Regions drop on Metropolis cleanup

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The total number of standard region equivalents dropped this month on OpenSim’s public grids due to a large cleanup of orphan regions on Metropolis.

The grid removed around 1,600 unused region reservation slots from its grid map.

The total number of standard region equivalents on the public grids is now 56,535, down about 1,100 from last month. The total number of registered users reached 542,076, a gain of more than 8,500 registrations, and the total number of active users was 34,784, up by about 300 from last month.

The Atek Grid was the biggest gainer this month, with 906 new regions, followed by OSgrid with 508, Kitely with 365, Lost Paradise with 233, AviWorlds with 105,  and The Adult Grid with 43.

Total land area on OpenSim's public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Total land area on OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

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

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.

DigiWorldz gained the most active users this month, 334, an increase of 25 percent. Virtual Brazil gained 191 for a new high of 505 actives – just short of making this month’s top ten list. The Great Canadian Grid gained 160 actives, Craft gained 128, and the Russian CyberFace grid gained 93, almost doubling its size to 192 active users.

Top ten most popular grids:

However, the hypergrid as a whole is beginning to function more and more like one large grid, with an increasing number of multi-grid events, communities, and groups.

Active users on the hypergrid, InWorldz, and on other closed grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Active users on the hypergrid, InWorldz, and on other closed grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)

The Adult Grid adds marketplace, forums

The Adult Grid's new welcome center. (Image courtesy The Adult Grid.)
The Adult Grid’s new welcome center. (Image courtesy The Adult Grid.)

Since a change in ownership at the end of 2015, The Adult Grid has added a marketplace and forum, and redesigned its website and welcome center, grid owners announced in a press release today.

The maximum prim size has already been increased from 256 to 1,064 meters, and regions can now be paid for using the local grid currency, TAG Bucks.

Transitions

The following seven grids were listed as suspended this month:  FreeLand, Koeberle, Our Hometown, Rutgers University Virtual Worlds, Shadow of Your Mind, Tertiary Grid, Virtual RP.

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, 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.

May 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 1,158 different publicly-accessible grids, 304 of which were active this month, and 207 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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