OpenSim reverses last month’s hefty decline in land area and user numbers

OpenSim added a total land area of 2,436 regions this month, reversing some of last month’s dramatic drop.

The active users tally dropped by 579 users and registered users fell by 6,155 but both are much smaller than last month’s drops and are fully accounted for by outages and stat reporting issues.

Logicamp, for example, did not report stats this month, and had more than 300 actives last month as well as more than 6,000 registered users. Virtualife reported a sharp drop of over 500 users month-over-month, which looks to be due to server issues or website updates. And the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid was offline at the time of our stats collection. That grid has over 2,000 registered users.

Groovy Verse, which was added to the stats report this month, had the most land area gained this month with 2,617 additional standard regions. OSgrid came second with 626, ZetaWorlds with 101, Outworldz with 69, and Lost World — which is also owned by OutWorldz — with 68.

 

Progress in OpenSim land area over the years. OpenSim land area has been increasing. (Hypergrid Business Data).

OSgrid, Kitely, Wolf Territories Grid, ZetaWorlds, and Alternate Metaverse were the top five largest grids in terms of total land area with 37,216 standard regions, 18,678 regions, 13,184 regions, 8,062 regions, and 6,378 regions respectively. Scroll to the end of this report to find the top 40 largest grids by land area.

The OpenSim metaverse now comprises a total of 345 active public grids spanning a total virtual land area equivalent to 115,140 standard regions, 99 percent of which are accessible via the hypergrid. The metaverse is now home to a total of 465,288 registered users. There are also many grids that do not report their numbers — closed role-play grids, company grids, school grids, and personal grids, for example, tend not to be open to the public and do not share their usage data.

These stats also 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 has added 1,860 new grids in 2022, out of which 174 are DreamGrids or those created with DreamGrid software.

The rate of creating DreamGrids has nearly doubled since last year according to the chart below.

(Image courtesy DreamGrid.).

With the free-to-use software, customers 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, shutting down entire grids or unoccupied regions to save computing power, and tracking usage stats.

DreamGrids have grown from slightly more than 2,000 grids in September 2020 to slightly more than 7,000 grids in total in July 2022.

Outworldz is also now offering 158 free OARs for download and 403 more are in review, set to go online this year. The company bought Joe Builder’s Galaxy Wars grid assets this month. This is in addition to Lostworld grid assets bought last month and which is still online. As a result, customers can now access more free downloadable OARs for use at their grids, said Fred Beckhusen, CEO at Micro Technology Services Inc. that runs both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

Fred Beckhusen

“We are still reviewing several dozens of Lostworld OARs for public release, and have not yet started reviewing the 23 new Galaxywars regions,” he told Hypergrid Business.

The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here. Anyone can also create a grid with the software and add it manually in the stats via the same link if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz.

The Hyperica events listing also lists current and future online events directly published to OpenSim viewers.

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, 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: 4,875 active users
  2. AviTron: 3,480 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 2,153 active users
  4. GBG World: 1,641 active users
  5. AviWorlds: 1,607 active users
  6. ZetaWorlds: 1,421 active users
  7. Neverworld: 1,228 active users
  8. Kitely: 993 active users
  9. Soul Grid: 978 active users
  10. Exo-Life: 960 active users
  11. Party Destination Grid: 938 active users
  12. Alternate Metaverse: 929 active users
  13. Quintonia: 692 active users
  14. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
  15. Craft World: 611 active users
  16. Dorena’s World: 602 active users
  17. Barefoot Dreamers: 563 active users
  18. OpenSim Fest: 529 active users
  19. Astralia: 518 active users
  20. Arkham Grid: 513 active users
  21. DreamNation: 506 active users
  22. Freedom Grid: 442 active users
  23. Moonrose: 394 active users
  24. New Hope Grid: 389 active users
  25. Free Life: 387 active users

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.

Again, the most popular are grids with most active users in total but are not necessarily the top gainers of new active users over the course of the last one month. A total of 12 grids gained 100 or more new active users each over the course of the last 30 days. AviTron led this group by adding 619 new active users followed by GBG World with 246, Neverworld with 222, Soul Grid with 222, and AviWorlds with 186 new active users.

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 19,639 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,610 product variations, 33,477 of which are sold with the Export permission.

Kitely Market listing, variations and exportables chart. (Kitely Market Data.).

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 556 OpenSim grids to date. This 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 and sells a total of 28,330 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.

OpenVue educational grid switches off hypergrid, goes behind firewall

The Openvue grid has its own destination guide, seen here with the Singularity viewer.

The Virtual University of Edinburgh or OpenVue grid – which is an education grid run by Professor Austin Tate at the university’s School of Informatics, for education initiatives – will not be accessible on the hypergrid starting on October 1 this year because it will be operating behind the university’s firewall. This is due to a networking security effort by the University to close open ports for services run by individual departments or schools by normal staff members, said Austin Tate.

Austin Tate

“Discussions are underway to potentially transfer the OpenVue grid to run as a central service so OpenVue may reappear on the hypergrid at some time, though its grid URI will change to a central one if that is done.”

He said hypergrid is a very important feature and benefit of using OpenSim in educational contexts, because it for instance allows universities to make available resources that others can easily access.  The OpenVue grid, which has been online on the hypergrid since 2007, has been working with collaborators in the open source communities to transfer over some facilities running on the University of Edinburg servers and which need continued hypergrid access, said Austin Tate.

“One of these is the OSgrid Ruth and Roth region which hosts the Ruth 2 and Roth 2 mesh avatars and associated freely accessible open source resources,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Serie Sumei who is a member of the creative team for the Ruth2 and Roth2 avatars and made the HUDs and avatar scripting for the latest versions, has stepped in to host the OSgrid RuthAndRoth region.”

What to do if OpenSim inventories fail to load on grid or region on viewers

Just in case you or your users are experiencing a problem where OpenSim inventories are failing to load  when the grid and regions are accessed via Firestorm viewers or logins are failing because of wrong folder types, you might want to check if a script by Tampa can help. It comes with details on how to use it.

This common error happens because Linden Lab recently added inventory validation codes on more recent second Life viewers but also extending the issues to OpenSim viewers and content. In other words, these viewers have have difficulty resolving these folder inventories with old inventory types until you fix them.

The script attempts to validate inventory for a single user or all users on a grid, checks the fatal inventory errors, and resolves the bad types in these folders by removing duplicates. It also checks bad root folders, and lets you easily edit inventory folders data table from the command line or through external programs like DBeaver or Navicat. You can run the script for one or all your users as a grid owner although the latter produces a very large output which is difficult to handle.

The alternative is to look at the folders with those errors and to fix them from the database. This is even easier if the view outputs the errors and warnings with respective folder UUIDs to make it easier to find them. Changing flag numbers on the inventories on the database helps the customers to avoid getting the messages that the items are missing something as happens when the issue occurs.

Leslie Kling

“If grids do not change the flag numbers on their databases, then their users will have to use another viewer or a later version of Firestorm,” co-founder of Tangle grid Leslie Kling told Hypergrid Business. “It will take some time because it is not easy to do.”

New third-party OpenSim grid website software released

A new third-party software known as VenWeb, which is used to create web front ends for OpenSim grids, has been announced by the GridPlay Productions.

The website package is installed using Composer and is powered by Laravel php web application framework. It is designed as a replacement for Diva Distro or Diva Wifi and has a number of advantages over Diva Wifi, said Chris Strachan, who is the programmer behind the project.

“It features a full fledged website with a forum coming, no DLL files to install, there is a ticket system, and has OAuth2 integration so grid owners can have their residents log into multiple sites with their grid accounts,” he told Hypergrid Business.

“Users can manage and use a custom splash page for the viewer, and has integrated landtool.php and currency.php,” he said. “The residents can view and delete their offline internal messages, manage friends’ lists, view grid currency transactions, and there is web search whose work is still in progress. Besides, it is in active development so new features are being added as others are being improved.”

You can watch a live demo at the website.

VenWeb also comes with an in-built Discord support. However, no plans to add PayPal for payments, he said.

The software uses SQL files for migration instead of a console. There is some configuration required as happens with most Laravel-powered websites. The tool also works with or uses the robust database so there is no need to hook it up with the robust.exe or OpenSim.exe, which means there is lesser chance of an exploit crash.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Acearia, EducaSim, Groovy Verse, Hot Gorean Nights, Jungle Friends Grid, Matrix, Sheikah, Thug TV, and Twilight.

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 1,771 different publicly-accessible grids, 345 of which were active this month, and 266 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.