Category: serenity

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OpenSim grids hit record usage as grids prepare for holidays

OpenSim grids added 2,897 active users for a new record high of 45,108 this month. The grids also registered 1,950 new local users within the past 30 days.

The active user numbers include both local residents and hypergrid visitors, which means that some users may be counted twice — however, users would also be counted twice if they visited other grids by creating new local user accounts there.

Meanwhile, land area fell by 16,896 standard regions during the same period. The reduction in the land area was almost entirely due to administrative housekeeping at OSgrid.

OSgrid co-owner Dan Banner confirmed that a cleanup was responsible for a 16,449 drop in their region count this month. Since OSgrid is a “free-to-attach” grid, anyone can run a region on their home computer and have it be part of OSgrid just by running OSgrid’s region installer software. These regions are only up, however, while their owners are running them on their computers. If the computer is shut off, the region disappears. To keep other regions from grabbing their map locations, the locations are reserved. Every so often, the grid cleans out old reservations for regions that haven’t been seen for a long time.

Despite the cleanup, OSgrid remains the largest grid in land area with 22,232 regions in total, and is the most popular in terms of active users with a total of 5,461. Kitely is the second largest grid with 18,394 regions in total, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 13,200, ZetaWorlds with 7,892, and Alternate Metaverse with 7,019. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the top 40 largest grids by total land area.

The public OpenSim grids now have a total of 103,180 standard-sized regions in virtual land area. The OpenSim metaverse now is home to 475,167 registered users.

 

OpenSim land area has been increasing on average over the years. (Hypergrid Business Data.).

Alternate Metaverse, reported the biggest growth in land area this month, with 397 new regions. Serenity was second with 177 new regions, followed by The Verse with 47 regions, ArtDestiny with 45 regions, and Littlefield with 32 new regions.

These stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

The total number of DreamGrids — or home grids created with the software — has grown from slightly more than 2,000 in September 2020 to more than 7,000 today.  Beckhusen is CEO of Micro Technology Services Inc which owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

Fred Beckhusen

With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, users can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. They can also use it to easily and quickly manage their grids using graphical interfaces. This includes adding new regions, banning users, deleting regions, auto restarting,  tracking usage stats, and shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power.

The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here.

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

Top 25 grids by active users

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

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 5,461 active users
  2. AviTron: 3,915 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 1,939 active users
  4. GBG World: 1,784 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,751 active users
  6. ZetaWorlds: 1,474 active users
  7. MetaverseLife Grid: 1,194 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,128 active users
  9. Soul Grid: 1,125 active users
  10. Eureka World: 1,078 active users
  11. Kitely: 1,031 active users
  12. Exo-Life: 989 active users
  13. Party Destination Grid: 949 active users
  14. Moonrose: 940 active users
  15. Neverworld: 926 active users
  16. The City: 850 active users
  17. Dorena’s World: 742 active users
  18. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
  19. Craft World: 682 active users
  20. Astralia: 612 active users
  21. Discovery Grid: 552 active users
  22. Barefoot Dreamers: 517 active users
  23. DreamNation: 502 active users
  24. Littlefield: 497 active users
  25. Gentle Fire Grid: 426 active users

The active list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know.

MetaverseLife Grid added the most active users this month, growing from 80 to 1,194 actives. However, the grid has never had more than 100 actives in one month before, and we couldn’t find any record of major events on the grid this past month, so this statistic may be an administrative error.

Eureka World showed the second-most growth in actives, with a 384 increase, followed by Alternate Metaverse with a 279 increase, OSgrid with 250, and Discovery Grid with 188.

The active user stats are used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hypergrid teleport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids, or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.

Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Not all grids need a stats page — especially grids that aren’t open to the public like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this dark metaverse of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 19,689 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,322 product variations, 33,256 of which are sold with export permission.

(Kitely Market Data.)

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 565 OpenSim grids to date. The Kitely Market is the largest collection of legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.

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

Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.

In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.

Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, lists and sells a total of 28,286 virtual items including apparel, avatar accessories, avatar appearances, and other items. From the marketplace’s website, anyone is able to list their products or items on the marketplace to promote them either for sale or as a freebie, but the content can only be purchased and used within the Tag grid and can’t be taken or delivered to other grids.

Littlefield upgrades server, finds undocumented issue

Littlefield has upgraded to OpenSim 0.9.2.1 after seven years on an earlier version of the software.

Although the upgrade went well, the grid would like to let everyone know about a vital setting that is not in the sample Robust.ini files, is undocumented, and may prevent a successful upgrade to the latest OpenSim version, said Chuck Simmons, Littlefield’s chief technology officer and grid architect. He is also known in-world as Ashton Nobilis.

Chuck Simmons.

“There were a few small issues during the upgrade that other grids should be mindful of when going from 0.8x to 0.9x, but the one that really sticks out is the change in the format of the fsassets datastore directory tree,” he told Hypergrid Business. “In older versions of OpenSimulator, an asset with the UUID of 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 would be stored in a path similar to /data/000/000/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.gz. Somewhere in the 0.9x development cycle, it was decided that asset should reside at /data/00/00/00/0000/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.gz, which is a completely different directory path which can prevent the existing asset datastore from being able to be seen by OpenSimulator.”

“Fortunately, there is a setting that can be placed in the Robust configuration files to specify the older format so that the asset datastore doesn’t have to be converted,” he added. “For the benefit of your readers that may still be on 0.x, using fsassets, and wanting to upgrade to 0.9x, the UseOsgridFormat = true command should be placed in the [AssetService] section of the Robust.ini to preserve the older format.”

Simmons was able to do this after parsing the source code but many users may be unable to do this which could interfere with a successful upgrade.

“I’m not sure why this feature is not documented, perhaps it is an oversight, but I don’t see any reason for it to be tucked aside considering the amount of frustration that can be caused,” he said. “We appreciate all the hard work the OpenSimulator developers have done and continue to do, but I think it might be beneficial to the OpenSimulator community to help ensure information is easily available to all.”

The grid is now back up and running on a new server with multiple Robust instances serving its multi-terabyte database and asset datastore to the residents in a safe, stable environment, he said.

The grid has also made minor changes to its region pricing structure., adding a new 15,000-prim region for $10 a month.

Littlefield to host ninth annual Thanksgiving event next week

(Image courtesy Littlefield grid.).

Littlefield’s ninth Thanksgiving — a recreation of the WKRP Turkey Drop, a classic Thanksgiving TV bit from the 70s in the United States — kicks off at 3.00 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, November 24.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Littlefield.

A Thanksgiving dinner is also among the activities prepared and is open to anyone including hypergrid visitors. It will take place at the Stonehaven Region.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Stonehaven. 

The Thanksgiving Dance Party will be held at the Speakeasy Dance Club starting at 8.00 p.m. Pacific Time.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Speakeasy. 

WLFG Radio will be playing Alice’s Restaurant and several Thanksgiving-related tunes all day long.

The annual WLFG Holiday Radio stream will be opened on November 25. The stream, which is open for anyone to tune into, will be playing Christmas Music all day and every week until January 6, 2023, Littlefield grid co-founder Walter Balazic told Hypergrid Business.

The hypergrid address is holiday.littlefieldgrid.com:8050. 

(Image courtesy Littlefield grid.).

Littlefield’s Christmas Island will be opened on Friday, November 25. The region will be offering free Christmas decorations that visitors can take away and use to decorate their own areas; free sleigh rides, and other attractions.

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

Winterfest in Alternate Metaverse next month

Wintervale. (image courtesy Alternate Metaverse.).

The Alternate Metaverse will host a Winterfest starting on December 22 through January 1 at the Wintervale region.

There will be winter events including skiing, ice skating, snowboarding, fantasy snow globes, Wintervale Palace, ice fishing, cafe on ice, sledding, winter carriage riding, snowman builds, a winter ballroom, and a photo booth. Other activities and events include a carnival, karaoke, a tree decorating contest, belly dancing, live performances, and DJing.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Wintervale.

Monentes Jewelry closes down

The Monentes Jewelry store — which offers free and full perm customizable virtual jewelry in OutWordz and Virtual-HG grids– will be closing down temporarily this month until January 2023 for remodeling. The owner also offers a free Monentes Jewelry Store OAR as a gift to the community so that anyone who wishes can rez their very own jewelry store at their own grid, and will continue to do so.

The remodeling will result into a cozier store and new jewelry designs, said Monentes Jewelry owner and designer Marianna Monentes.

Marianna Monentes

“My main store was in need of a bit of a remodel that it seemed so huge I am thinking of something a bit cozier,” she told Hypergrid Business. “We will see. I am still pondering. January I will open a little satellite store where I will present new pieces so those store owners who rez their jewelry stores at their own grids can pick up and add new pieces to their own store collections. I am also considering making exclusive pieces for each individual store for whoever asks me so that each store will be unique to the owners.”

The Monentes Jewelry store OAR can be picked up at Outworldz.

“I decided to make the jewelry free so that people could check out the jewelry prior to any purchase they might make,” she said. “Giving the store OAR seemed logical and I love that others can have the store on their grids.”

The hypergrid addresses is virtual-hg.com:8002:Monentes Jewelry.

Winter and Christmas shopping at Free Souls

Lunaria has an already set Christmas area, gifts boxes and other gifts, Christmas tree, and decorations. (Image courtesy Lunaria.).

The Lunaria region of the Free Souls grid is themed for the winter season with beautiful winter sceneries and events, including cross-country skiing and skating.

It also has Christmas decorations and Christmas markets where visitors can go shopping for Christmas. There are areas for exploring, trolling, and driving the carousels.

The hypergrid address is free-souls.de:8002:Lunaria.

Winter and holiday events and music at New Hope

The Aria region of the New Hope Grid is ready for winter holiday events and is themed for them with an ice rink, Christmas trees, lighting, and winter blossoms.

The region also hosts regular live music and entertainment events that feature different OpenSim and real-life artists including Rogue Galaxy and Clairde Dirval.

The hypergrid address is login.newhopegrid.com:8002:Aria.

Novale preparing for winter after successful autumn activity

(Image courtesy Novale.).

The Novale region of the CreaNovale grid is preparing for winter events this November after concluding its successful autumn season events and activities.

The Novale’s autumn season — which ended on November 12 — had a host of activities including cereal and fruit growing and harvesting, horse riding, boat tours, a guided tour of the Halloween attractions, and a Caves Hunt.

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

Metaverselife opens new winter store

The iPleasure region at the Metaverselife grid has a new Winter Store which will start offering new winter items as freebies. The region has a new Skin Store for skin freebies. It offers female and male fashion freebies and animations freebies.

The hypergrid address is metaverselife.org:8002:iPleasure. 

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Mathesis and Nymph Paradise.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,491 different publicly-accessible grids, 369 of which were active this month, and 267 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.

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

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April stats all up despite outages

All OpenSim stats are up this month. The total land area of the public OpenSim grids increased by more than 1,000 regions, to 100,880, while the active users increased by more than 3,000, to 43,272.

Creatrix World, which reported more than 700 regions last month, is currently recovering from a server crash, and The Social Mouse is down for maintenance and reported a large drop in active users. In addition, the Great Canadian Grid did not report its land area stats this month, and Tag Grid did not report its active users.

We are now tracking a total of 1,748 grids, 361 of which are active, out of which 297 had their stats reported this month.

This month, OSgrid was the biggest gainer of land area, with the equivalent of 947 new regions, followed by Furry World with 424, Serenity with 275, Alternate Metaverse with 138, and AviTron with 75 new regions.

OSgrid is also the largest grid in terms of land area, with a total of 36,500 standard region equivalents followed by Kitely with 18,942, ZetaWorlds with 7,646, Alternate Metaverse: with 5,875, and Discovery Grid with 5,873 regions. Scroll down to the bottom of this article and see the list of 40 largest grids by land area.

Total regions, in standard region equivalents, on public OpenSim grids, as of April 2022. (Hypergrid Business data.)

These stats do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid, which is a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid lets anyone create a small home grid on their computer easily through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. The software is free to download and use. Customers can use it to easily and quickly manage their grids using graphical interfaces. They can add new regions, ban users, delete regions, auto restart and shut down entire grid or unoccupied regions to save computing power, and track usage stats.

Outworldz DreamGrids have access to 170 free OpenSim Archives, with five more in the works.

The Hyperica events listing also lists current and future online events directly published to OpenSim viewers. According to OutWorlds and DreamGrid owner Fred Beckhusen, the Hyperica grid crawler software is tracking a total of 6,639 objects including 5,796 DreamGrids and 505 other grids.

OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform similar to Second Life that allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and to 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. 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.

Top 25 grids by active users

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

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 3,873 active users
  2. AviTron: 2,244 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 2,113 active users
  4. Metropolis: 1,774 active users
  5. AviWorlds: 1,485 active users
  6. ZetaWorlds: 1,484 active users
  7. Kitely: 1,456 active users
  8. Alternate Metaverse: 1,293 active users
  9. GBG World: 1,052 active users
  10. Eureka World: 952 active users
  11. Party Destination Grid: 938 active users
  12. Exo-Life: 917 active users
  13. Craft World: 913 active users
  14. Neverworld: 876 active users
  15. The City: 772 active users
  16. Little Breath: 710 active users
  17. Dorena’s World: 658 active users
  18. Soul Grid: 644 active users
  19. Astralia: 640 active users
  20. DreamNation: 552 active users
  21. Free Life: 512 active users
  22. Arkham Grid: 498 active users
  23. Freedom Grid: 494 active users
  24. Barefoot Dreamers: 489 active users
  25. Fire and Ice Grid: 479 active users

Since last month, AviTron gained the highest number of active users with an increase of 720 actives, Fire and Ice Grid with 479, VirtuaWorld with 447, Alternate Metaverse with 261, and Dorena’s World with 255 new actives. Full details are available on this month’s full grid stats report page.

The actives list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know.

The active user stats are also used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hyperport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids, or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.

Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Not all grids need a stats page — especially grids that aren’t open to the public like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this dark metaverse of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 19,469 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,600 product variations, 33,469 of which are sold with the Export permission.

(Kitely Market Data.)
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 543 OpenSim grids to date, which includes both public grids listed here as well as private grids that are not accessible to the public, don’t report their stats, and don’t make it into our reports.

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

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

Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.

In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.

Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, also lists apparel, avatar accessories, avatar appearances and other items. From the marketplace website, anyone is able to list their products or items on the marketplace to promote them either for sale or as a freebie, but the content can only be purchased and used within the Tag grid and can’t be taken or delivered to other grids.

Help Cream The Rabbit find Easter eggs

(Image courtesy Mobius grid.)

Cream The Rabbit is searching for missing Easter eggs in the ongoing Easter egg hunt at the Green Hill Zone region of the Mobius grid, and is inviting  you to help out in the in-world search. Starting on the Easter weekend on Sunday, April 17, you will be helping The Cream find 12 Easter eggs by April 30.

“When you approach Cream she will start talking to you,” grid head Serra Royale told Hypergrid Business. “Click the hyperlinks appearing as underlined text in the messages she sends to continue the dialogue. You may need to right click the hyperlinks and click Run this Command on some viewers.”

In this hunt game, you will need to click the eggs when you find them.

The hypergrid address is main.mobiusgrid.us:80:Green Hill Zone.

Happy Easter!

Mobius grid has also redesigned the region by replacing most of the prim builds with optimized mesh that features improved textures.

Dereos grid celebrates Easter this Sunday

The PSSMG Paradise region of the Dereos grid will host an Easter Fire 2022 event at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, April 17 featuring Easter tunes with DJ Dereos, Ly and Aki. There also will be decorations and surprises.

The hypergrid address is dereos.org:80:PSSMG Paradise.

Easter decoration ideas at the Soul Grid

(Image courtesy Soul-Ostara.)

Looking for some Easter season decoration ideas? Soul-Ostara region of the Soul Grid has some fantastic ideas you can consider this season.

The hypergrid address is soul-grid.de:8002:Soul-Ostara.

Easter eggs at Encantada

(Image courtesy Encantada.)

Need some Easter decorated eggs for your region or virtual world? The Encantada region of the OSgrid — which always houses free mesh items for home and garden — has some eggs some that you can use as is or with modification. The textures are included in the Peter Rabbit Egg.

The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Encantada.

Neverworld has a new continent area and free parcels

Neverworld grid now has a new continent area comprising of 37 regions currently but to be expanded shortly. The grid is also offering free water island parcels parcels at The Keys, Mariner’s Bay, and North and South Bay Estates. The free parcels range from 10,000 square meters to over 70,000 square meters in size, said grid owner Govega Sachertorte.

“We have a lot of exciting things happening soon including a collaboration with a major music or art talent, which will bring a whole new level of users to our grid and spaces, including live concert venues,” she told Hypergrid Business.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Cooperation Creative, Maze of The Mind, Nautika, and Victoria Lane.

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

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,748 different publicly-accessible grids, 361 of which were active this month, and 297 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 metaverse land shrinks, but usage grows

The total land area of the public OpenSim metaverse shrank by over 2,000 regions over the past month. Nearly all of that loss can be attributed to ZetaWorlds — which lost 2,336 regions due to maintenance on the grids. The total number of both active monthly users and registered users increased.

The land area of all the public OpenSim grids that reported their stats this month was 99 748 standard region equivalents, a drop of 2,344 from this time last month. The total number of registered users is 466,736, an increase of 2,871. The total number of active monthly users is now 38,059, an increase of 758.

OpenSim total land area over the years (Hypergrid Business Data.)

The top land gainers this month are Wolf Territories Grid which added 438 new regions, Serenity with 351, OSgrid with 245, Alternate Metaverse with 183, Tag Grid with 68, and GridPlay Grid with 62 new regions. In addition to ZetaWorlds‘s land drop, Creatrix World lost the equivalent of 303 standard regions, Logicamp lost 291,  Outworldz lost 165, and MisFitz Grid lost 81 regions.

OSgrid remained the largest grid in total land size with 36,057 regions, Kitely was in second place with 18,863, and ZetaWorlds third with 7,943. Scroll at the end of the report to find the list of top 40 grids by total land area or check out our full monthly stats export.

These stats do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz’ DreamGrid, which is a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, or private company grids, or school grids who used other installers.

OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform similar to Second Life that allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and to 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. 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.

Top 25 grids by active users

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

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 4,695 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. DigiWorldz: 2,032 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  3. AviWorlds: 1,736 active users (HG login.aviworlds.com:8002)
  4. Metropolis: 1,648 active users (HG hg.metro.land:80)
  5. ZetaWorlds: 1,491 active users (HG hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Welcome)
  6. AviTron: 1,237 active users (HG avitronlogin.avitron.net:8002)
  7. Kitely: 1,031 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  8. Alternate Metaverse: 1,000 active users (HG alternatemetaverse.com:8002)
  9. Party Destination Grid: 990 active users (HG partydestinationgrid.com:8002)
  10. Exo-Life: 908 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  11. GBG World: 861 active users (HG gbg-world.cloud:8002)
  12. Craft World: 844 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  13. Neverworld: 794 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)
  14. Eureka World: 702 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  15. Astralia: 568 active users (HG astralia.eu:8002)
  16. DreamNation: 552 active users
  17. Little Breath: 527 active users (HG little-breath.club:8002)
  18. Free Life: 515 active users (HG freelife.outworldz.net:8002:Free Life Central City)
  19. Moonrose: 483 active users (HG moonrose-grid.de:8002)
  20. Arkham Grid: 481 active users (HG grid.arkhamgrid.org:8002)
  21. Soul Grid: 474 active users (HG soul-grid.de:8002)
  22. The City: 457 active users (HG thecity.inworldz.net:8002)
  23. Discovery Grid: 428 active users (HG discoverygrid.net:8002)
  24. Fire and Ice Grid: 423 active users (HG fireandicegrid.net:8002)
  25. Freedom Grid: 398 active users (HG freedomgrid.world:8002)

The above are top 25 grids in terms of total active users over time of 30 days. We compare this figure with the previous month’s tally for each grid to generate a list of most active grids or a list of grids that gained most active users in the last 30 days.

The above, however, are not necessarily the most active grids in terms of number of active users gained during the past month.

This month, Moonrose gained 424 new active users, OSgrid gained 285, The City gained 189, Alternate Metaverse gained 157, and AviTron gained 178. Full details are available on this month’s grid stats link.

The actives list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know.

The active user stats are also used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hyperport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids, or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores or hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.

Here some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Of course, not all grids need a stats page, especially grids that aren’t open to the public, like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this “dark metaverse” of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

(Kitely Market Data.)

There are currently 19,273 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,289 product variations, of which 33,189 are sold with the export permission.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 535 OpenSim grids to date, which includes both public grids listed here as well as private grids that are not accessible to the public, don’t report their stats, and don’t make it into our reports.

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

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

Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.

In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.

Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, also lists apparel, avatar accessories, avatar appearances and other items across 26 categories. This month, the market has listed a total of 28,244 items. From the marketplace website, anyone is able to list their products or items on the marketplace to promote them either for sale or as a freebie, but the content can only be purchased and used within the Tag grid and can’t be taken or delivered to other grids.

Virtual Life World giving away free regions

Virtual Life World  is giving away free regions measuring 512 square with free mesh, voice, texture upload, shopping and 100 residents each. You need to contact the grid and web maintenance administrator Valtino in-world to find get the new region. You can then get free content or shop for skin avatars, clothes, mesh, and building at the grid to help fill them up.

The hypergrid address is virtuallifeworld.tk:8002.

DigiWorldz hosting weekly building classes

DigiWorldz is hosting a series of events to train people on prim building, art, collaboration, and communication. Specifically, the Metaverse University at the DigiCenter is the place to be every week if you want to learn from expert instructors on how to build in OpenSim virtual worlds. It hosts the following events.

The Prim Building With Nebby is a bi-weekly event for newbies in prim creating. It will next time take place from 4 to 5 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, February 25. Nebby will trains you how to copy, manipulate, move, and texture prims. Lets Get Our Art-On! With Noxluna takes place every Sunday starting 1 to 2 p.m. Pacific Time. It is a class introducing art and building. The Taris EZ Prim Building Class, which also trains people on building prims, takes place from 3 to 4 p.m. Pacific Time every Monday.

Join Samantha Simmons every Wednesday starting from 2 to 3 p.m. Pacific Time for the Collaboration And Communication class and gain in-world collaboration and communication skills. You can also catch up with Country Bob every Monday at 7 p.m. Pacific Time for the How to Broadcast in OpenSim class.

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

DigiWorldz seventh birthday is next month

DigiWorldz will be hosting the BIG DigiWorldz Birthday bash on March 12 to celebrate the grid’s seventh birthday. Not much is known about the event yet but you can watch out for the grid’s announcements for more information.

Craft-World’s Territorial Network meeting happens next week

Craft World will be hosting a second meeting of the Territorial Network from 12 p.m. Pacific Time on February 21 at the Artemaestra region and via Google Meet. The network is facilitating collaboration between landowners who deal with art, music, poetry, books, theatre, and services.

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

The grid will also host an Indian Night starting at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on March 10 at the Taj Mahal region, with DJ Arianna. This event will feature Indian themed costumes and scenery.

There also will be a Cartoon Party starting at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on March 1, at the Fashion region, featuring DJ Corsaro.

Get a free parcel and start building for the OpenSim Fest exhibition

(Image courtesy OpenSim Fest.)

OpenSim Fest — a festival that celebrates creative talents on virtual worlds — will run from July 8 to 25 this year. Building on the host OpenSim Fest grid is expected to be complete on June 30. There also will be a preview party on July 1 and build testing from July 2 to 7. The event is hosted by the Infinite Metaverse Alliance.

The organizers, who include entertainers, merchants, tech architects, code maintainers, and graphic artists, are offering free parcels for exhibitors and merchants to start building their exhibits. To get a free parcel, contact the organizers via Facebook, Twitter, or their Discord group. Musicians, DJs, poets, and entertainers wishing to perform at the event can also contact the organizers.  The group is also calling for sponsors and volunteers to join them in hosting the event.

Alternate Metaverse opens Memorial region, launches new advertising Telehub

Alternate Metaverse now allows you to advertise and promote your builds, regions, and items on their grid-wide Telehub. You can do this simply by adding a picture of the item, landmark, and an optional notecard describing it. You can also list other regions, schedules, events, and even contact information on the notecard. The content and descriptions can also be changed at will by the owner.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:AMV Real Estate. 

You can also memorialize a lost loved one at the grid’s Memorial, which has beautiful nature spaces, a small country chapel and trees surrounding the grounds. You can place their photos, names, candle flowers, statues, or anything else, but you have to have a grid tag to place those. You can even pick free items like candles, bouquets, and statues by the landing point for placing.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Memorial.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Blendioptera Grid, Carima Welt, Cooperation Creative, Cozy Comforts Grid, and GridPlay Grid.

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

Do you have any updates about these grids? Let us know!

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,739 different publicly-accessible grids, 384 of which were active this month, and 308 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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Firefly: Serenity VR Fan-Projekt für PC-Brillen veröffentlicht

Der TV-Serie Firefly war nur eine kurze Lebensdauer beschieden, nach einer Staffel war schon Schluss. Trotzdem erlang die Mischung aus Science Fiction und Western mit der Zeit Kultstatus, was zu dem abschließenden Film Serenity führte, der noch offene Fragen beantwortete. Nun bringt ein Fan nach jahrelanger Arbeit mit Serenity VR das Raumschiff der Firefly-Klasse für PC-Brillen in die virtuelle Realität.

Serenity VR für Firefly-Fans

Das Projekt von Kevin Tabar startete schon im Jahr 2014, damals noch auf der Oculus Rift DK2. Nun steht Serenity VR nach mehr als vier Jahren Arbeit als kostenloser Download bereit und soll mit jeder SteamVR-kompatiblen Brille wie Oculus Rift, HTC Vive und Windows Mixed Reality Headsets funktionieren. In der VR-Erfahrung können Fans der Serenity das legendäre Raumschiff erkunden und teilweise Objekte aufnehmen. Man kann sich beispielsweise ins Cockpit bewegen oder den Frachtraum untersuchen.

Um die Simulation zu entwickeln, setzte Tabar auf Blender und die Spiele-Entwicklungsumgebung Unity. Allerdings sollten sich Fans beeilen, die VR-Erfahrung herunterzuladen, wie Road to VR anmerkt, da sie aus rechtlichen Gründen schnell wieder verschwinden könnte. Wie dem auch sei, Serenity VR macht Lust darauf, sich Film und Serie erneut anzusehen. Wer sie noch nicht kennt: Auf Netflix und via Amazon Prime können Abonnenten die Serie Firefly derzeit streamen, der abschließende Film Serenity steht derzeit nicht im Abo-Stream zur Verfügung.

(Quelle: Road to VR)




Der Beitrag Firefly: Serenity VR Fan-Projekt für PC-Brillen veröffentlicht zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!

Posted on

‘Serenity VR’ Fan Project Lets You Step Aboard The Most Famous Firefly-class Ship

Serenity, the firefly-class spaceship from cult TV show Firefly (2002) and film Serenity (2005), is now full explorable in VR.

With many years in the making, Unity developer and 3D environmental artist Kaveh Tabar’s Serenity VR fan project is finally here. Starting out in 2014, Tabar originally designed Serenity for the Oculus Rift DK2.

Now more than four years later, Tabar has released the project, which includes the cockpit, mess, cargo hold, engine room, infirmary area and crew quarters.

The fully-explorable Serenity supports SteamVR headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets. According to Tabar, “any HMD with SteamVR support should work.” The experience contains a number of items strewn about that you can pick up using your VR system’s motion controllers. In all, it’s a awesome way to pay homage to the series that went off the air far too soon.

Considering the litigious state of intellectual property, it would better to grab it sooner rather than later, lest Serenity VR befall the same fate of the numerous unlicensed VR experiences based on franchises such as Blade Runner and Star Trek.

You can download Tabar’s Serenity VR here.

The post ‘Serenity VR’ Fan Project Lets You Step Aboard The Most Famous Firefly-class Ship appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

‘Serenity VR’ Fan Project Lets You Step Aboard The Most Famous Firefly-class Ship

Serenity, the firefly-class spaceship from cult TV show Firefly (2002) and film Serenity (2005), is now full explorable in VR.

With many years in the making, Unity developer and 3D environmental artist Kaveh Tabar’s Serenity VR fan project is finally here. Starting out in 2014, Tabar originally designed Serenity for the Oculus Rift DK2.

Now more than four years later, Tabar has released the project, which includes the cockpit, mess, cargo hold, engine room, infirmary area and crew quarters.

The fully-explorable Serenity supports SteamVR headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets. According to Tabar, “any HMD with SteamVR support should work.” The experience contains a number of items strewn about that you can pick up using your VR system’s motion controllers. In all, it’s a awesome way to pay homage to the series that went off the air far too soon.

Considering the litigious state of intellectual property, it would better to grab it sooner rather than later, lest Serenity VR befall the same fate of the numerous unlicensed VR experiences based on franchises such as Blade Runner and Star Trek.

You can download Tabar’s Serenity VR here.

The post ‘Serenity VR’ Fan Project Lets You Step Aboard The Most Famous Firefly-class Ship appeared first on Road to VR.