Spanish, with English translation.

The multi language conference will feature presentations from various grids, conference and training sessions. It will be the first expo of the group which formed just this year to advance various group interests for hypergridders including commerce and social interests.

The new hypergrid address is: craft-world.org:8002:HIEexpo

Immersive Reality offering free parcels

The Immersive Reality grid is offering free parcels and stores to anyone on the hypergrid. To get the free offers, visit the grid and click the mailbox in front of the parcel or store every 30 days to keep the land or rez something within 24 hours of claiming that land or store to keep it.

Each land measures 768 to 4,096 square meters for adult regions and 144 to 400 sq meters for the moderate region.

The hypergrid address es are  grid.immersiverealitygrid.com:8002:Boom Town and grid.immersiverealitygrid.com:8002:IRHQ.

Orchid Heights holds Advent Hunt

The Advent Hunt is an hypergrid-wide hunt where people can win gifts every day from different stores on the Orchid Heights, a region in DigiWorlds. It started in December 1 and is still on.

“People can open every day a gift on the advent calendar on the this region and will receive a beautiful gift, made by one of the creators on this region — Dexter, Eclipse, Dollies and G-Music,” Orchid Heights manager Suzan Moennink told Hypergrid Business.

She formerly ran ZanGrid, which shut down about a month ago. Some of the people and content from ZanGrid have moved to the Orchid Heights enclave on DigiWorldz.

There are Christmas toys on the four shops. A person searches for a toy with the number corresponding to the date that they visit the region and then they will receive the gift.

“So for example the 4th of December you go search for the toy with the number four,” she said. “You can click on it and you will receive a gift. On the 5th of December you go look in the four stores for the toy with the number five and so on.”

Each number is open for two days after that you will not receive a gift anymore from an earlier date.

In total there are 24 gifts.

There will also be a Christmas party from 12 noon to 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday 23 at the Orchid Heights club where DJ Digital will entertain those in attendance.

The hypergrid address is login.digiworldz.com:8002:orchid heights

Some of the places to visit this holiday

There is a long list of winter-themed and Christmas-themed grids and regions to visit for hunts, gifts, creation and other activity during this holiday season.

Transitions

Hypergrid International Expo grid enters the new list of grids we track. Others include Reserects Worlds, Jazzn’s DreamWorlds, Winsome Grid, The Haven Grid, and the Out & Proud Grid.

The following 12 grids were marked as suspended this month: 2nd Oakdene, Alluris Estates, Américas Worlds, CINECA GRID, Kingdom of Creation, KRRRL, Lupopas Welt, PTDE, TUIS Open Grid, UFSGrid, Unreal, and Virtual-EPI.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be under-counted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

December Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,277 different publicly-accessible grids, 269 of which were active this month, and 199 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

 

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Places to visit in-world this holiday season

Grids are getting an early start on the holidays this year, with a number of winter-themed regions already up and ready to visit, and a full calendar of events planned across the hypergrid.

Skiing and Winter Expo in Tangle Grid

Isle Expo region is ready for the Winter Expo event. (Image courtesy Tangle grid.)

This year’s Tangle Winter Expo will run from December 1 to January 13, 2018. Visitors will enjoy skating, sledding or skiing.

The expo will also feature exhibitions from creators, builders and merchants all around OpenSim.

“In the Winter Village there are numerous market stands available to anyone in Open Sim who would like to display their winter themed creations,  Tangle Grid spokesperson Elbereth Elentari told Hypergrid Business. “Leslie Kling is also the person to contact for more info.”

Those interested in showcasing, promoting or selling any items at the expo should contact Leslie Kling in-world or via email at lesliespiritweaver@gmail.com for more information.

The event might expand in future to promote OpenSim in general by showing newcomers what OpenSim has to offer.

“Near the landing point there is also an igloo with an OpenSim Spotlight theme,” said Elentari. “Its aim is to showcase some of the amazing things that OpenSim has on offer to residents and newcomers and hopefully with interest from people all over the metaverse it may expand in the future to involve more aspects and creations so that people can use it as a place to see what OpenSim has on offer at one glance.”

The hypergrid address is: tanglegrid.net:8002:Expo Isle

Get unique decorations and accessories at Great Canadian Grid

Mystery Creations is offering Christmas decorations and themes for sale and freebies. (Image courtesy Mystery Creations.)

Mystery Creations just released a new Christmas-themed collection. You can buy lovely unique garden, decor, landscape, furniture, animals, fashion and even avatars for the holidays. You can also get freebie items from the more than 100 awesome free group gifts at the region.

The hypergrid address is login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002:Mystery Creations Gloebits.

Win advent gifts at Kroatan

Eternal Ice region on Kroatan Grid. (Snapshot by Maria Korolov.)

Kroatan Grid will join forces with Virtual Life EU and KiWo grids this winter season for an advent event.

It will run from December 1 to January 6. One new door will be open every day until December 24 and give participants notecards and landmark addresses where the advent gift of the day is hidden. Some regions will have parties at the same day.

Then, all doors will be open from December 25 to January 6 and participants can still get notecards and landmarks from all doors.

The hypergrid addresses are as follows:

  • Virtual Life EU: virtual-life.eu:8002:XMas. This is an adult region  and no child avatars allowed. The minimum avatar height allowed is 1.56 meters.
  • KiWo: kikiandwollex.de:8002:White Snow
  • Kroatan: kroatan.de:8002:Eternal Ice

Enjoy a Christmas dance at Littlefield

Welcome Region in Littlefield. Christmas Island opens November 26. (Image courtesy Littlefield.)

Christmas Island Holiday region in Littlefield opens 6 a.m. Pacific on Sunday, November 26. You can visit the island for some sleigh rides, Santa workshop, ice skating, free Christmas gifts.

The grid will also host a Christmas Dance Party on 8 p.m. Pacific on Friday, December 24 at the same island featuring live DJ, dancing, food and drinks.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Christmas Island.

Enjoy nice snow and ice spots in DigiWorldz

Bandits is themed for winter. (Image courtesy DigiWorldz.)

DigiWorldz‘s Bandits area is decorated for Christmas with 16 regions of snow and ice with nice spots to sit wearing a warm winter coat.

The hypergrid destination is: login.digiworldz.com:8002:Bandits

Get Christmas-themed freebies at OSgrid

Winter region is themed for both Christmas and Winter. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

OSgrid has a Winter Paradise region that offers holiday freebies including Christmas freebies.

The region offers great views for winter and you can enjoy winter related activities.

The hypergrid address is: hg.osgrid.org:80:winter paradise

Catch the Christmas spirit and get freebies at Craft World

Christmas Spirit region in Craft World is ready for Christmas (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

Craft World has a region named Christmas Spirit that will be open from noon Pacific on November 25 to January 7 with a Christmas Market where you can pop in for Christmas market for some Christmas-themed freebies, dance and music to help get in the Christmas mood in time.

If you would like to donate some items for the Christmas Market, contact Raffaele Macis, who is known in-world as Licu Rau. The event is open to all hypergrid visitors.

The region will host a Christmas celebration at 1 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, December 21. It will be time to exchange Christmas wishes and gifts and party together.

The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002.

Enjoy dinner and ice skating at Baller Nation

Baller Nation Welcome Region. Christmas region opens to public on December 1. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

Baller Nation will host first annual Ball Room event at 2 p.m. Pacific on Saturday, December 16 at the Winter Wonderland Ball, a winter-themed sim that has been decorated by Baller Nation staff members.

Participants will need to put on their best gown tuxedos to attend the vent. Apart from the dinner, event, you can also visit the region to enjoy ice skating and winter lodge retreating. The sim opens to public on December 1. Drip Drop told Hypergrid Business.

The hypergrid address is login.ballernation.us:8002:Winter Wonderland Ball.

 

Get Christmas gifts from Neverworld and take them back home

Scorpio Christmas region in Neverworld, all set for Christmas. (Image courtesy Neverworld.)

The first region, Crystalwind has the Santas Village, a perfect little snowy village complete with a toy shop and a Xmas shop that has many free high quality items.

The second, Scorpio, an urban themed Portland Share also has freebies including furniture and decorations. It also hosts a Christmas Market whose tents has beautiful holiday decorations and decorated Christmas trees that you can take for free.

“This is the place to come to find gifts for your friends and family, and to find scrumptious decorations for your virtual home, and to take memorable photos in many winter themed settings,” grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

More destinations

Other regions which are already themed for Christmas include Crazy Houses at Party Destination Grid on partydestinationgrid.com:8002:Crazy Houses and Metropolis grid on hypergrid.org:8002:BRBP.

The Novale region of the CreaNovale grid is decorated with Autumn colors for anyone to celebrate the Autumn.

The hypergrid address is hg:creanovale.ca:8052:novale.

Are we missing anything? Let us know in the comments or email me at david@hypergridbusiness.com.

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OpenSim land area breaks 90,000 region milestone

OpenSim land area grew by the equivalent of 6,437 standard regions last month — enough to pass the 90,000 milestone for the first time in history.

The public grids reached 90,757 regions despite the fact that several large grids have stopped publishing land area stats, including InWorldz, Great Canadian Grid, and The Adult Grid.

Active user numbers went up only by 484, to 32,593. Growth was depressed somewhat by the closing of ZanGrid, which had 342 active users last month.

The massive growth in land area in the month was led by OpenSim Life which added a total of 2,458 standard region equivalents since we last collected the data in September. Next was OSgrid which added 1,404 regions, GreekLife with 857, Kitely with 228 and Atek with 164 new regions.

Growth in OpenSim land area. (Hypergrid Business Data.)

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids.

According to the latest DreamWorld stats, more than 2,521 mini-grids have been created with this installer alone so far, out of which 38 percent or 959 are hypergrid enabled.

This month, OSgrid still remained the largest grid with a total of 30,350 standard region equivalents, followed by Kitely with 17,111, Metropolis with 6,989, Atek grid with 6,270 and DigiWorldz with 5,253. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see the list of top 40 grids by land area.

Kitely was also OpenSim’s most valuable grid this month when it comes to bringing in new users. It reported 1,361 new accounts this month, followed by InWorldz with 1,149, Emilac with 840 users, EdMondo with 607 and Island Oasis with 597 users. Emilac and EdMondo are both education-focused grids, and regularly bring in large numbers of new users every semester.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

You can also add your grid in the stats if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. OutWorlds also provides OpenSim users with free  mesh items, OARs and free seamless textures that you can download and use on your grids.

Popularity

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. OSgrid: 3,979 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. Metropolis: 3,870 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  3. GreekLife: 2,130 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 1,974 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. Island Oasis: 1,176 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  6. Kitely: 1,153 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  7. Sacrarium: 954 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  8. Lost Paradise: 930 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  9. Eureka World: 897 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  10. Kroatan Grid: 751 active users (HG kroatan.de:8002)
  11. Dorena’s World: 745 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  12. Craft World: 690 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  13. Exo-Life: 677 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  14. DreamNation: 591 active users
  15. Virtual Brasil: 585 active users (HG mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002)
  16. Logicamp: 486 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  17. FrancoGrid: 444 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  18. Genesis MetaVerse: 427 active users (HG grid.genesismetaverse.com:8002)
  19. Neverworld: 399 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)
  20. ZetaWorlds: 365 active users (HG hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Welcome)
  21. EdMondo: 351 active users (HG slw.indire.it:8002)
  22. YrGrid: 345 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  23. Eros Resort: 336 active users (HG opensim.bci3d.com:8002)
  24. Nextlife World: 313 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  25. 3rd Rock Grid: 304 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)

GreekLife saw the most growth in active user numbers in the month with 677 new active users followed by Eureka World with 503 users and Genesis MetaVerse with 314. Virtual Life EU had 196 and Kroatan grid closed the top five spot of the most active grids with 166 users.

Of the top 25 most popular grids, only DreamNation was not hypergrid-enabled.

In fact, hypergrid-enabled grids accounted for 96.4 percent of all reported active OpenSim users on the public grids. However, one large closed grid, InWorldz, no longer publishes its active user numbers.

Dreamworld stats

The Hypergrid Business database currently tracks 1,271 grids, of which 267 were active this month.

OutWorldz has another system for tracking grid counts, and currently has a total of 2,521 grids. This is up by 339 from last month.

The total tally includes 17 percent of DreamWorlds or grids created with the DreamWorld software that allows users to easily create and run grids at home as well as to connect to other OpenSim grids.

Of the 2,521 grids, only about 379 grids are online, of which 56 are hypergriddable. The test to determine whether sims are online runs every hour and offline grids tested every four hours.

The details of statistics can be found on Hyperica directory of grids. and the daily summaries here on the OutWorldz website.

Any grid owner can add their grid into the list on the OutWorldz website if OutWorldz is not currently tracking its online status.

Kitely adds 300 more products

Kitely added close to 300 new products this month and now has a total of 10,913 product listings, containing 20,634 product variations, of which 15,855 are sold with the export permission.

Kitely Market has delivered items to 228 OpenSim grids to date, up by five grids this month.

Kitely exportables have been rising month by month. (Kitely Data.)

Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.

However, non-hypergrid grids can also accept Kitely Market deliveries, giving their residents ready access to a wide, legal, and ever-growing collection of content.

VirTec records increase in spending on grids

Expenditure on VirTec network by various grids. (VirTec Data.)

Grids registered a nine percent increase in spending on the VirTec network compared to last month. This was the largest increase since May this year.

VirTec is a vending machine network owned by DigiWorldz which can be used to create and manage sales across many OpenSim grids, both on and off the hypergrid, and supports multiple currencies.

InWorldz stayed on the lead in terms of expenditure on the network followed by DigiWorldz, Virtual Mecca, Baller Nation and Genesis Metaverse.

OpenSimulator Community Conference to be held next month

OpenSimulator Community Conference, an annual event for OpenSim developers and the user community, will open doors next month from December 9 and 10 on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid.

The event will focus on the latest software releases, visions for the future, and technologies or content today that are shaping the future of the OpenSim platform. The organizers are still looking for volunteers, presenters and sponsors. The event will feature short presentations, panels, performances, and workshops.

View all news, schedules and other information on the OpenSim Community Conference website.

HIE performs load test for next month’s Expo

The Hypergrid International Expo grid just completed its first load test last Wednesday, November  8 in preparation for the The Hypergrid International Expo that happens on December 16 and 17.

The expo will feature presentations from various grids, conference and training sessions. The multi language conference will feature presentations in French, German, Italian and Spanish, with English translation. The grid is dedicated to the Expo courtesy of Phaandor Pertwee and has only five regions.

The hypergrid address is: hie.ddnss.org:8006

Metropolis deletes infringing content, plans more bans

Metropolis grid announced this week that they have deleted several freebie regions that were violating copyrights, including Adachi that had “repeatedly violated” the grid’s Terms of Service.

The grid has now decided to delete Adachi owner’s inventory on the grid and issue a ban on grid usage, grid founder Lena Vanilli wrote in a Google Plus post.

The action will send a strong signal that the need to take serious copyright issues and to respect grid Terms of Service that discourage infringement, although it would not be received well by some people, read the statement.

Adachi has been at the center of copyright violations and related controversies in the recent past, with complains against it flying from every side. Metropolis grid, last month, called upon anyone with complains about copyright infringement on the grid to send an official complain.

Nine other regions are also associated with the same IP and since Metropolis must assume that there could be further damage from the IP, they might delete all the regions associated with that IP to prevent further damage, unless the company hosting Adachi region sends Metropolis a statement saying that they have discontinued hosting the region from their server as that would assure Metropolis that the IP would not pose further risk.

Former ZanGrid residents open a mini-grid in DigiWorldz

The Orchid Height community, which is a community of former ZanGrid residents, will open its doors to public as an enclave on the DigiWorldz grid. The grand opening will be at noon Pacific time on Saturday, November 18.

“We are still building up, but the main region Orchid Heights is ready to go and for this event we like to celebrate our landing in DigiWorldz,” former ZanGrid owner Suzan Moennink told Hypergrid Business.

ZanGrid closed last month after half a decade of OpenSim service as the owner went for further studies.

Those wanting to join the new Orchid Height community group can create an account at the website and when they login to OpenSim, they will land on the Orchid Heights welcome region and not the DigiWorldz welcome region.

“As a grid within a grid we also will offer regions to people who would like to own a region,” she said. “They will have full owner ship of those regions.” Orchid Heights will promote those regions on their webpage and on social media.

The community is formed by a group of people who were formerly at ZanGrid and who wanted to stay together and were searching for a new home grid.

“As grid owner of ZanGrid I helped them by giving the owner of DigiWorldz the filtered IAR and OAR files of those people, so he could load them on their avatar and on their regions in DigiWorldz,” Moennink  said. “Soon Orchid heights will have all their regions on their own server in DigiWorldz.”

Alchemy to have better currency support

The latest release of Alchemy OpenSim viewer released a few days ago features Gloebit’s proposed currency extensions for the first time.

Developers of Singularity and Alchemy viewers last month confirmed they would implement the module although they said they would need to do some changes on the patch code.

The patch, which was developed by the Gloebit team led by its CEO Christopher Colosi, will bring multi-currency support in OpenSim and eliminate the need for Gloebit users to do complicated coding and configuration for their grids and regions to support various money modules.

Phoenix Firestorm project manager Jessica Lyon also said in a post that allowing Firestorm users to purchase Gloebits currency on multiple grids via the viewer was a big step forward.

However, the team needed some legal advice before they can go ahead with the implementation of the patch in the Firestorm viewer.

For example, would be any complications for Firestorm if an unethical OpenSim grid owner exploited users’ money on their grid while the user is purchasing currency, or when the grid collapses, and the user takes the grid to court?

“And while we would most likely not be held accountable since we can prove we had no control over or interception of said transactions, we would still have to prove it and in doing so endure legal costs, travel expenses and a lot of headaches,” she said.

The full proposal of the patch can be read here.

Get sensational at Sensation City Black Millenium 2017

Sacrarium Grid region Sensation City will host the Sensation Black Millennium dance on November 23. Entertainment will be by Hard Techno and Hardstyle.

The small village is located on mountains and overlooking the sea so you get good sea views as well as enjoy good natural scenery.

Participants can also visit the beach where there is a store offering freebies, a club, Christmas market, and entertainment with DJs.

The hypergrid address is: sacrarium24.ru:8002:sensation city.

Transitions

Fifteen new grids were added to our list this November, including GlobusGrid, Moons Paradise, Ausgrid, DGridMen, VartownGrid, Imperial World, Hidden Oasis, Kokomo-World, Krabat Grid, Rhia’s Hideaway, Sunvibes Grid, SocialMouse, VirtualHarmony, Virtuality Grid, and the Hypergrid International Expo grid.

The following eight grids were marked as suspended this month: Avi Globe Grid, Blackswan, FranEsti Grid, New Zealand Virtual World Grid – Auckland, Rissland, SLFDGrid, Virtual ABDL Grid, and Virtual Dreamz.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

November Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,271 different publicly-accessible grids, 268 of which were active this month, and 198 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

Posted on

OpenSim land area drops due to grid changes

The total land area of the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 1,000 regions this month as ZanGrid shut down and Genesis Metaverse moved its hosting.

Total active users numbers continued to rise, however, with about 2,000 new actives.

Zangrid, which had 439 regions as of last month, is closing at the end of this month while Genesis Metaverse, which had 1,148 regions last month, went offline for more than a week as it changed hosting from DigiWorldz to its own servers. Its land area went down by 949 regions during the move.

A couple of other grids saw small land area decreases — OSgrid lost 159 regions while AllCity lost 152 regions.

Other grids gained land area.

DigiWorldz saw the most growth this month, adding the equivalent of 276 standard regions, followed by Metropolis with 229 regions. Kitely added 196 regions and Kinky Grid 162 regions.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids. According to the latest DreamWorld stats, more than 2,182 mini-grids have been created with this installer alone, out of which 14 percent or 789 are hypergrid destinations.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

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.

GreekLife was the lagest gainer of active users in the month with 377 new active users followed by Sacrarium grid that added 294, Islands of Enlightenment with 241 and ZetaWorlds with 175 more active users. Genesis Metaverse lost 589 active users as a result of the changes it made, becoming the grid that lost most active users in the month, followed by 2Open that lost 186 and Virtual Life Brasil with 84 active users.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 3,874 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. Metropolis: 3,823 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  3. AllCity: 2,045 active users (HG login.allcity.com.br:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 1,860 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. GreekLife: 1,453 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  6. Island Oasis: 1,253 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  7. Kitely: 1,191 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  8. Lost Paradise: 968 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  9. Sacrarium: 891 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  10. Dorena’s World: 823 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  11. Craft World: 802 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  12. Exo-Life: 671 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  13. Virtual-EPI: 671 active users (HG 209.126.208.163:9024:virtual event planners int)
  14. DreamNation: 623 active users
  15. Virtual Brasil: 534 active users (HG mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002)
  16. FrancoGrid: 500 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  17. Logicamp: 497 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  18. YrGrid: 431 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  19. Neverworld: 421 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)
  20. Nextlife World: 416 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  21. Eros Resort: 398 active users (HG opensim.bci3d.com:8002)
  22. Eureka World: 394 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  23. ZanGrid: 342 active users (HG login.zangrid.ch:8002)
  24. Islands of Enlightenment: 298 active users
  25. 3rd Rock Grid: 282 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)

DreamWorld numbers cross 2,000 mini-grid mark

OpenSim users looking to run their own private mini-grids on their personal computers are embracing the DreamWorld installer. This month, the number of installations has reached 2,182 OpenSim mini-grids in its network, 14 percent of which, or 789, are hypergrid-enabled.

DreamWorld gathers the data using a grid crawler but grid owners can also add in their grids into the list by filling a simple form here.

The full list of all grids including the date grid was created, hop address and whether it is hypergrid enabled or not can be found on this page.

VirTec shows slight increase in transactions, drop in total revenues

Revenue in the VirTec network fell by 14 percent this month although the amount of transactions increased slightly to reach 657 this month and the number of merchants remained fairly the same compared to last month’s tally, which indicates that the average value of transactions went down.

InWorldz led in terms of the dollar value of transactions or VirTec revenue, followed by DigiWorldz, then Genesis Metaverse and Great Canadian Grid.

Merchant and revenue data at VirTec network. (VirTec data.)

Gloebit’s number of transactions and users continue to rise

The value of transactions in Gloebit network increased by 8 percent in September to reach a new high of over 1.5 million Gloebits or more than US $6,000 in dollar equivalent, while the number of user accounts went up by four percent to reach 1,066 in the same month.

Number of transactions and users up in Gloebits network. (Gloebits Data.)

The number of transactions is rising faster than the number of users, which means the existing users continue to spend more and more money with Gloebit.

Kitely

There are currently 10,697 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 20,275 product variations of which 15,496 are exportable, meaning they can be used not just in Kitely only but in any other grid. These make up 76 percent of all variations.

Kitely Market now delivers items to 223 OpenSim grids. This is eight grids more than last month’s tally.

Exportable items on the Kitely Market, in green, rise steadily. (Kitely Market Data.)

Ruth 2.0 mesh body project is looking for a skin maker

Ruth 2.0, is a new mesh avatar body for OpenSim, to be distributed under a Creative Commons license. It is currently available with a female shape, and a male shape is planned for the future.

The creator, Shin Ingen, is now looking for collaborators, specifically a skin maker who can contribute pale, tan and dark skins.

Ruth 2.0 currently has 17,000 vertices for the head, left and right Bento hands, upper and lower body and a set of high feet, all of which is 8,000 shy of the ideal maximum game character polycount of 25,000.

Mesh bodies can look nicer than the “system” shapes available to OpenSim users, which are modified using sliders. However, mesh bodies also require custom-made clothing and accessories, and costs can add up if the base mesh bodies are proprietary and creators and users have to pay for the models.

The owner is also looking for people willing to help optimize the basic texturing, vertex weight to make it easy for people to build clothes using the software and to simplify weight transfer from the mesh body to the clothes being made.

Using Ruth 2.0, creators will be able to make clothes, shoes and other apparels and accessories and develop their very own fashion lines supporting their own fashion models.

The original “Ruth” is the name of the default system avatar in Second Life and OpenSim.

Get free parcels from Freebies Parcels at Neverworld

parcels are available at the Enclave region in Neverworld grid. (Image courtesy Neverworld grid.)

Neverworld grid has two standard-sized Freebie Parcels and Freebie Parcel II and The Enclave where anyone, including those from the local grid and hypergrid worlds, to set up a nice, serene parcels measuring approximately 4,000 to 5,600 square meters in area.

You do not need to create an account with the local grid to set up the land.

“The only main thing we ask is that you actually build on the parcels, since it is first come first serve,” grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business. “If you do not, we reserve the right to revoke the parcel and make it available to someone else. We feel this will be a big help to off grid members who cannot afford to rent a parcel in their home grid. I plan to add more freebie parcel regions this month.”

The hypergrid region address is: hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002:Freebie Parcels and hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002:Freebie Parcels II

Baller Nation to host Founder’s Day next week

Baller Nation will host the Grid Founders Day for four hours starting at noon Pacific on Thursday, October 19 and is calling all hypergrid visitors to come in and celebrate in this costume party together with them as they mark two years of operations.

The event will feature entertainment by DJ Lani and DJ Utmost.

Baller Nation also has new mesh body release that has tons of color options. It is available for shopping at the grid’s Gloebit-enabled Imagine Anything Market region.

The login address is: login.ballernation.us:8002:Imagine Anything Market

Hypergrid Chamber of Commerce is proposing a Virtual Worlds Fair

Hypergrid Chamber of Commerce, which has been trying to bring OpenSim stakeholders in all sectors including finance and development, is proposing a Virtual Worlds Fair that will list hypergrid destinations of interest, host nonprofit and commercial exhibitions from different people in OpenSim, and host events and walkin teleports of interest.

This will help promote virtual worlds on the hypergrid. Infinite Metaverse Alliance grid is willing to provide space and promotion for the fair but is proposing that a group come together to make it a success.

The event is great for those willing to look for more audience for their grids, services and creations.

See details of the proposal on this page.

All things Halloween for October and November

Island of Nightmares in Digiworldz is all set for Halloween celebrations.(Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

Many grids are already planning Halloween-related events including hunts, parties and entertainment. Examples include DigiWorld’s third annual Halloween party on October 28 at the Halloween Region, Tangle Grid‘s Halloween Expo at the Expo Isle region starting this Sunday 12 noon Pacific and Halloween Hunt at the Halloween Hunt region in the Kroatan grid, which kicked off on Friday.

Read more on Halloween events from our Halloween story here. You can also let us know what you are planning so we can include it in that story.

Topi’s World grid rebrands as Lost Soul Camp

Topi’s World grid is back online on its own Teampeak server and has changed its name to Lost Soul Camp with a new website, according to a post.

The grid, which is still hypergrid-enabled, offers rental land starting at 20 Euros for a standard-sized, 30,000 prim region.

OpenSimulator Community Conference coming this December

OpenSimulator Community Conference, which is an annual event targeting OpenSim developers and the user community, will be held on on December 9 and 10 on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid.

The event will focus on the latest software releases, visions for the future, and technologies or content today that are shaping the future of the OpenSim platform. The organizers are looking for volunteers, presenters and sponsors. The event will feature short presentations, panels, performances, and workshops.

View all news, schedules and other information on the OpenSim Community Conference website.

Transitions

We added two new grids into our lists. Chilumba Grid is a place for those looking for freebie shops and a nice place to relax. UKTurk, which helps people learn English and Turkish, also enters the list this month.

The following six grids were marked as suspended this month: CloneLife, FreeLand, Micachee, REDgrid, Ventureworldz and Yugen World.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

October Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,255 different publicly-accessible grids, 259 of which were active this month, and 181 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

Posted on

OSgrid holds fundraiser

OSgrid fund raiser has kicked off and targets to raise $3000. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

OSgrid, OpenSim’s largest and oldest virtual world, launched a fundraising campaign today.

The OSgrid Carnival Fundraiser kicked off today at 10 a.m. Pacific and will run until 10 p.m. Pacific today on the grid’s Event Plaza region. It will continue from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific on Saturday at the same venue and then move to the Maritime Club Belfast on Sunday, where it will go from noon to 5 p.m. Pacific.

The fundraiser will help the grid pay for hardware upgrades and also bolster its financial reserves so it is prepared for unexpected emergencies.

OSgrid, which turned 10 years old this summer, is a major driving force for OpenSim. As a testing grid, this is where developers can try out new features for the platform. Given OSgrid’s size, if they work there, they will work on any other grid.

The funds will be donated during the DJ sessions, live performances and dance sessions. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

In addition, by allowing users to freely connect regions running on home computers, it has become a low-cost entry point for users looking to run their own sims. It has also been an incubator for both social and commercial grids, as well as for OpenSim hosting companies.

The grid’s running costs are more than $1,000 per month, according to the grid’s donation usage report, all paid for by voluntary user donations.

Two years ago, a grid outage ended up costing more than $4,000 in data recovery costs, Stiofain MacTomais told Hypergrid Business. MacTomais is the host of this year’s fundraiser, a DJ, and regularly runs live music events on the Maritime Club Belfast region.

“Our fundraising target is $3,000,” said MacTomais. “All funds raised will go toward external costs as all grid staff are volunteers.”

Maritime Club Belfast on OSgrid. (Image courtesy Stiofain MacTomais.)

The balance in the grid’s PayPal account, which has previously averaged around $3,000 a month, has recently decreased to around $1,500, said grid treasurer Lawrence Roberts in a post. Roberts is also known as Albertlr Landar in-world.

A total of 20 DJs, live performing artists and singers will perform during the whole event according to this schedule and the donations will be given during the DJ dances and live performances.

A thermometer at the region will show, in real time, what is donated as the campaign continues. Grid officers will also be available at Q&A meetings held each Saturday at the Wright Plaza office building to answer questions from grid residents and other members of the public.

(Image courtesy Maria Korolov.)

Anyone can donate in-world or through the website using PayPal donation buttons.

The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:event plaza and hg.osgrid.org:80:maritime club belfast.

Posted on

OpenSim land area and active users up

OpenSim’s public grids gained 2,546 active users this month, and land area increased as well, by the equivalent of 2,475 standard region.

OSgrid gained the largest land area — 4,440 new standard region equivalents, followed by DigiWorldz with 848, Virtual Worlds Grid with 441, Kitely with 411 and Atek Grid with 256 additional standard regions. Discovery Grid, currently migrating to new servers, lost the most land area this month, 4,341 standard region equivalents, followed by OpenSim Life, which lost 280, and Genesis MetaVerse, which lost 225 regions.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

The public grids have also reported that they signed up 6,149 new residents this month.

Kitely led in new registrations with 1,962 signups, followed by InWorldz with 1,478, Emilac with 1,323, OSgrid with 623 and Island Oasis with 430.

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids. According to the latest DreamWorld stats, more than 1,900 mini-grids have been created with this installer alone, 694 of which were on the hypergrid.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

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.

GreekLife gained 537 new active users becoming the grid that gained most active users in the month, followed by DigiWorldz with 206, OSgrid with 158, then FrancoGrid with 129 and Craft World with 107.

OpenSim Life lost the highest number of active users, at 624, followed by Anettes Welt which lost 308 active users, while Discovery Grid lost 90 active users in the last month.

Metropolis was, however, the most active grid attracting 3,753 active users during the month, followed by OSgrid with 3,741 and AllCity with 1,931 to close the top three spots.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Metropolis: 3,753 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  2. OSgrid: 3,741 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  3. AllCity: 1,931 active users (HG login.allcity.com.br:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 1,720 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. Island Oasis: 1,223 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  6. Kitely: 1,181 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  7. GreekLife: 1,076 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  8. Lost Paradise: 928 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  9. Dorena’s World: 856 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  10. Craft World: 744 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  11. Genesis MetaVerse: 702 active users (HG grid.genesismetaverse.com:8002)
  12. Virtual-EPI: 670 active users (HG 209.126.208.163:9024:virtual event planners int)
  13. Exo-Life: 670 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  14. Sacrarium: 597 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  15. DreamNation: 580 active users
  16. Virtual Brasil: 558 active users (HG mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002)
  17. Logicamp: 465 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  18. FrancoGrid: 449 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  19. YrGrid: 429 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  20. Eros Resort: 380 active users (HG opensim.bci3d.com:8002)
  21. Party Destination Grid: 355 active users (HG partydestinationgrid.com:8002)
  22. ZanGrid: 351 active users (HG login.zangrid.ch:8002)
  23. 3rd Rock Grid: 329 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)
  24. Dynamic Worldz: 324 active users (HG grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002)
  25. Genesis Global Journey: 304 active users (HG ggj.world:8002)

Kitely Market delivers to a record 215 grids

Kitely currently has 10,502 product listings containing 19,880 product variations, 15,095 of which are exportable.

Only 4,785 of the variations of Kitely Market listings are non-exportable, meaning that they can only be used on the Kitely grid. That’s less than 25 percent of all variations. This is a drop from the peak of 4,970 at the end of 2016, and a sign that merchants are increasingly embracing the hypergrid business model.

Kitely Market has delivered items to 215 OpenSim grids to date, an increase of 12 from last month’s tally.

Exportable items on the Kitely Market, in green, rise steadily. (Kitely Market Data.)

Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.

However, non-hypergrid grids can also accept Kitely Market deliveries, giving their residents ready access to a wide, legal, and ever-growing collection of content.

VirTec sales show slight increase

The VirTec vending machine network recorded about the same number of merchants, transactions and revenues in the last month compared to the previous month, with 44 merchants and 642 transactions in total.

But the total volume of transactions, was $365 in August, up from $300 in July. That’s still down quite a bit from its high of $690 in March.

Virtec was acquired by DigiWorldz in April.

The most active grid on the network, InWorldz, recorded the equivalent of $192 in transactions.

Merchant and revenue data at VirTec network. (VirTec data.)

GerGrid now hypergrid-enabled

Gergrid is back to the hypergrid space. (Image courtesy Gergrid.)

GerGrid is now hypergrid-enabled, after a long time as a closed grid. This will help users who want to travel to other OpenSim grids and those who want to visit but do not want to immediately create an account with GerGrid.

The GerGrid Sandbox is also available on the grid for testing by creators.

“We are currently working with the OpenSim 0.9.1.x on Unix with Mono and ubODE, that brings considerable advantages with moving physical objects,” grid owner Thomas Goetz told Hypergrid Business.

GerGrid’s decision to turn on hypergrid connectivity leaves just 37 closed grids on our list. The largest, by reported active user counts, are DreamNation with 580 actives, and Virtual Highway with 118. The next four most-active closed grids are all educational projects — Islands of Enlightenment, Emilac, TeCoLa, and Cineca.

When a grid is not hypergrid-enabled, any new visitors first have to create new avatar accounts. This reduces the number of new people who can come attend events or go shopping. Some grids, however, prefer a more private, secure experience — and many school grids require it.

However, as multi-grid communities like OpenSim Virtual have proliferated and event organizers and merchants have become comfortable with the hypergrid, the number of closed grids has been shrinking dramatically over the past few years.

Discovery grid updates servers

Discovery grid has upgraded its servers, according to an announcement.

The company has shifted from Zetamex hosting to its own management and said the new servers have twice the power of their old servers.

However, the company said it was in the process of restoring a third server which had crashed when adding software.

The money server is also currently down, but will be up shortly.

“Your money is safe,” said grid representative Angel Legendary in a Facebook post. “We haven’t applied the money server yet until we can settle some of the more basic issues but I have a full list of avatars and their money. It is not lost.”

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

The grid has also posted a land sales page, with region prices starting at a dramatic $30 for an a varregion anywhere from four to 64 standard region in size. The total number of prims is limited to 45,000, so for the eight-by-eight varregion that translates to about 50 cents per month per 700-prim standard-sized region.

You can follow the grid on Facebook and Google Plus for all the latest news.

Moonglow offering free land, more speed

You can now enjoy faster speeds at Moonglow grid because the grid has is now using a faster server according to a post.

You can also sign up for free land on the hypergrid-enabled grid. Those interested in freebies can check out the many freebies shops on the many sims at the grid.

The new hypergrid address is dreamworld.home.kg:8002.

Neverworld has a new Halloween hunt area

Neverworld will launch a new Halloweeen-themed region called Requiem on Sunday, October 1.

“It is hypergrid-enabled,” a grid representative told Hypergrid Business. “Anyone can play and collect skulls and then redeem them for prizes. Prizes include seasonal Halloween decorations and jewelry.”

Halloween Hunt 2017 on Kroatan

Kroatan grid will host the Halloween Hunt at the Abbandonato region on October 14 and 15.

Hunters will get rewards and gifts given by some residents at the end of the hunt.

“Each hunter will get a free HUD at landing point, which shows 11 posters of missing people. By asking the residents of Abbandonato, hunters should find out what happened to the missing persons and will get rewarded at the end of the hunt game,” grid owner Bink Draconia told Hypergrid Business.

The hypergrid address is kroatan.de:8002:Abbandonato.

3rdLife Grid starts monthly car races, offers free shops

Interested in virtual car racing? 3rd Life Grid will have monthly races, starting on Saturday, September 23 at noon Pacific time on the Raceway region.

“This race is open to everyone from any grid,” 3rdLife grid co-manager Gary Justus told Hypergrid Business. “The winners get a trophy, bragging rights and a lot of fun.”

(Image courtesy 3rd Life Grid.)

There will also be two races on October. One is the regularly-scheduled monthly race at noon Pacific time on Wednesday, October 14.

There will also be a special Halloween race, with custom Halloween-themed cars, at noon Pacific time on Wednesday, October 28.

For more information on grid events, follow it on Facebook and on Google Plus.

Merchants can now also sell content on the grid to both local residents and hypergrid visitors, at 3rd Life Grid’s Gloebits mall.

Merchants don’t even need an account on the grid, said Justus, and just need to contact him in-world via his avatar DJTommy Seetan, in order to get a free store.

The hypergrid address of the mall is 3rdlifegrid.com:8002.

Diva Distro updated

The Diva Distro version of OpenSim, which was lastly updated in 2015, has released a new, updated version, but it comes with some challenges for users.

It’s good to see people are still working behind the scenes to improve the platform,” one user told Hypergrid Business. “But it has different physics so [some] mesh and scripts do not work that were created using Bullet.”

Some mesh objects will need to have their faces reversed in order for them to work, the user said.

The Diva Distro is a favorite option for users running self-hosted mini-grids, and is the base for the popular DreamWorld installer. DreamWorld currently supports both the previous version of the Diva Distro, version 0.8.2.1, and the new 0.9 version.

According to DreamWorldz stats, more than 200 mini-grids are already running on the new version, while more than 1,600 mini-grids are still running on 0.8.2.1.

Metropolis grid seeking donations

Metropolis grid, which does not charge any money for anyone using the grid even for profit, is calling on all well-wishers to donate to enable the grid continue funding its services including grid services, added data security and backups.

The grid said the money would also be used to extend its storage capacity.

The grid is was the most popular this moth with 3,753 active users. It has 16,112 registered avatars in total and 4,213 regions in total.

AvatarFest to exhibit builds from next week

AvatarFest will open to the general public on Saturday, September 23 or 24 and will remain open until Monday, October 30 for anyone on the hypergrid to visit and see the avatars created by the OpenSim community.

It will be third year the event is held and they have received different topics from creators on many different grids. The event promotes personal creativity, hobbies, interests and group activity.

There will also be music from various artists during the opening weekend.

The hypergrid address is avatarfest.net:6000:Avatarfest.

You can keep up with all events on the AvatarFest Google Plus community.

Watch the video below from last year’s AvatarFest:

Sacrarium launches from Kazakhstan

We haven’t had many Russian-language grids on our lists, and none from Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic located in Central Asia — until now.

Sacrarium currently has 11 regions and 81 registered residents, but reported more than 500 active users this past month. It’s on the hypergrid, so visitors can teleport in from other grids without registering for a local account.

However, the owner could not point to any particular events or promotions that took place this past month and could account for those numbers.

The grid’s main social media presence is on VKontake, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook.

“All people have secret wishes and passions. Sacrarium has to become a place for relies of wishes without any conditions,” grid owner Whiteangel Deed told Hypergrid Business. “In a manner, Sacrarium is a local experiment on a human nature with its wishes, good and bad sides of the personality.”

The hypergrid address is sacrarium24.ru:8002:sacrarium.

Transitions

The following grids were added to our lists this month: Mimic Life, Lupopas Welt, Eros Resort, Kinky Grid which also rents land, Argofantasy, Virtual Eden and Sacrarium.

The following 18 grids were marked as suspended this month: Adventure Bay, Brillyunt, Gnosis Grid, IMA Test World, Infinite Metaverse Alliance, Iti Motu Resort, Konk Combat Grid, Lighthouse Point, Marble Isle, Meet Instantly, Ocean Grid, Old Fuddy, Origins, Outworldz Pirateland HG, Outworldz.lnk, Paradwys, Play Grid BR, and That Place.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

September Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,255 different publicly-accessible grids, 259 of which were active this month, and 183 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

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A default avatar could make you look like a copybotter

If you’re using a default avatar that comes with some versions of OpenSim, your name might wind up on copybotted content without you knowing about it.

That’s just what happened to a user known as “Gemini Fullmoon,” a resident of the Great Canadian Grid. Fullmoon is also the owner of the Full Moon Designs store on the Kitely Market.

Last summer, Fullmoon set up a private mini-grid on a home computer, renamed the default avatar to “Gemini Fullmoon” and then traveled to a couple of other grids to test it out.

“It was pretty kool at the time I have to say,” Fullmoon said. “Once I figured out how to do it I quickly lost interest and pretty much stopped playing with Sim-on-a-Stick.”

However, that was enough time for the “Gemini Fullmoon” avatar name to get attached to copybotted inventory items uploaded by totally unrelated people, and, last month, Fullmoon’s name came up in a discussion about illegal content on the OpenSim Virtual community on Google Plus. One of Fullmoon’s alts, “Alex Reese99,” also had the same problem.

Allegedly stolen content discovered on various freebie shops. (Image courtesy Moonrise Azalee.)

“I would just like to warn people not to make the same mistake I did and also to get the word out that I’m not a copybotter,” said Fullmoon.

The problem is that the default avatars that come with the Diva Distro or Sim-on-a-Stick, software people use to create free OpenSim mini-grids on their personal computers, all have the same avatar UUID. That’s like a Social Security number for avatars. So when someone using a default avatar travels to another grid via hypergrid, their new avatar name becomes associated with that UUID in the new grid’s database — even if someone else had that UUID previously.

And the original copybotter avatar with the same UUID doesn’t even have to visit those grids personally — they might have ripped and uploaded the content then shared it with other users, who, unknowingly, took it to other grids.

“It appears if there is an item on a grid with that UUID but that avatar that actually created never landed on the grid it will retain its name until someone actually lands on the grid and then the name may switch out magically to the new person after an unknown amount of time passes,” said Chris Mac, known as Lite House on the Great Canadian Grid, who helped Fullmoon investigate the issue.

That means that the names of innocent users can show up — incorrectly — as owners of other people’s content. That’s a security issue for the other grid, since someone who isn’t the actual owner is now showing as the owner of the content. And if that other content is pirated, that can be a PR nightmare for the innocent user.

How not to share your UUID with a copybotter

It’s easy enough to keep the same thing from happening to you in the first place, just by creating a brand new avatar when you first set up your mini-grid.

“Using any new avatar during the start up on Sim-on-a-Stick would not create this issue since it hashes out a new UUID each time randomly,” Mac told Hypergrid Business.

But once the damage is already done, getting it fixed is extremely difficult, experts say.

Now, not only can your avatar name show up on other, random content, but your own content might wind up coming up as belonging to someone else.

However, you can keep it from getting worse. If you are using Sim-on-a-Stick, Diva Distro, or any version of OpenSim that uses the mySQL database, you can create a new grid and start over from scratch.

Or you can follow the following steps, as suggested by DreamWorld owner Fred Beckhusen:

  • Save backups of all regions using OAR files
  • Save backups of all inventories using IAR files
  • Delete the contents of the folder mysql\data\opensim\*
  • Delete the mysql\data\* files
  • Leave the folder mysql\data\mysql alone, along with an empty \mysql\data\opensim folder
  • Start Mowes.exe
  • Start Opensim.exe
  • It will rebuilt a blank system with new UUIDs after prompting you for the name of your master avatar

Mini-grid owners can also switch to the DreamWorld version of OpenSim, which is more up-to-date and, more importantly, is currently being supported. The Diva Distro hasn’t been updated since 2015, and Sim-on-a-Stick hasn’t been updated since 2014.

Diva Distro creator and hypergrid investor Crista Lopes did not respond to a request for comment.

DreamWorld, like the Diva Distro and Sim-on-a-Stick, is also a distribution of OpenSim that allows people to easily set up a mini-grid on their home computer. However, DreamWorld creates a brand new avatar, with a random new UUID, when the grid is first set up, Beckhusen told Hypergrid Business. That means that users don’t have the shared UUID problem.

Problem hard to solve for big grid owners

For owners of the big social grids, where random users upload a lot of random content, shared UUIDs are a much thornier issue.

Deleting all content with that UUID, and banning all avatars with that UUID, will hurt a lot of innocent people who use those default avatars by accident. And there is only so much that bans can do, since users may still continue to bring in content labeled with the problematic UUID.

“You can ban an avatar by UUID, but I don’t know of a way to ban an inventory UUID,” said Beckhusen.

And it won’t stop folks who deliberately create duplicate UUIDs for their avatars — or for their content — in order to mess with permissions.

That could create PR problems for social grids, since they could be accused by users of violating their content rights.

OpenSim does allow for avatars and inventory items to improperly share UUIDs, confirmed Metropolis grid manager Lena Vanilli.

But grids aren’t responsible for the problem, she told Hypergrid Business.

“This is not a bug but is related to the standard behavior of a viewer which is optimized for Second Life, with one database, not for OpenSim with many different databases and duplicate UUIDs,” she said.  “We are not responsible for the way Sim-on-a-Stick creates UUIDs.”

In general, no grid — and that also includes closed grids like Second Life and InWorldz — can guarantee perfect security for their content. And most creators understand that they have to prepare themselves for the possibility of theft. After all, even the biggest Hollywood studios can’t protect their movies from piracy, content that they spend millions of dollars to create.

Dierk Brunner

If someone has the technical skills, and runs their own grid, they can intentionally edit ownership of items inside a grid to appear as creators, Dreamland Metaverse CEO Dierk Brunner, also known in-world as Snoopy Pfeffer, told Hypergrid Business.

“In general it is always possible to intentionally create user accounts with an UUID used by someone else on another grid,” he said. “Then when objects of that creator are loaded the chances are high that at the other new location this user account with the same UUID is seen as creator.”

And, of course, grid owners can give their avatars “god powers” or edit their own grid databases.

Thieves who do not manage their own grids also have other options, including copybot tools.

“There is no 100 percent security unless encryption would be used up to the graphics cards,” Brunner said. “Currently it is only possible to make clear legal statements and to enforce them at court, if necessary.”

Shared UUIDs pose challenges for copyright enforcement

The UUDI problem also makes it difficult for content creators to track down the actual copybotters who originally stole and distributed the content.

Fred Beckhusen

“No one knows who actually uploaded the items when two or more people share the same UUID,” said DreamWorld’s Beckhusen. “So accusing one person of stealing, without better proof, is potentially libelous. There are multiple people running around with the same UUID, so how would you know?”

Beckhusen investigated the issue personally, setting up a new Sim-on-a-Stick minigrid, changing the default avatar name to “NotAlex Reese99” and teleporting to his own Outworldz grid.

The default avatar UUID, for those out there who are technically inclined, is “26ecc3a5-9243-470e-b8d9-4afcacdecf58,” he reported.

After that one visit to Outworldz, Beckhusen checked his grid’s database.

(Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)

“I scanned through the inventory tables and found a mountain that had been uploaded by this UUID,” he said. “It is now magically created by NotAlex, who literally was created today.”

Folks who have access to the OpenSim management console can take advantage of this security hole, said Beckhusen, since they can create new avatars with any UUID they want.

Creating a new avatar with OpenSim.exe. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)

Beckhusen then took his “NotAlex” avatar to other grids, and confirmed that the ownership and creation issues came up elsewhere, as well.

Chris Mac was also able to confirm the problem when traveling to other grids.

 

The avatar shape seen as created by NotAlex Reese99 to Beckhusen appears as created by brasiltropical.owner to a Craft resident. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)

One thing that might help, to some degree, is to clear viewer and inventory caches, Metropolis grid’s Vanilli told Hypergrid Business. 

That includes manually clearing the viewer cache after each hypergrid jump, she suggested. The instructions for doing so on the Firestorm viewer are here.

However, the cache is there to make things load faster, and clearing it will slow down performance.

The viewer cache saves local copies of content, and it also creates a situation where different creator or owner names show up for the same content for different users, or at different times.

“It might appear as Alex Reese now but later it will be another name or another user that gets cached,” OSgrid president Dan Banner told Hypergrid Business. “They might see the Simona Stick avatar as their own name because that is how it’s cached to them.”

One thing that content creators may consider is attaching a notecard to their content describing who the owner is, and how the content can be used. If the creator has a store or website, the notecard may also include directions for where to get more content. A brief summary can be included in the item’s description, as well.

In the OpenSim Virtual discussion thread about the issue, for example, Beckhusen notes that some of the content has an incorrect name for the creator, but the attached notecard shows that it was originally distributed by “Gladiatrix Athena SHAREORDiE.”

A notecard, or a description line, won’t keep criminals from stealing the content, of course. Notecards and descriptions are easy to change. But they will give legitimate users information about the content.

In addition, content owners could make it easier for their legitimate customers to check whether content is legal by putting up notes on their websites describing where the content is available for sale, whether or not free copies are available, and, if relevant, explaining the shared UUID situation. Then double check that a Google search for, say, “Gemini Fullmoon content” brings people to that page. (You can help improve that page’s search rankings by linking to it in your signature, store listings, and social media posts.)

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OpenSim land area passes 80,000 region milestone

The total reported land area of OpenSim’s public grids has passed 80,000 regions — a record high.

This is despite the fact that InWorldz, the most popular OpenSim grid, did not report its land area this month.

The total number of registered users went up by 9,764, and even the number of active users increased slightly, despite the fact that it’s the middle of summer and many education-oriented regions and grids are on break.

GreekLife added the most land area in July, a total of 1,371 regions, followed by Metropolis with 748, OSgrid with 482, ZanGrid with 245 and Kitely with 239 standard regions.

GreekLife also added the most registered users and most active users this month. However, this may be a bookkeeping issue rather than a sign of extremely rapid growth. Three months ago, all the grid’s stats fell sharply. For example, their registered user numbers fell nearly to a tenth of what they were before. Since registered users numbers never fall as long as a grid stays in business, especially not by such a dramatic amount, it’s likely that the problem was a stats collection glitch that they fixed this month.

Genesis Metaverse lost the most land area this month, going down by 163 regions, followed by Virtual Brasil that lost 95 and AllCity 66 regions.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

GreekLife registered 3,797 new user this month, though, again, this may be a bookkeeping issue. Kitely was in second place with 1,520 new registered users followed by InWorldz with 1,048, Emilac with 801 and Virtual Brasil with 412. Adreans-World grid lost 218 registered users.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

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.

GreekLife added a total of 291 active users this month, making it the greatest gainer of active users, followed by OpenSim Life with 214, Genesis Global Journey with 193, Metropolis with 175, while all the rest added fewer than 100 active users.

Eureka World lost the most active users will 233 followed by Islands of Enlightenment grid that lost 124. Both are education-focused grids.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Metropolis: 3,702 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  2. OSgrid: 3,509 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  3. AllCity: 1,797 active users (HG login.allcity.com.br:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 1,395 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. Island Oasis: 1,348 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  6. Kitely: 1,076 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  7. Lost Paradise: 1,011 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  8. Craft World: 868 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  9. OpenSim Life: 860 active users (HG grid.opensim.life:8002)
  10. Genesis MetaVerse: 837 active users (HG grid.genesismetaverse.com:8002)
  11. Eureka World: 732 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  12. Virtual-EPI: 660 active users (HG 209.126.208.163:9024:virtual event planners int)
  13. Exo-Life: 660 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  14. DreamNation: 592 active users
  15. Kroatan Grid: 585 active users (HG kroatan.de:8002)
  16. Logicamp: 486 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  17. YrGrid: 430 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  18. GreekLife: 410 active users (HG greeklife.eu:8002)
  19. ZanGrid: 369 active users (HG login.zangrid.ch:8002)
  20. Nextlife World: 367 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  21. 3rd Rock Grid: 364 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)
  22. Dynamic Worldz: 353 active users (HG grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002)
  23. FrancoGrid: 351 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  24. Anettes Welt: 318 active users (HG anettes-welt.de:8002)
  25. Neverworld: 303 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)

Kitely Market passes 10,000 listings milestone

Kitely Market passed the 10,000 listings milestone this month.

The online marketplace groups different versions of the same item into one listing, much like Amazon and other online shopping sites, so that, say, all the colors of a particular dress are considered to be a single product listing.

When all the variations are counted individually, as on the Second Life Marketplace, the Kitely Market totals 19,071 different variations. Of those,  14,314 are exportable to other grids.

The market now delivers to 197 different grids, up by three from last month.

Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)

VirTec vending machine network loses ground

It was a very bad month for the VirTec vending network. Both the number of merchants and the transaction volume fell this month.

The total US dollar value of transactions fell from $511 last month to $360.

The number of merchants also dropped dramatically from 238 to 55 merchants.

Merchant and revenue data at VirTec network. (VirTec data.)

VirTec is a line of in-world vending machines that allow merchants to sell their products on multiple grids, for multiple currencies. It was recently acquired by DigiWorldz.

Gloebits currency continues steady growth across OpenSim

Gloebits, a virtual currency that can be used on multiple grids, added a total of 52 user accounts this month and the transaction volume went up by nine percent to a new high of $3,839 in dollar equivalents.

Gloebits transactions and user account figures. (Gloebits Data.)

The currency is currently used on more than dozen grids and applications and is a popular currency choice for grids that run shopping malls serving hypergrid travelers.

Grids can have more than one currency, with some grids using Gloebit on hypergrid shopping regions and their own in-world currency elsewhere.

OSgrid will celebrate its 10th birthday end of this month

OSgrid will host its tenth birthday on July 24 at the OSG10B region, and the celebration will feature live music, dancing and exhibitions.

Creators will also have a chance to splay their creations and unleash their ideas and designs from July 24 to 30.

The builds will be those built by the residents and there is no particular theme for the event, grid president Dan Banner told Hypergrid Business.

“We do have exhibit space left if anyone is interested and can make the deadline of the 24th,” he said.

July 29 and 30 will be the days for dancing and live entertainment to celebrate 10 years of business.

The hypergrid address is login.osgrid.org:OSG10B3.

Genesis Global Journey hosts talent show next month

The Caribbean-themed Genesis Global Journey grid will have a talent competition this August titled “OpenSim Got Talent.”

The event will be held on the Freebies Island region and winners get a cash prize of US$50, grid owner Shawn Corr told Hypergrid Business.

“Winners will be determined by votes, this way the OpenSim community determines who wins,” he said. “A committee comprised of seasoned OpenSim users has been set up with additional people to be added in order to ensure effective planning and smooth running of the event.”

The event stage has already been built, he said.

The hypergrid address is ggj.world:8002:freebies island.

The grid is also offering free land to new residents. You can contact Zig Genesis in-world for more information and conditions.

 

Genesis Global Journey is fully Caribbean. Image Courtesy Genesis Global Journey.

 

 

Neverworld to host a coin hunt

Neverworld grid will be hosting the coin hunt for 24 hours from 12 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, July 29 at the Dream Hunt region. The winner will be the person who collects the most coins and will go home with a prize of a free standard region.

The region will remain free for six months, Neverworld spokesperson told Hypergrid Business.

The region will have no content but Neverworld can upload an OAR if the winner wants.

The contest is open to all including hypergrid residents, but the winner will need to create a Neverworld avatar account to run the region.

Looking for free legal scripts?

Check whether you can get a free script at the landing area of Script Magic freebies region in OSgrid. These scripts are donated by people around the OpenSim and you can use them freely.

They already have various scripts donated in the building, avatar, transportation, effects and texture categories. You can also donate a script for others to use.

The hypergrid address is: hg.osgrid.org:80:Script Magic

Learn or improve design and photography skills in-world

Metaverse University of DigiWorldz. Image courtesy DigiCenter.

Ever wondered how to improve your design skills in-world? It is all possible at DigiCenter or Metaverse University of DigiWorldz located at DigiWorldz grid, where you can learn various courses and techniques virtually under various tutors. The techniques courses include building, texturing, scripting, region management, real-life program skill and many others.

You can attend the One Prim Wonders class at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on July 20 at the DigiCenter campus where instructor Koz Maesa will introduce the Prim Torture tool. You will learn how to transform ordinary prims into various objects using reshaping techniques. You can join them as they focus on how to reshape various items each month.

Ever felt like you can try photojournalism in-world? You can attend Photography 101 at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on August 2 at the same venue, with instructor Gray Delwood and learn various skills that make a great in-world photographer including windlights, composition, backgrounds, AOs & pose balls, and basic editing. This class is offered every Wednesday at the same location.

The hypergrid address is login.digiworldz.com:8002:DigiCenter.

Transitions

We added three new grids to our list this month including the Metaworld grid which currently has only one and hypergrid-enabled region named Metaworld Core and two registered users. The hypergrid address is metaworld.outworldz.net:8002. Other new grids are Canadian-based VR Playground and HGLuv grid which has has 21 standard equivalent regions and 13 users in total.

At the HGLv grid, you can upload your snapshots after logging in on their website and those snapshots will be shown on your viewer login screen instead of the default grid page snapshot captured using the link.

The following 22 grids were marked as suspended this month: Bartelbe, BDSM Community, Bearly a Grid, CyberFace, DreamWorld Ayla Vu, DreamWorld Kids, Hive, Ipsofacto, Joy, Keystone Grid, KoolPheller Estates, Majickal Network, MajWorld, Radiola, SimudyneGrid, Simugrid, SUT 3D, Terra Virtua, TheGrid, Virtual Dreamz, World 3D, and Xntra City.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

July Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,244 different publicly-accessible grids, 261 of which were active this month, and 191 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

Top 40 grids:

 

 

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OpenSim records gains in land area and active users

Public OpenSim grids gained the equivalent of 1,257 regions this month, while the number of active users rose by 511, after falling for the past three months in a row.

Great Canadian Grid, InWorldz and The Adult Grid did not provide full data this data, as was the case the previous month.

The hypergrid active users share, which is a representation of the number of users who travel the hypergrid in the OpenSim compared to the total users, went down by three percent this time round.

OpenSim land area is now at 74,235 standard region equivalents after the gain this month and 97 percent of that area is hypergrid-enabled.

OSGrid was the largest gainer in OpenSim land area with an additional 1,421 regions, followed by Virtual Worlds Grid that gained 429 regions and Kitely 339 regions. This was able to offset the losses by Metropolis which lost 213 regions, DigiWorldz that lost 206 regions, Genesis Metaverse that lost 130 regions and Adventure Bay that lost 102 regions.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

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.

Kroatan Grid gained the most active users this month with430, followed by Eureka World — which lost 245 active users  last month — at 369 users, and OpenSim Life gained 217 active users. Metropolis, Islands of Enlightenment, Dorena’s World, AllCity and 2Open each added more than 100 active users.

Virtual ABDL Grid, which suffered an outage last month and so missed in the list, lost the most active users at 367, followed by OSgrid at 183 and Genesis MetaVerse lost 153 active users.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. Metropolis: 3,527 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  2. OSgrid: 3,514 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  3. AllCity: 1,722 active users (HG login.allcity.com.br:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 1,449 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. Island Oasis: 1,360 active users (HG islandoasisgrid.biz:8002:island Oasis)
  6. Kitely: 1,124 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  7. Lost Paradise: 1,014 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  8. Eureka World: 965 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  9. Craft World: 905 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  10. Genesis MetaVerse: 869 active users (HG grid.genesismetaverse.com:8002)
  11. Virtual-EPI: 654 active users (HG 209.126.208.163:9024:virtual event planners int)
  12. Exo-Life: 654 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  13. OpenSim Life: 646 active users (HG http://opensim.life/stats.php)
  14. DreamNation: 623 active users
  15. YrGrid: 489 active users (HG grid.yrgrid.com:8002)
  16. Logicamp: 460 active users (HG logicamp.org:8002)
  17. FrancoGrid: 411 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  18. ZanGrid: 362 active users (HG login.zangrid.ch:8002)
  19. Dynamic Worldz: 338 active users (HG grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002)
  20. 3rd Rock Grid: 335 active users (HG grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002)
  21. Nextlife World: 327 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  22. Dorena’s World: 318 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  23. Neverworld: 311 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)
  24. Anettes Welt: 274 active users (HG anettes-welt.de:8002)
  25. Islands of Enlightenment: 270 active users

Kitely

The Kitely Market now delivers to a total of 194 OpenSim grids. There are currently 9,803 product listings in the market containing 18,704 product variations, of which 13,960 are exportable.

Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)

Gloebits

Gloebits had a great month with an 80 percent increase in transaction volume compared to last month’s data while the number of users went up by 31 percent.

Gloebits transactions and user account figures. (Gloebits Data.)

Gloebits has also released new money module module files that can be downloaded from their dev site here. These files contain two updates, namely no purchase messages that a user would get upon every new session on a Gloebit app and a bug fix involving errors in purchasing land, a problem discovered in one grid. These two problems have now been solved, Gloebits CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business.

“We asked the community and had pretty uniform response that our chat message to inform them that Gloebit was enabled was good and our internal messaging system with our auth url was useful, but that receiving the purchase internal message every time they logged in after they had authorized was annoying,” he said.

Gloebits has also added the text to the chat message sent to clients upon a new session which tells them that they can click their balance in the viewer to get the link to where they can purchase Gloebits. Many Gloebits partners are also providing messaging on their regions.

VirTec

VirTec and DigiWorldz are yet to complete the transfer of ownership of the VirTec vending machines, but the network attracted a total revenue of the equivalent of US $511, with 238 merchants and 1,087 transactions. Last month, it had $538 in dollar revenue from 58 merchants.

Merchant and Revenue data at VirTec network (VirTec data.)

InWorldz was the biggest customer this month at $255 in total transactions, followed by DigiWorldz at $105 and Genesis Metaverse at $60. The other grids saw total transactions of less than $50.

Sinful Grid is folding

Sinful grid is folding at the end of the month, though temporarily, and is planning to come back with a new name and revamp, grid executive staff told Hypergrid Business.

Users are requested to transfer any cash or cash out any money through Podex as soon as possible.

MVC grid offering free parcels

Anyone who needs free land on the MVC grid can contact administrator Natasha Thiebaud in world. The parcels are available at the Home region of the virtual grid and are 2304 square meters in size and can hold up to 878 prims.

There are no specific rules for getting the free land.

There are also free stores available for creators and designers at the Plaza region.

The grid has also enabled a local grid currency for payments, grid owner Arturas Baltrukaitis told Hypergrid Business.

“MVC grid has enabled in-game currency or V$ for micro-payments,” he said. “Residents can buy it directly on our web page or purchase it by using in-world terminals of third parties re-sellers Podex and VirWoX.”

GreekLife now has a market place

GreekLife grid finalized its online marketplace yesterday and is inviting residents of other grids to create stores and use the marketplace. The marketplace can work with any currency from any grid, making it easy to run the store. It works like the old Second Life marketplace.

Anyone willing to create a free store can contact Nickos Mit, commonly known as Nick the Greek, in-world.

The grid is also offering free parcels holding up to 480 prims on the Greek Community region.

There is free land offers at the Mykonos region of the grid. (Image courtesy GreekLife grid.)

Earn in-world at Immersive Reality

Immersive Reality is now using the Podex money exchange to allow members to buy in-world IR$ currency but you cannot convert it back to real world money.

If you are a creator, you can work for them by building virtual slot machines and earn 60 IR$ per hour, Bob Reite told Hypergrid Business.

Rent land and get combat system free at Konk

The Konk grid is offering regions for $7 for the first three months, for a limited number of customers, said owner Mica Breen. Contact Breen at konkcombat@gmail.com for the details.

“All lands include our full combat and role play system suitable for Gorean and medieval and other style of metered combat in OpenSim,” Breen told Hypergrid Business. “Currently we have around 15 different regions hosting the system throughout the hypergrid comprising of many grids — Digiworldz, Kitely, AviUnite, Osgrid, Virtual Brasil,  Great Canadian Grid and of course the Konk grid with the main purpose here is to make a combat oriented grid.”

The combat system is given for free as an add-on to the land purchased. The land rental price will go to $15 per month after three months.

Land for only $1.25 at Tangle Grid

Tangle Grid is offering 5,184 meter square parcels with up to 1,250 prims for only $1.25 a month at the Dream Island region, grid media spokesperson known as Rainy-Dae Pixels in world, told Hypergrid Business.

“These have been set up for those who want more freedom than found within the free suburban areas, but who don’t want to spend $8 or more on a full region,” she said. “It’s a great way to dip the toes in and settle-in to Tangle.”

The Dream Island at Tangle grid. (Image courtesy Tangle grid.)

The grid is also holding its birthday celebration at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, July 7 at the Welcome Island on the beach.

It may go all day, depending on the entertainment plans for the day, which are yet to be completed.

The grid now has a new forum for residents and these, together with the existing communication tools, will help residents share events and find support, said Pixels.

3rdLife to hold birthday party and monthly race

3rd Life Grid will host the grid’s monthly race at 12 noon Pacific Time on Saturday, June 17 to celebrate their Dads Day Race.

The grid will also celebrate its first anniversary from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time on July 14, featuring two live performers from Second Life. Gary Jonstone, who is considered the premiere male country voice in Second Life, will start performing at 6 p.m, grid owner Tommy Seetan, also known as Gary 3rdLife, told Hypergrid Business.

“His high energy and easy, friendly way with people makes him extremely popular,” he said. “Combine that with the smoothest, deepest voice you’re ever likely to hear on any grid, and you have one of the most uniquely powerful shows anywhere.”

Shayne Jonstone, whose shows are also fun filled and energetic according to Seetan, will start performing at 7:00 p.m.

Moonglow grid to get a new server

Moonglow grid, which now has 53 members and 33 regions, is working on getting a new server to make operations run faster and doing some work on the database.

Transitions

New grids this month are the FranEsti Grid, which currently has two regions, a total of 11 residents and attracted four unique users in the last one month. The DevWorks Open-Source Initiative grid is run by an initiative looking to provide free open-source and proprietary software and scripts for businesses, 3D worlds, corporate world and start-ups.

The following 10 grids were suspended this month: Anvil1, Binary Hills, CyberFace, Microgrid Sundance, MysticGrid, Pegasus, Smxy, Snaketopia, SUT 3D, and Terra Virtua.

June Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,241 different publicly-accessible grids, 276 of which were active this month, and  195 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

Top 40 grids:

 

Posted on

Top five business models for successful grids

I occasionally get emails from people starting new OpenSim grids, and wondering how they’re going to pay for them.

Here are the top five ways that OpenSim grids find success.

1. Commercial grids

These are the best-known grids, typically because they put the most time and resources into sales and marketing.

They make their money by renting land and by making commission through currency transactions.

The most common way to charge for land is to set up PayPal forms on their websites, though grids use other payment mechanisms as well, including in-world payments.

(Image courtesy Kitely.)

Grids typically offer a handful of the most popular configurations, with limits on the number of simultaneous visitors and prims. Users looking for other configurations would typically contact the grid’s support staff and ask for what they need.

Island Oasis has a particularly slick interface:

(Image courtesy Island Oasis.)

The Great Canadian Grid also has a grid of the most popular options, and clicking on a particular offer takes users to a simple PayPal payment form.

(Image courtesy Great Canadian Grid.)

For currencies, grids either roll their own, use Podex to create a currency for their grid that can be traded on the Podex exchange, or use the Gloebit payment system. Gloebits can be spent on any grid that supports the currency, and is becoming increasingly popular with hypergrid-enabled grids and users.

Grids can also have multiple currencies. For example, several grids are currently testing the Gloebit system, with some regions using the grid’s existing in-house currency or Podex currency, and other regions using Gloebits.

Gloebit gives grid owners a cut of every transaction that takes place on their grid, currently set at 1 percent. Gloebit itself takes 2 percent of each transaction to cover its own costs.

How do grids set all this up? If they are owned by developers, they typically build everything themselves from scratch, or use open source modules.

Everyone else goes through a hosting service that takes care of all the infrastructure for them. Dreamland Metaverse has been the top-rated provider for the past few years, with newcomer DigiWorldz the second-favorite choice in last year’s reader survey. Other hosting vendors are here.

Typical services include OpenSim grid configuration, setup, management, and backups, website, currency, and technical support for end users.

Grid owners typically get discounts for purchasing large numbers of regions, and price their land so that they can cover their hosting costs, personnel costs, investment in content and events, and then make a reasonable profit.

2. Non-profit and donation-supported grids

A grid doesn’t have to make a profit to be successful.

OSgrid, for example, is the largest and most popular grid running on the OpenSim platform, according to our last stats report.

The grid has a number of donation options on its website, using PayPal.

OSgrid also has a partnership set up with Amazon, where it gets a percentage of all purchases made through Amazon’s Smile program. A grid has to be a registered non-profit to participate. OSgrid is an official non-profit, which also means that direct contributions are tax-deductible.

Another non-commercial grid that accepts donation is Metropolis.

In addition to soliciting donations on their websites, successful non-profits also hold fundraisers, sell merchandise, and recruit sponsors. All these are potential options for OpenSim grids as well.

3. Niche service grid

My personal favorite business model for grids is the niche service grid. Success is measured in how well the grid meets the needs of its constituency.

Take, for  example, Nara’s Nook. It’s not the biggest or busiest grid, but it has ranked very highly in our reader surveys because of what it offers.

Paradise region on Nara’s Nook, at world.narasnook.com:8900:Paradise.

Nara’s Nook is the top OpenSim destination for writers looking for community. The grid provides content, events, and virtual space to writers. It also rents out land, with fees set just high enough to cover server costs. Users can create local accounts, but almost all have their accounts on other grids, and visit Nara’s Nook via hypergrid teleport.

You can use a hosting company to set up a grid like this, or run it yourself if you have the skills and the server space. Letting users keep their primary accounts elsewhere will lower overhead.

4. School or company grid

Education and collaboration are two hot uses for OpenSim. Schools, government agencies, and businesses either set up their grids on their own, or use a hosting provider.

Dreamland Metaverse is particularly popular with enterprises, and offers a range of enterprise-focused services. For example, Dreamland can instantly create hundreds of new user accounts — one for every student or employee. Or turn off those accounts in bulk when they’re no longer needed. It can also set up roles, so that, for example, teachers can upload content or travel to other grids, but students cannot.

School and companies typically get their starting content by downloading free, pre-built Linda Kellie regions from Zadaroo. The content is hosted by Zetamex Network, another OpenSim hosting company.

5. Group or personal grid

Finally, if all you need is a grid for yourself or your friends, then you can set up your own grid.

You can either get a commercial hosting company to do it for you, or set it up for free on your own computer.

DreamWorld. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhunsen.)

For example, Dreamworld is an easy-to-use installer. Setting up a brand new mini-grid takes just a few minutes — read our review here.