Land, traffic drop with summer heat

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Correction: Due to an error in collecting data from OSgrid, land area was undercounted this month. In fact, OpenSim’s land area actually increased by the equivalent of 828 regions. OSgrid did lose some land area, but only 395 regions — not 2,500 as reported.

“Many people — including myself – have consolidated their multi regions into a single or multi var regions,” OSgrid secretary Larry Roberts told Hypergrid Business. “For instance I use to have 36 regular regions, those are now 4 var regions.  And when the web site counts regions it only counts a var region as a single region.”

The total land area of OSgrid last month was 605.42 square kilometers, or the equivalent of 9,238 standard regions.

Original article:

OpenSim’s land area dropped for the first time in nearly a year as OSgrid cleared more than 2,500 regions off its map. Active users numbers also continued their typical summer slide as schools shut down for the season and other OpenSim users went outside to enjoy the sunshine.

Number of standard region equivalents on OpenSim's public grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Number of standard region equivalents on OpenSim’s public grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)

But while OSgrid shrank, other grids continued to grow, so overall OpenSim grids lost just 1,336 regions, for a new total of 61,659 regions.

Traffic fell by 1,368 users, to 30,029.

Kitely was the biggest land gainer again this month, with 394 new regions. The grid announced a major price charge at the beginning of June, eliminating metered pricing and lowering the cost of the two top plans by 60 percent.

InWorldz offers ‘quad’ region packages

InWorldz was in second place, gaining 312 regions after two years of no growth. The reason? On June 16, the grid began offering four-region packages at $85 for a two-by-two block of regions capable of holding up to 12,000 prims each.

Normally, single regions cost $75 on InWorldz. That’s on the high side for OpenSim grids, some of which offer regions for as little as $3 each and variable-sized regions for an even lower effective rate.

The InWorldz quad regions are not variable-sized regions or megaregions as available on other grids, but four standard regions in a square configuration, with separate names, and each managed individually. Varregions and megaregions act as a single large region, with no border crossings. While the InWorldz quads do still have border crossings, all four regions of the quad are hosted on a single server to make those crossings easier.

InWorldz residents can either buy a brand-new block of four regions, or take an existing region with fewer than 12,000 prims on it and upgrade it to a quad, as long as it has space around it on the map to expand. Owners can also move their regions to new locations on the map.

Right now, the new regions are only available in the form of a two-by-two square.

“We can always move to discussing other configurations if they are a popular item for us,” said InWorldz co-founder Beth Reischl, also known as “Elenia Llewellyn” in-world, in a forum post. “We’re never deaf to listening to our customers, so one step at a time.”

To take advantage of the new possibilities — and because existing mainland regions can’t be upgraded in place with neighbors in the way — some InWorldz residents have created a large new navigable landmass, which can be seen in the video below.

Another big gainer was AviWorlds, which grew by 170 new regions, more than doubling its land area. This was mostly due to a new project — a virtual recreation of the city of Lisbon.

For those who are new readers, 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

Of the top ten most visited grids this month, seven lost active users. InWorldz lost 410 actives, but also had the most to start with, so the loss was probably barely felt. Other grids that lost users this month were the three biggest open grids, OSgrid, Metropolis, and Craft, as well as the big commercial grids Kitely, Avination, and YrGrid.

Top ten most popular grids:

DigiWorldz made it into the top list for the first time after gaining 359 new active users, a growth of 65 percent compared to the previous month, after an ownership dispute was settled. DigiWorldz was launched in March, which means this is the fastest that any startup grid has ever grown.

DigiWorldz is a hypergrid-enabled commercial grid that offers $16 varregions regions that can be configured as up to 16 standard regions in size.

Transitions

We have nine new grids added to our database since this time last month, including Rock Grid, Free World, Benelli Grid, Offworld, Yugen World, Isle of Nod, MathLife, Divergent Realms, and SOlfaé.

The following 35 grids were suspended this month: 2142, AngelFire Grid, BearKat, Beverkenverlt, BioMed, Broncoland, Carline and Mari’s OpenSim World, CS4162, Dynamic Worldz, Emerald Grid, Euro Netz, FarOutWorld, FleepGrid, Galactic Systems, Grid Nirvana, HDD VR, Jazmine’s Closet, makland, Matrix Grid, MetroEMS, Nash Grid, Open 3D Chat, Rons Grid, Smoke Grid, Stray Cats-The Game, TheGrid, Third Nation, Triatrix, Umrion, Universidad, V-ALERT Mainland, Virtual Designers World, VUCC, Wer ist Wo, and Your World.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months are marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, and is 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.

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 1,100 different publicly-accessible grids, 345 of which were active this month, and 254 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.

Maria Korolov
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