Outages plague grids this month; Speculoos returns

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OpenSim land area and users rose slightly this month, despite outages and maintenance on several grids.

Atek was down for a while before later resuming, as was Virtuality Grid, while Kinky Grid also went under construction temporarily. Tangle Grid is currently still down for maintenance.

And Gevolution was doing load testing last month, resulting in unusually high active user counts for March — that issue has since been resolved and the numbers are back to normal. As a result of that statistical bump, however, total active user counts are down slightly compared to last month, but are still up when compared to February.

On a positive note, the beloved Belgian grid Speculoos is back after two and a half years. More information below.

Total registered users also continued to rise this month, and, in fact, have hit a high of 593,183. Registered user numbers only go down when grids clear out their databases, or go out of business. For example, the OpenSim community lost more than 70,000 registered users when Avination shut down in 2016, and it took nearly a year for OpenSim to recover.

Altogether, 232 grids reported their statistics this month, also a record high, totaling 37,979 active users and a land area of 84,663 standard region equivalents.

 

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

The greatest gainer of land this month was GreekLife grid with 1,035 new regions followed by OSgrid with 824 regions, Virtual Worlds Grid with an additional 533 regions. Atek Grid gained 272 regions while Discovery Grid added 192 regions.

OSgrid remained the largest grid by land area, with the equivalent of 21,027 regions, followed by Kitely with 17,381, Atek Grid with 7,283 and DigiWorldz with 5,218.

There were no surprise losses in land area this month, except Gevolution that lost a total of 1630 regions. Grid Nirvana lost 100, while Tangle Grid — which is down right now — 73 and ZetaWorlds 71 regions.

InWorldz registered the most new users this month, with 1,476 new signups, followed by Kitely with 1,172.

There are 1,278 grids in our database in total, with 271 being active and 232 reporting statistics this month, up from 203 grids last month.

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids. DreamWorld has counted more than 8,483 mini-grids created with this installer alone so far.

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. OutWorldz 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.

Neustadt grid gained 428 active users in the last month, followed by GreekLife with 265, Grid Life with 155, Nextlife World with 149, and Kitely 90 active users to close the top five most active grids of the month. However, the five most popular grids with largest number of active users in total were OSgrid, Metropolis, GreekLife, DigiWorldz and Sacrarium.

Gevolution lost the most active users this month at 1,387, from an unusual spike from last month’s load testing, as mentioned above. Education-focused Eureka World dropped by 568 active users.

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 4,030 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. Metropolis: 3,365 active users (HG hypergrid.org:8002)
  3. GreekLife: 2,578 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,161 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  5. Sacrarium: 1,687 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  6. Kitely: 1,252 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  7. Eureka World: 1,192 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  8. Gevolution: 862 active users (HG login.gevolutionworld.com:8002)
  9. Lost Paradise: 812 active users (HG lpgrid.com:8002)
  10. Virtual Brasil: 768 active users (HG mundo.virtualbrasil3d.com.br:8002)
  11. Exo-Life: 707 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  12. Craft World: 677 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  13. Dorena’s World: 674 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  14. Eros Resort: 587 active users (HG opensim.bci3d.com:8002)
  15. ZetaWorlds: 563 active users (HG hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Welcome)
  16. Party Destination Grid: 479 active users (HG partydestinationgrid.com:8002)
  17. DreamNation: 477 active users
  18. FrancoGrid: 476 active users (HG hg.francogrid.org:80)
  19. Nextlife World: 469 active users (HG nextlife-world.de:8002)
  20. Littlefield: 458 active users (HG lfgrid.com:8002)
  21. Freedom Grid: 438 active users (HG freedomgrid.world:8002)
  22. Neustadt: 428 active users (HG neustadt.ddns.net:9000)
  23. Dynamic Worldz: 424 active users (HG grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002)
  24. EdMondo: 423 active users (HG slw.indire.it:8002)
  25. Tranquility: 348 active users (HG tranquility-grid.info:8002)

DreamWorld stats

The Hypergrid Business database currently tracks 1,278 grids, of which 271 were active this month and 232 reporting their stats.

OutWorldz has another system for tracking grid counts, and has currently counted a total of 11,274 — up by 33 percent from last month’s tally — Dreamworlds or grids created with the DreamWorld software owned by OutWorldz. The DreamWorld software allows users to easily create and run grids at home as well as to connect to other OpenSim grids.

Out of the 11,274 Dreamworlds, 8,233 are private and 3,041 are hypergridabble.

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 exportables continue to rise

There are currently 11,791 product listings in Kitely Market containing 22,681 product variations, of which 17,694 are sold with the Export permission.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 261 different OpenSim grids to date.

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

Exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables since Kitely turned the hypergrid export functionality, 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 revenue down

VirTec network revenue was up last month by 19 percent after a decrease of 12 percent the previous month. However, the number of merchants remained low at 34, which is five merchants down from the previous month’s tally. The number of transaction was up by more than 100 to reach 679 this month.

The value of transactions in revenue went up in VirTec network last month. (VirTec Data.)

DigiWorld’s Activities Coalition holds their first event

The Activities Coalition of DigiWorldz grid will host a traveling party at 11:15 a.m. Pacific Time on April 22 as their first event. It will be a visit to the galleries of DigiWorldz and will feature various galleries including City of Athens, Emmalena Damour’s Art Gallery, Gray Delwood, Pangea Arts Center and Tierra Paz. Participants should meet up at the grid’s Welcome Center.

Meanwhile, the grid will have a restart for two hours beginning from 6 am Pacific Time on April 17.

Virtuality Grid is back up online

Virtuality Grid saw some downtime as a result of a DNS update issue, which has to do with how the domain names work. It went offline last week when they initiated a transfer of their new web hosting account. They gave an update on April 15 stating that the latest backup of our grid was transferred to their core.

The grid now has a new login, grid.virtualitygrid.com:8002, and the website has many changes. However, you do not need to register a new account if you were already registered. Inventories and currency is also all safe, according to the grid owners.

Karmalot adult-only grid to restart from zero

Karmalot, which has been offline for four years now, is coming back with new updates including a new look with the same theme. 

“With the revamping of the grid and due to the unfortunate collapse or virus during the update we are now starting over from zero,” owner Karma Fride told Hypergrid Business. 

With the new restart, the grid will still have the Karmalot Apples for in-grid transactions.

“You do activities around the kingdom such as picking our Karmalot Apples and you are able to take them to the store and use them to buy items,” she said.

Speculoos grid coming back after six years

Speculoos Grid is now back after six years. (Image courtesy Speculoos grid.)

Speculoos grid is coming back after a couple of years of downtime. Created on September 9, 2011, the grid was meant to target the Belgian community but attracted people from all over the world. At its peak, it had hundreds of monthly visitors.

“So we came back to discover it had been destroyed,” grid owner Olivier van Helden told Hypergrid Business, perhaps speaking metaphorically. “Hurricanes have devastated our ‘Grand Place,’ water has flooded our building, the shops have been looted and there is not a lot left but a few bits that let guess what the plaza used to look like.”

After return they aim at making the grid a place where people can come and create their dreams and inspirations. They now have 27 regions online already. The grid will also have free and paid regions available. Free parcels are already available in Residences region, with a “touch to renew” rental system to avoid dead zones.

“Since the beginning we offered free regions and it allowed us to host the beautiful ‘Cymru Fach’ Welsh village of Susannah Avonside,” said van Helden.

New free regions will be available once the grid fixes bugs that arose after the upgrade of OpenSim to 0.9. They will also start building roads and areas around Grand Place for residences, shops and hang outs, he said.

Transitions

Next Reality grid is among those coming back up online after a short while. (Image courtesy George Miner.)

The following grids were added to our database this month: Arcana, Atlantide, Beastly Worldz, Birikkina, DestinyLore, Dolfins Dream World, Dream Fantasy, Dreamlife, DreamWorlded, EasterHome, Fish World, Free Life, Freedom, Freedom Grid, Gayland, Glenwalker, Grid Life, Hartland, Havens Realm, Independence, Interzone, KA Grid, Kater and Friends, Lake Kindred Spirit, Marcos Home World, Mikeland, MMDA, Mogor, Neustadt, Ozziegrid, Rainbow Ridge Grid, Skytec Grid, Snazzy, Takland, Think Academy, Vida Dupla, ViMe, Virtual Islands, Virtual Nexus, Warrior Virtual Support, World Of Magic, Worldz Away, Your Worlds, Zagino World, Zona Notre

Next Reality, Blackswan, Paralax and That Place have been offline but are back again. Meanwhile, Jamgrid grid is offline due to server maintenance issues. Jamgrid is moving to a new server.

The following 16 grids were suspended this month: Avi Globe Grid, AviUnite, FranEsti Grid, Hypergrid International Expo, Island Oasis, JamGrid, Karmalot, Mimic Life, MintaKa, Paradwys, Refuge Grid, TCU, Traduverse, UpSideDownFriends, Your Alternative Life, YSLife

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.

We posted a stats FAQ page here.

April 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 1,327 different publicly-accessible grids, 310 of which were active this month, and 232 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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