OpenSim hits new land area record as user numbers spike

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The public OpenSim grids reported over 2,600 new active users this month, the biggest increase since last fall. The total land area also hit a record high, of 125,841 standard region equivalents.

All of the growth has been on hypergrid-enabled grids. In fact, there were only 499 active users reported by the 15 non-hypergrid-enabled grids in our database, 467 of them located on a single grid, DreamNation. This was up by two users from last month, but down significantly from a peak of 13,922 active users in 2014. All in all, hypergrid-enabled grids accounted for 98.4 percent of all land area and 98.5 percent of all active users.

We are now tracking a total of 2,576 OpenSim grids, 424 of which were active this month, and 282 of which published statistics.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely are still the three largest grids by land area, with Wolf Territories also being the fastest-growing grid by land size having added 4,000 new regions within the last month.

Size of OpenSim Metaverse in Standard Regions over the years. (Hypergrid Business Data.).

OSgrid reported the equivalent of 27,325 standard-sized regions this month, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 25,520 regions, Kitely with 18,299, ZetaWorlds with 10,156, and Alternate Metaverse with 8,789 regions.

OSgrid offers unlimited free regions to all residents — as long as people run them on their home computers. They have an easy region installer here. No wonder they’re the largest grid in OpenSim.

ZetaWorlds, on the other hand, offers two-by-two regions with 75,000 prims for €18.99 (US $21) per month with other configuration options also available. Groovyverse land prices start at $25 per month for a region that can be configured to be as big as 16 by 16 standard regions. Both grids also offer free land parcels to residents.

Another option for people who want free OpenSim land is to use DreamGrid from OutWorldz, a version of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid since these tend to be private grids.

DreamGrid has so far recorded a total of 10,377 DreamGrids that have launched. However, when the grid name changes are accounted for, 3,435 Dreamgrids have been installed as shown by a count of unique, random IDs according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

Fred Beckhusen

The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here. 

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, including adding new regions, banning users, deleting regions, auto restarting,  tracking usage stats, and shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power.

OutWorldz also offers free OARs — complete region files — which you can load to your grid easily and with little effort.

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

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Top 25 grids by active users

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

Top 25 most popular grids this month:

  1. OSgrid: 4,914 active users
  2. Wolf Territories Grid: 2,640 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 1,854 active users
  4. Alternate Metaverse: 1,691 active users
  5. GBG World: 1,611 active users
  6. Neverworld: 1,370 active users
  7. ZetaWorlds: 1,326 active users
  8. Soul Grid: 1,137 active users
  9. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,120 active users
  10. AviWorlds: 1,116 active users
  11. Moonrose: 1,050 active users
  12. Exo-Life: 993 active users
  13. Craft World: 879 active users
  14. One Life Grid: 834 active users
  15. Eureka World: 823 active users
  16. Party Destination Grid: 810 active users
  17. Kitely: 768 active users
  18. Darkheart’s Estates: 761 active users
  19. Kid Grid: 623 active users
  20. The City: 596 active users
  21. Youth Nation: 586 active users
  22. ProxyNet: 562 active users
  23. Offworld: 538 active users
  24. Trianon World: 524 active users
  25. Barefoot Dreamers: 521 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.

Wolf Territories Grid was the fastest growing this month, adding 470 new active users, following by One Life Grid with an increase of 440 actives, Neverworld with 400, and ProxyNet with 333 new active users.

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 is significantly 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 19,987 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,671 product variations, 34,581 of which are exportable.

Kitely listings, product variations, and exportable history data. (Kitely Market data.).

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 587 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 online marketplace. The marketplace lists 28,293 items both for sale and free.

Products on sale on Tag. (Image courtesy Tag.).

Volunteers needed for OpenSim .Net 6 testing

As the development of OpenSim shifts from Mono to the .Net 6 platform, developers are calling on people who are familiar with .Net or C# testing to join the developers’ weekly meetings at 11 a.m. Pacific Time every Tuesday or make suggestions for testing over the mailing list.

The meeting takes place at the Dev Outreach region of the OSgrid whose hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Dev Outreach.

Volunteering is crucial since there currently is no automated testing set up for OpenSim, said Zetamex Virtual Network CEO Vincent Sylvester.

Vincent Sylvester

“Moving to .Net 6 is fairly simple, installation of the runtime is similar to mono and on most machines is a few commands,” he told Hypergrid Business. “The biggest difference is no longer is the executable used, instead the OpenSim.dll and Robust.dll are used to run the application.”

Meanwhile, a minor bug that affected ban lists has been fixed on the .Net branch to make the ban list flag — the flag that is used to skip checking for entries on the ban list if there are no entries on it — effective even before a manual entry is made to a ban list. Previously, the flag was not changed via script functions and so became effective only if and when a user added an entry to the list. Now, the flag is controlled via script functions, said Sylvester.

“Removing all entries from the list by hand resets the flag, but currently only the reset function will do so for the script equivalent,” he said. “Again, unless backported this fix is only on the .Net branch so for anyone using security systems that rely on those functions, might be a good idea to just add a random user to the list to make sure the flag is active and bans are checked properly.”

You can go here to learn more about the recent changes made to the .Net branch.

WestWorld grid closes temporarily

WestWorld announced that the grid will be offline for about a month to six weeks, then back with a new WestWorld grid and website.

Concepts Mesh to host a fashion show next weeek

(Image courtesy Concepts Mesh.).

Concepts Mesh is hosting a Fashion Show from 2.00 p.m. Pacific Time on June 24 at the Insomnia region of the DigiWorldz grid. The event will showcase both men’s and women’s fashion from the works of Phantazia Serendipty and Erdette Clarity.

Some designs will also be available for purchase through PayPal. Both local and hypergrid visitors will earn door prizes every 15 minutes.

Virtual World Consortium now in Kitely

The Virtual World Education Consortium has opened an OpenSim representation in Kitely and has already held several official meetings and events there. The VWEC consortium, which started in 2021 and brings together educators to share their successes and tackle obstacles in virtual world education, is also present in Second Life.

“Kitely is a big proponent of virtual-world-based education and we are supporting the VWEC by placing its information kiosk in the Kitely Welcome Center,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

At the same time, their Minetest Summer Camp 2023 also returns at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on June 17, July 1, July 15, August 5, and August 19 this year at the VWEC Welcome Plaza. The event targets to help educators familiarize themselves with Minetest and learn how to use it.

The community now has two directories — VWEC Member Directory which helps educators to find their colleagues, and VWEC Metaverse Communities which provides a list of educational places and communities that educators can explore.

Kitely hosts the Coopersville Flotilla event

Kitelly grid recently hosted the Coopersville Flotilla event or parade in which nine waterborne vehicles were exhibited in captivating styles at the Coopersville region of Kitely. 20 people participated in the event. Among them included the Virtual World Education Consortium crew, DJ Rosa Alekseev, Koshari Mahana who owns the Coopersville region, GM Interactive craft, Ada Radius with an innovative Whale Houseboat, Mike Lorrey of the Hypersonic Systems; and Cooper Swizzle and Carla Kincaid.

Watch videos of the parade here and a more detailed review of the event by Hypergrid Safari’s Thirza Ember.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Caribou Grid, Eleutherias, Herederos Grid, IBK Grid, Morada Grid, Shoalwater Bay, Space Life, Whispering Willows.

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

Closed grids

After a grid has been inactive for two months, we mark it as suspended. Then, after it’s been suspended for a couple of months, we mark it as closed.

The following 28 grids were suspended this month: AmunRiseN, Bubble Grid, BunnyLand, Cajungrid, Duros Pr, Eenhgrid, Fashionistas, Figment, Fjorgeland, Futurer Luv, Gimisa, Insight Concepts, It, Konecta Radio, KoolPheller Estates, New Hope Grid, P7, PaderGrid, Panda Grid, Phillip’s Grid, Proud Rainbow, Rocket World Grid, TheGrid, Virtual Harmony, Virtual Life Style, Virtual Life Style — HG URI, and WestWorld.

Sometimes, a grid changes its loginURI or website address — if that’s the case, email us and let us know and we’ll update our database.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,576 different publicly-accessible grids, 424 of which were active this month, and 282 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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