The number of regions on all OpenSim grids is also up by 3,021, the biggest monthly increase since this past June, for a new total of 130,366 standard region equivalents.

We usually witness an increase in activity during this season since more people spend more time inside on the computer, and grids ramp up for holiday events. Also, the OpenSimulator Community Conference — which took place this past weekend — reported 326 active users.

You can see all the OSCC23 presentations on YouTube here, and the livestreams from both days of the conference here.

Or watch Maria Korolov’s State of the Metaverse presentation here:

She also gave a talk about how generative AI will change content creation and coding.

Meanwhile, the number of total registered OpenSim users tumbled by a massive 8,055 this past month, mostly attributable to the indefinite closure of AviTron, which had 10,179 total registered users and 898 actives last month at this time.

We are now tracking a total of 2,652 public grids, of which 340 are active and 274 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email us at david@hypergridbusiness.com or maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

The Wolf Territories Grid is the largest grid by land area, with 26,832 standard region equivalents, followed by OSgrid and Kitely.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of OpenSim since these tend to be private grids.

DreamGrid has so far recorded more than 3,000 unique DreamGrids that have launched since it was launched, according to this year’s update from Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here. Anyone can easily add their grid to this list from the same page.

With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, anyone can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature on their home computer. 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. Learn here how to create and host a new Dreamgrid on your home computer using the software.

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 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 5,324 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 4,428 active users
3. GBG World: 2,230 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,113 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,919 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,320 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,297 active users
8. Moonrose: 1,277 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,080 active users
10. Littlefield: 1,073 active users
11. Trianon World: 1,062 active users
12. AviWorlds: 1,014 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 806 active users
14. Craft World: 780 active users
15. Herederos Grid: 763 active users
16. Astralia: 735 active users
17. Jungle Friends Grid: 712 active users
18. Kitely: 685 active users
19. Eureka World: 668 active users
20. German World Grid: 654 active users
21. Virtualife: 560 active users
22. New Life Italy: 546 active users
23. AvatarLife: 517 active users
24. ZetaWorlds: 517 active users
25. Vivo Sim: 510 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

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.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,500 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,366 product variations, 35,192 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 600 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 eight years.

Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties on Littlefield

There will be four holiday-themed parties, the first starting at 6 p.m. on December 23, a Christmas Eve party from 9 p.m. on December 24, and a Christmas Party from 8 p.m. Pacific Time on December 25, at the Christmas Island in Littlefield grid.

There also will be a New Year’s Eve formal dance at the grid’s New Year’s Island starting at 9 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, December 31.

All events will feature music, dancing, DJs, and Ball Drop and Fireworks every hour on the hour. Free tuxedos and gowns for the events are available at the grid’s formal wear shop located in the region, grid co-owner Walter Balazic told Hypergrid Business.

The region also hosts the Christmas Mall where visitors can find free Christmas decorations and other types of freebies. The region also hosts Santa’s Castle, Santa’s Flying Sleighride, Christmas Sleighride, ice skating with free ice skates, and many other Christmas-themed attractions.

The hypergrid addresses are lfgrid.com:Christmas Island and lfgrid.com:New Years Island.

Holiday party this weekend on Kitely

Kitely will host a holiday party starting at 12 noon Pacific Time at the Kitely Events Center, featuring skating, snowball fights, dancing, and music with DJ Rosa. The event is open to hypergrid visitors. If you want to give a gift contact Kimm Starr or Koshari Mahana for details.

The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Events Center.

AvatarLife grid plans mobile app

AvatarLife is currently developing a mobile-based viewer for the grid which will see AvatarLife members playing all types of games on the mobile devices by next year, AvatarLife co-owner Sushant Chandrasekar said.

“We are working with them to make this possible,” he told Hypergrid Business. “By September 2024, we should be on mobile. We are keeping the mobile app purely for gameplay, roleplay, and entertainment. Creators who want to create content on AvatarLife will still need to do it from their computers. The objective of the mobile app is to open the virtual worlds to a lot of younger generation users who prefer to use mobile apps as compared to a desktop viewer.”

AvatarLife already has a working prototype but mesh and texture rendering is still pending. It is partnering with the Crystal Front Viewer team in the project. The team will continue to build for Apple Vision Pro and other immersive VR devices in the future once the mobile app is complete and shows traction. The company also has a new CTO, Alok Singh Mahor, who is heading the technology department.

The grid will also launch premium membership this month starting at $6 per month. Premium members will get weekly stipends of in-world currency, and marketplace discounts, as well as other benefits.

Neverworld has a new role-play continent,  Gloebit bonuses and free land

Neverworld is currently developing a new continent for role-playing games, named Neverrealms, and is seeking role-player coordinators. The role play area currently includes Lucidus and Stilwater, two large cyberpunk post-apocalyptic sims. The role play will center around land grabs by warring factions, grid owner Govega Sachertorte said.

“We will be adding other sims we have such as three Fallout-inspired sims, combat sims, and zombie hunt areas,” she told Hypergrid Business. “Also some fae and elven regions. The area is already the size of 32 standard regions and we have plans to actively expand this in the new year.”

The grid is also offering Gloebits bonuses and free regions for new creators and DJs, particularly creators who can offer original creations including clothing, skins, hair, builds, scripts, and vehicles, she said.

The grid has also been running a promotion where anyone who buys new land gets free additional prims on the purchased land. Each new region order gets a 5,000 prim increase at the end of each quarter up to 15,000 extra prims in total until December 31 this year, said Sachertorte.

Additionally, there are hundreds of free premium parcels available for new members joining the grid. Most are homestead-sized, 16,000 meters and up.

AviTron closed indefinitely again

AviTron grid is currently offline following a Facebook post last month from owner Alex Ferraris discussing yet another closure. He’s previously closed AviTron or his previous grid, AviWorlds, more than twenty times. There’s no information available about how residents can get their content out or get refunds.

The grid came back up online in October from yet another indefinite closure. A few people have sent us emails complaining about it but the majority of the 10,000+ residents the grid claims to have, seems to have no complaints at all about the many business closures, most of which are not even planned or announced in time. The grid numbers may also be another attempt by Ferraris, who also runs a blog about several other things including cryptocurrencies, to market his grid.

If you are into virtual worlds and are planning to rent a region or create a region, we recommend a bit more predictable grids where the content will not disappear without a warning from the owner.

The three oldest grids in OpenSim that are still active today are OSgrid, founded in 2007, 3rd Rock Grid, founded in 2008, and AnSky, founded in 2009. In addition, Kitely and Digiworlds are two other extremely well-regarded grids that have been continuously operational for years and rent land. Kitely has been around since 2011 without any major outages, and DigiWorldz has been around since 2015 and is also well-known for its stability. Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov recommends Kitely for anyone just starting out and looking for an extremely low-cost, reliable, and high-performance region and OSgrid for people who are interested in running a region on their home computer for free.

OpenMic Arts this Saturday at Alternate Metaverse

The OpenMic Stage is seeking bands, singers, musicians, poets, storytellers, comedians, free-stylers, and other artists who are interested in showcasing their talent during the OpenMic Arts event which will happen from 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday, December 16 on the OpenMic Arts region. The event happens every Saturday and is hosted by Chris Dayellis.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Open Mic Arts.

The Open Mic Arts and the Arts regions were created by Cataplexia Numbers and host all things arts including an art gallery that has exhibitions from artists from all around the hypergrid, the Arts Magazine which also accepts 2D and 3D art submissions including photography, a live performance stage, and an annual arts festival during the summer.

Win Amazon gift card at Omnopolis

The Ithilien gaming region of the Omnopolis grid is hosting a Hi/Low game contest in which one player with the highest score will win a $25 Amazon gift card. The rest can win in-game tokens. The game has been ongoing since August but will conclude at 11 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, December 24 when the winner takes home the prize.

The region, which is already winter and Christmas-themed, hosts free-play games in which players earn free game tokens.

The hypergrid address is omnipolis.com:8002:Ithilien.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Ankabi, Arcadia Asylum, Mister Grid World, Resurgence, Tiffany’s, VR-ESC, and Tropicana Grid.

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

Closed grids

The following 42 grids were suspended this month: 3D Worldz, Avalonia Virtual, Avequest, Bubblesz, CLC grid, Dark Shadows, Destinationz, Dreamland Metaverse, Dynamic Worldz 2, EthanWorld, Exo-Life, Floyd World, Focus 360, Great Canadian Grid, Holo Neon, Holoneon, Hypergrid City, Ikora’s World, Joe’s Place, Kantarobasta Grid, Lake Kindred Spirit, Linkwater, Lost World, Martin Dimitrov Music, Neogrid 3, Old Europa Metaverse, One Life Grid, Online Plunder, Piggy Bank Grid World, SiLi, SiN Grid, Terranei World, Thug, Troiwia, TSim, Vanessa , and Vrugs Kingdom.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI 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 2,642 different publicly-accessible grids, 337 of which were active this month and 273 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.

• Wolf Territories Grid: 27,664 regions
• OSgrid: 25,650 regions
• Kitely: 18,296 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 11,743 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,162 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,296 regions
• Groovy Verse: 5,067 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,574 regions
• German World Grid: 2,133 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 951 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 873 regions
• ArtDestiny: 841 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• AviWorlds: 815 regions
• Tomi’s World: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 653 regions
• CandM World: 581 regions
• Littlefield: 511 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• AvatarLife: 419 regions
• Craft World: 393 regions
• DreamNation: 378 regions
• Furry World: 372 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 298 regions
• Neverworld: 280 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Six Sides: 233 regions
• Counter Earth: 197 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 192 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 166 regions
• Kater and Friends: 151 regions
• Outworldz: 149 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions

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.

Compared to last month, the number of active users is up by nearly 1,700. The total land area is down, however, by the equivalent of 5,423 standard regions.

Land area would have increased this month except for the fact that OSgrid, the largest grid in OpenSim, lost 6,684 regions.

That’s due to a regular cleanup carried out this month, grid owner Dan Banner told Hypergrid Business. 

OSgrid is a free-to-connect grid, where people can download the OSgrid region installer software on their home computers and run regions themselves, for free. These regions are only up, however, when those computers are active and connected. OSgrid reserves map locations for region owners but, if they haven’t been up for a while, clears away those map reservations so that other people can use them. Region numbers typically go up again when people reconnect their regions and reclaim their spots — or find new ones.

There were also some outages that affected the stats this month. TheKaz Grid, for example, is currently offline — and had 2,110 regions last month. Active user counts were also depressed by outages. Grids that were down this month include the Floyd grid, which had 133 actives last month, Piggy Bank Grid which had 634 actives, Vivo Sim which had 421 actives, and Goldor Grid which had 163 active users last month.

We are now tracking a total of 2,642 grids, of which 337 are active and 273 published their statistics this month. The rest do not have accessible public stats pages. The metaverse now spans an area of 125,877 total standard region equivalents, 95 percent of which is hypergriddable. There are nearly half a million total users out of which 44,184 are active. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email us at david@hypergridbusiness.com or maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

In summary, the Wolf Territories Grid is the new biggest grid by total region count of 26,768, ZetaWorlds is the fastest growing grid after adding 1,546 new regions in a month, OSgrid is the most popular by total active users or 5,265, Endless grid earned the most active users in a month or 448, and Eureka World registered the highest number of users or 565 in a month.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of OpenSim since these tend to be private grids.

DreamGrid has so far recorded more than 3,000 unique DreamGrids that have launched since it was launched, according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here. Anyone can easily add their grid to this list from the same page.

With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, anyone can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature on their home computer. 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. Learn here how to create and host a new Dreamgrid on your home computer using the software.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 5,265 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 4,050 active users
3. GBG World: 2,312 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,250 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,842 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,276 active users
7. Moonrose: 1,150 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,090 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,035 active users
10. Trianon World: 928 active users
11. AviTron: 898 active users
12. Party Destination Grid: 875 active users
13. AviWorlds: 838 active users
14. Littlefield: 794 active users
15. Craft World: 730 active users
16. Kitely: 720 active users
17. German World Grid: 668 active users
18. Jungle Friends Grid: 639 active users
19. Astralia: 630 active users
20. Herederos Grid: 548 active users
21. Endless : 487 active users
22. Gentle Fire Grid: 467 active users
23. DreamNation: 461 active users
24. ProxyNet: 447 active users
25. Discovery Grid: 441 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

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.

Eureka World registered the most users in the past month with 565, followed by OSgrid with 291, AvatarLife with 227, Kitely with 112, and Darkheart’s Playground with 79 new registered users.

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 20,500 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,366 product variations, 35,192 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 600 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 30,031 items both for sale and free.

OpenSim grid news

Thanksgiving Day at Littlefield Grid

Littlefield Grid will host a full-day celebration Thanksgiving Day starting at 3 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, November 23, at the Stonehaven Island and Speakeasy regions. Various activities are planned for the day including WLFG radio music sessions every hour on the hour, to recreate the famous WKRP turkey drop at Littlefield Mall, with Les Nesman and Dr. Johnny Fever. WLFG radio will be playing Alice’s Restaurant all day every hour on the hour.

A Thanksgiving dinner will be served all day starting at 6 a.m. Pacific Time at Stonehaven Island and a Thanksgiving Dance Party will take place from 8 p.m. Pacific Time at the Speakeasy Dance Club.

The hypergrid addresses are lfgrid.com:8002:Stonehaven and lfgrid.com:8002:Speakeasy.

Christmas Island region opens at Littlefield in readiness for Christmas and winter events

Littlefield’s annual Christmas Island will open on Saturday, November 25 in readiness for Christmas-themed events, decorations, and items, grid spokesman Walter Balzic told Hypergrid Business. The Christmas Mall, which is located on the island, will have free decorations, freebies, Christmas gifts, Christmas-themed decorations and other related items that can be picked by all.

Visitors can also find Santa’s Castle, Santa flying Sleighride, Christmas Sleighride, ice skating with free ice skates, and many other attractions.

The region will also host a Christmas Eve dance at 9 p.m. on Sunday, December 24 and a Christmas Day dance from 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, December 25.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:Christmas Island.

Neverworld offers free prims on new rentals to celebrate eighth birthday

Neverworld just celebrated its eighth birthday on a new region known as NWBB8 which is still up. The grid is therefore offering prims increments on new virtual region rentals. All new regions ordered by December 31 will be awarded free additional prims.

“Each quarter a rented region will complete it will be awarded 5,000 additional prims — up to 15,000 prims more per region for the life of the region on any new sims ordered by December 31,” ” grid owner Govega Sachertore told Hypergrid Business.

The NWBB8 region will be online for a few more weeks so everyone can get a chance to visit, he added. “We have freebies all over the region that are exclusive to the grid. The region has a lot of very detailed region showcases, some of them were shrunk in size to make a miniature rendering of the actual full-sized region. There are landmarks at each showcase parcel.”

Live on Mars at Neverworld grid

Neverworld grid has recreated the Martian near-future movie Total Recall from the 1990’s at the Virtual Recall region. Grid residents and visitors can now experience what it feels like to live under glass in the region. They can save the planet at the Pyramid Mines, live at the Mars Hilton Hotel, or roam around collecting various freebies at the region which include avatars based on movie characters.

The beautiful Mars Hilton Hotel has apartments available for rent and dwellers can decorate the rooms the way they want, and even add more walls and furniture. They can just sit and watch red dust as it swirls over the dome or walk over to the nearby stores that have themed gifts, clothing, avatars, and furniture. There also is a penthouse sun deck for basking in the hot tub.

The hypergrid address is hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002:Virtual Recall.

World Techno Day on December 9

ZetaWorlds will host a virtual World Techno Day Techno Party at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on December 9 at The Vault — which is the first event venue at the Event region — featuring DJ Tanya playing her famous trance mixes, DJ Mattie with Techno Live series of music for two hours in the afternoon, and DJ Nora playing a Supermix.

The hypergrid address is hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Events.

Techno Day is a day mainly dedicated to celebrating the evolution of the Techno music genre, an electronic dance music that originated in Detroit, Michigan, in the late 1980s. The Techno music is a genre created using electronic instruments, such as synthesizers, sequencers, or drum machines. It features classic acid house to hardstyle and drum and bass. People reflect on the evolution of electronic music over the past few decades during Techno Day, which is celebrated through Techno Parties, exploring new Techno gadgets, and listening to Techno music.

Some of the most famous tracks in this genre include Cosmic Cars by Juan Atkins, Magnese by Surgeon, The Tunnel by Richie Hawtin, Electric Salsa by Sven Vath, Ghetto Kraviz by Nina Kraviz, Subzero by Ben Klock, E Dancer by Kevin Saunderson, Autobahn by Kraftwerk, and The Bells by Jeff Mills.

SilverFox Designs Mall moved to Kishaki grid

SilverFox Designs Mall is now located on the Kishaki grid. It features inventory and textures such as clothes for men and women, for instance for the Gianni avatar, as well as shoes, suits, HUDs, ties, belts, and hoodies for Athena. The team is also due to launch a WinterDream on which visitors will find an animated Train, Skilift, Mountain Cafe, Wintermarket, Ski and Sled, among other things.

The hypergrid address is kishaki.de:8002:SilverFox Designs Mall.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Bradley City, Europa Metaverse, Jaytopia, Kishaki, Kizzys Grid, and Six Sides.

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 30 grids were suspended this month: Admeja, Bubblesz, Champions Gate, CLC grid, Dead Frog, Destinationz, Dreamland Metaverse, EthanWorld, Exo-Life, Focus 360, Great Canadian Grid, GridPlay Grid, Joe’s Place, Linkwater, Lost World, Martin Dimitrov Music, Old Europa Metaverse, One Life Grid, Online Plunder, SiN Grid, Terranei World, Thug, Troiwia, Vanessa , Vivo Sim, vLearn Lab, and Vrugs Kingdom.

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 2,642 different publicly-accessible grids, 337 of which were active this month and 273 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.

• Wolf Territories Grid: 26,768 regions
• OSgrid: 24,062 regions
• Kitely: 18,304 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 11,760 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,300 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,296 regions
• Groovy Verse: 4,405 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,557 regions
• German World Grid: 2,185 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 873 regions
• AviWorlds: 823 regions
• ArtDestiny: 729 regions
• Tomi’s World: 676 regions
• Kinky Haven: 653 regions
• Friends Grid: 645 regions
• Cristin and Mattt’s Stuff: 581 regions
• Littlefield: 495 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Craft World: 380 regions
• DreamNation: 377 regions
• AvatarLife: 374 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Neverworld: 277 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 212 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 192 regions
• Counter Earth: 191 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 160 regions
• Outworldz: 158 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• AviTron: 134 regions
• Kater and Friends: 133 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions

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.

OpenSim active users tally is, however, down this month by around 2,000 despite being an active season, which can be attributed to downtime on a number of grids.

Major grids that we did not get stats for this month include Exolife which had 932 actives last month, One Life had 381 actives last month but is currently offline, and Sin Grid, which had 251 actives last month, but offline when we were collecting the stats. In addition, Soul Grid , which had over 1,100 actives this summer, is no longer reporting that statistic.

Other grids that reported significant drops in active users were AviWorlds, Jungle Friends Grid, and Piggy Bank Grid World — the latter saw a drop of more than 800 actives compared to September.

We are now tracking a total of 2,635 OpenSim grids, 329 of which were active this month and 280  of which published their statistics. The rest do not have accessible public stats pages. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email us at david@hypergridbusiness.com or maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely are the three largest grids by land area this month, as they have been for a while now.  The list of the top 40 largest grids by land area is at the bottom of this report.

OSgrid also tops the list of fastest-growing grids after adding 976 new regions this month.

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.

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of OpenSim since these tend to be private grids.

DreamGrid has so far recorded a total of 3,435 unique DreamGrids that have launched since DreamGrid started, according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here. Anyone can easily add their grid to this list from the same page.

With the free-to-use DreamGrid software, anyone can easily create virtual worlds through a graphical interface and one-click install feature on their home computer. 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. Learn here how to create and host a new Dreamgrid on your home computer using the software.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 5,121 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 3,810 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,233 active users
4. GBG World: 2,079 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,632 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,373 active users
7. Moonrose: 1,080 active users
8. AviWorlds: 980 active users
9. AviTron: 961 active users
10. WaterSplash: 934 active users
11. Neverworld: 903 active users
12. Party Destination Grid: 856 active users
13. Kitely: 743 active users
14. Trianon World: 723 active users
15. Craft World: 658 active users
16. Piggy Bank Grid World: 634 active users
17. OpenSim Fest: 569 active users
18. German World Grid: 561 active users
19. Littlefield: 558 active users
20. Jungle Friends Grid: 550 active users
21. Astralia: 488 active users
22. Eureka World: 455 active users
23. Gentle Fire Grid: 454 active users
24. ZetaWorlds: 446 active users
25. Herederos Grid: 438 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

OpenSim Fest grid registered the highest number of active users with 348 due to the just concluded annual OpenSim Fest conference, followed by the Wolf Territories grid with 218, Goldor Grid — a new grid — has 163, The E Grid has 159, and Craft World — which hosted the annual Hypergrid International Expo — registered 150 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.

OSgrid registered the most number of users within the past month with 325, followed by AvatarLife with 164, Eureka World with 87, Kitely with 80, and Alternate Metaverse with 77.

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 20,466 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,309 product variations, 35,140 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 601 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 29,950 items both for sale and free.

Neverworld Grid Marketplace is another option for OpenSim grids and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists around 100 items for sale to both residents and hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.

“At the moment the marketplace for in-world delivery is still pending, with a few possible developers interested in doing this project,” grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

The admins are also inviting anyone to list their items on the marketplace.

Neverworld also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measure from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and can support up to 5,000 prims.

The grid website is now a jopensim-enabled website. Neverworld also offers a free region server to anyone who wants to self-host a region or grid on Neverworld. To do so, you need to download and install the server software on your machine, ensure the router ports are open as required, and run the .bin file as per instructions on this link then set up a region.

AvatarLife grid launches a marketplace for gaming and other items

AvatarLife grid has opened a new virtual world marketplace which currently lists about 26 items in 24 categories that include skill gaming, furniture, clothing, decor, textures, breedables, animations, art, and complete avatars. There also are Halloween and fall-themed items listed. The market is, however, only accessible to the grid’s residents since it is a closed grid.

Items are priced and traded in the grid currency AV$. The market also does in-world deliveries for all purchases similar to the Kitely Marketplace, said grid spokesperson Bob Young. Visitors can also find freebies, game demos, and scripts, but there currently are no OARs, brand name content creations, or exclusive content listed for sale, he added.

“As we are in very early stages, such content is not listed at this very moment, but hopefully we will have them soon,” Young told Hypergrid Business.

“Aargle Zymurgy, the creator of the famous skill game Zyngo has listed this game and probably future games in our marketplace,” he added. “Zyngo is widely considered to be the game that played a major role in the skill games expansion in Second Life.”

The game currently can not be found on any other marketplace. Another game due for listing on the marketplace is Deep Sting’s fishing game, Crypto Fish. He will be listing multiple new fishing rods for residents to fish with different reward systems on each different rod, AvatarLife CEO Shushant Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business.

OpenSim grid news

Live Halloween storytelling with StoryLink Radio

StoryLink Radio is offering Halloween-themed stories all month and will host a live story-telling session featuring stories about ghosts from 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, October 19. Read  about the rest of the Halloween-themed stories at StoryLink Radio here. You can follow all the storytelling events on StoryLink Radio’s YouTube channel or in-world on Kitely and SecondLife.

The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:Creative Collaborators.

Breakfast movies at the Funsize Dinkies in Alternate Metaverse grid

The Funsize Dinkies region on Alternate Metaverse grid is hosting movie mornings every week during this Halloween season. The Rocky Horror Picture Show will play at the Movie Park at 7:30 a.m. Pacific time on October 15,  Beetlejuice on October 22, and The Addams Family on October 29.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Funsize Dinkies.

Everyone is also welcome for the open Autumnfest Fishing event at the same region from 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time on October 24.

Zombie Apocalypse at Spirit Rock Ranch in Discovery Grid

The Spirit Rock Ranch region on Discovery Grid will, from 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time on October 28, host an adventure game that involves participant avatars taking down zombies that are threatening to over-run the region. Gamers choose the weapon of their choice at the region.

Visitors can also play other adventures almost every Saturday morning including surfing, dune buggies, sailing, horse riding, target shooting, big game hunting, and more.

The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Spirit Rock Ranch.

Conectados’ first-ever event will be a Halloween event

Conectados, a relatively new grid, will host a Halloween DJ event at 2:00 p.m. Pacific time on October 27 at the Your Dream region. You can pick a Halloween costume for the event at the grid’s stores.

The hypergrid address is conectados.opensim.fun:8802.  

OpenMic every Saturday at OSGrid

All musicians, singers, poets, and spoken word artists are invited to an OpenMic individual presentations event from 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time on October 28 at the Parsons Creek Lodge region in OSgrid. The region also hosts regular live events at 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. every Saturday morning.

The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Parsons Creek Lodge.

AvatarLife launches single-player Wild Poker game

AvatarLife has introduced a single-player game mode on its Wild Poker game which launched with the multi-player mode in July 2023. With the single-player mode Wild Poker game, one or three people can play against the computer.  The game is based on the Texas Hold’em poker game and players can win prizes in both single and multi-player modes.

AvatarLife to host Halloween Hunt and Party

AvatarLife grid is hosting a Halloween Hunt similar to the Easter Egg hunt. The hunt started about a week ago and will continue until the end of the month. It is taking place on 30 different locations.

It involves hidden gems including 30 quality mesh decor and Halloween-themed furniture to be found. Collect them all to have a complete Halloween set and win prizes. Different clues will be given.

There also will be a four-hour Halloween Bash for Cash party from 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, October 21 at the Creep Club’s Gaming Paradise region, hosted by AOS Gaming Paradise, a third-party games provider. It will feature DJ Kris and DJ Kelly and prize money will be given to attendants on the same day.

“We have a starting prize fund of 125,000 AV$ which is about $500,” Young told Hypergrid Business. “Money will be given out every few minutes by a random moneygiver. There will also be a best outfit competition.”

The hypergrid address is avatarlife.com:8002:Gaming Paradise. 

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Assassin Guard, BigOne, CandorsRPWorld, Cristin and Mattt’s Stuff, Dragonz Kin Territories, Endless, Expanse, Falling Love, Goldor Grid, Lagniappe Grid, Omicron Dreams, South Grid, CatGrid, and SunEden Resort.

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 46 grids were suspended this month: Alterlifes, Atacama Desert, AviVerse AlterEgo, Beha Second, BradleyVille, Bubblesz, Chez moi, CosmoPlanet, Costa Isla, Dead Frog, Eenhgrid, EthanWorld, Farm World A Sua Vida Virtual, Gabngio, Galaxy Warz, GridPlay Grid, Hasengang, Horse Island, Immersion Tools, Joe’s Place, Lonetree, Lovely Paradise, Matrix, MetaverseGrid, Micachee, Ocean Grid, Oczko, Online Plunder, Proxy, Rainbow World, Rezmela, Scripted Artwork, Seconds, Serenity, SFgrid, Small Town X, Takland, Tropical Isle, Virtual Ability, Virtualife, vLearn Lab, VR Playground, and WaterSplash.

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 2,635 different publicly-accessible grids, 329 of which were active this month and 280 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.

• OSgrid: 30,746 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 26,112 regions
• Kitely: 18,293 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,214 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,040 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,316 regions
• Groovy Verse: 4,459 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,641 regions
• TheKaz Grid: 2,110 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• German World Grid: 1,238 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,056 regions
• GBG World: 951 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 873 regions
• AviWorlds: 830 regions
• Tomi’s World: 676 regions
• Kinky Haven: 653 regions
• ArtDestiny: 625 regions
• Littlefield: 502 regions
• GorGrid: 428 regions
• Craft World: 392 regions
• DreamNation: 385 regions
• Furry World: 374 regions
• AvatarLife: 355 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Cristin and Mattt’s Stuff: 281 regions
• Neverworld: 274 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Soul Grid: 223 regions
• AviTron: 200 regions
• Counter Earth: 194 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 192 regions
• Adreans-World: 171 regions
• Outworldz: 158 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 156 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions

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.

This year’s Hypergrid International Expo kicks off at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, October 6 at the HIE’s Auditorium on Craft World, featuring an opening party with music from Zoree Jupiter at 11 a.m., Arianna Nightfire at 1 p.m., and Forest Azure at 10 p.m. Pacific Time.

“The three artists will bring us an international mix of songs on a unique music stage built by Nyx Breen with a sort of crosswords in all languages theme,” Thirza Ember, one of the planning committee members, told Hypergrid Business. 

The event, which showcases the diversity and various cultures in OpenSim, will run through Saturday and Sunday, September 8. It is open to all hypergrid visitors and will be broadcast live on the HIE YouTube channel.

The hypergrid event attracts exhibitions, artists, and speakers from all around OpenSim. Please see the full schedule on this link.

The main activities will take place on Saturday and Sunday starting from 9 a.m. Pacific Time. Three different sessions are planned each day — two sessions dedicated to talks in the normal conference format and the other session to artistic displays.

The teleports to the different regions are located at the Welcome region of Craft World grid.

The hypergrid address is craft-world.org:8002:HIE Welcome.

The hypergrid address to the auditorium is craft-world.org:8002:HIE 4.

Addresses to the other areas dedicated to the event are craft-world.org:8002:HIE 2 and craft-world.org:8002:HIE 3.  

Craft World is an ideal place to host the event because the different language groups needed for the event are already operational there, it is a popular grid, and many of the presenters already have avatars on the grid, said Thirza Ember in an interview.

Exhibitions, art, music, and speakers from around OpenSim

This year’s event features over 70 exhibition booths covering three OpenSim regions and showcasing work from different people around OpenSim, including grid and region owners and OpenSim creators and artists. The exhibitions will take place at the Expo Park next to the Auditorium region. Different exhibitors will tell the story of their grids and regions, advertise their grids and regions with textures and using personalized booths or by providing their web page links at the booths, showcase any projects they have, and give away freebies, souvenirs, note cards, and other items which are usually in full perm.

Art performances and music will take place at the Auditorium — which consists of four sims — including four art performances by Range Darkstone, Lampithaler Artist, CapCat Ragu, Tosha Tyran, and Cherry Manga.

This year’s event speakers are drawn from different OpenSim grids, including Craft World, OSGrid, Pangea Grid, CreaNovale, and SV3D. They will address a range of topics and issues from the experience of living in OpenSim to technical tricks with scripts. HIE streams the audio using Discord so as to be heard across region boundaries. You can find the presentation subtitles in-world through the HIE groups.

Presentations in five languages

Speakers at the HIE event give their presentations in five languages — French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish — unlike the OpenSim Community Conference where all presenters speak English.

However, the audience in the HIE does not need to know the languages in which the speakers are presenting because they can follow all of the presentations through subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. By allowing for presentations in languages other than English, the event will give a chance to people who want to make presentations in those languages and also embrace cultural variations in language and other things.

The event is organized by Mal Burns, James Atlloud, Kelso Uxlay, Tosha Tyran, and Thirza Ember. However, there are other volunteers, including the streaming and filming team, translators team, booth makers, admins, greeters, speakers, planning committee, and performers.

Traffic is expected to be even higher in the next month because the annual OSFest kicked off today.

We are now tracking a total of 2,619 OpenSim grids, 430 of which were active and 270 of which published their statistics this month. The rest do not have accessible public stats pages. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email us at david@hypergridbusiness.com or maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

Oh, the total number of active grids was also a record high this month.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely were the three largest grids by land area this month, as they have been for a while now.

OSgrid, a free-to-connect, non-profit world, now has an equivalent of 29,770 standard-sized regions in total, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 25,504 regions, Kitely with 18,301, ZetaWorlds with 10,386, and Alternate Metaverse with 9,949 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.

DreamGrid has so far recorded a total of 3,435 unique DreamGrids that have launched since DreamGrid started, according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

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

The total list of grids for which OutWorldz reports stats is available here. Anyone can easily add their grid to this list from the same page.

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. Learn here how to create and host a new Dreamgrid on your home computer using the software.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 5,108 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 3,568 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,196 active users
4. GBG World: 2,116 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,647 active users
6. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,493 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,479 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,283 active users
9. AviTron: 1,121 active users
10. Moonrose: 1,091 active users
11. Neverworld: 998 active users
12. Exo-Life: 992 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 858 active users
14. Trianon World: 829 active users
15. Jungle Friends Grid: 787 active users
16. Kitely: 743 active users
17. Herederos Grid: 613 active users
18. Littlefield: 516 active users
19. Barefoot Dreamers: 516 active users
20. Craft World: 508 active users
21. DreamNation: 456 active users
22. ProxyNet: 448 active users
23. ZetaWorlds: 438 active users
24. German World Grid: 436 active users
25. Gentle Fire Grid: 436 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

Little Big City is this month’s greatest gainer in the number of active users with 406 new active users, followed by the new Herederos Grid with 324 actives, Eureka World and GBG World both with 302, and Trianon World with 272.

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.

Eureka World registered the highest number of users this month with 393 users, followed by OSgrid with 342, AvatarLife with 167, Kitely with 132, and the new Herederos Grid with 90 newly registered users.

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 20,180 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,935 product variations, 34,821 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 598 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 29,950 items both for sale and free.

Neverworld Grid Marketplace is another option for OpenSim grids and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently has a few dozen items for sale to both residents and hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.

Neverworld also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measure from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and can support up to 5,000 prims, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

Neverworld also offers a free region server to anyone who wants to self-host a region or grid on Neverworld. To do so, you need to download and install the server software on your machine, ensure the router ports are open as required, and run the .bin file as per instructions on this link then set up a region.

OpenSim grid news

OSFest 2023 kicks off

This year’s annual OpenSim’s largest hypergrid event OpenSim Fest — which attracts thousands of participants including sponsors, builders, exhibitors, artists, musicians, merchants, grid owners, and OpenSim enthusiasts from around the hypergrid — kicks off at 9.00 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday, September 15. The full calendar of events is located on this link.

The final build testing was completed successfully on September 14, but the floor is still open for anyone willing to volunteer or sponsor the event. Details on how to register as an exhibitor, merchant, volunteer, promoter, supporter, and attender are located on this link and you can follow the progress via the host’s Discord group here. OSFest also runs a YouTube page, Facebook page, Twitter page, and OpenSimWorld page from where you can get regular updates on proceedings, and occurrences about the event.

Twenty-nine companies and individuals are sponsoring this year’s event, which usually takes place for 16 days and offers more than 90 hours of live performances and tours of exhibits and merchant stores. Over 140 standard region equivalents spanning a total area of nine square kilometers have been set aside for the various exhibitions, expos, performances, presentations, group and individual tours, and meetings.

In addition to sponsors, grid owners, builders, and merchants exhibiting their items, there are a host of events planned including a 10th anniversary of The Golden Touch theater at 11.00 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, September 16 at Golden Sky Region of the Utopia Sky Grid where the theater is hosted. There also will be group tours to exhibitor stores on Mondays and Wednesdays during the event period.

The hypergrid address to the Welcome region is grid.opensimfest.com:8022:hg-welcome.

Wish Upon a Star at the Grid Genesis Roleplay

The shopping area Masala Al Kahov, translated in English as “wish upon a star,” has launched on Genesis RolePlay grid. It offers original and remodeled freebies built by owners of the mall.

Here you can get, for free, their newest creation the Pineview Townhouse — a very detailed house with a garage, kitchen, living room, den or study, bedroom, bathroom, 3D windows, and a deck. The beautiful mesh is full perm copy, modify, and transfer and you can use it to beautify your grid or regions.

Masala Al Kahov also offers other freebie items like original plants, furniture, boats, English manor houses, pumpkin houses, flax flowers, and small shops. You can get items for all manner of holiday and event decorations.

The hypergrid address is grid.genesis-roleplay.org:8002:Masala Al Kohav.

I Love You Grid up and running despite devastating earthquake

Last week’s Marrakesh earthquake has left a huge loss and disruptions including to power, broadband, and telephony connectivity but I Love You Grid — whose one of the owners, DebzFox, resides in Morocco’s capital — has announced that it has made necessary arrangements to run the grid without interruptions despite the happenings.

The grid offers free land for residents, events every Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and shops and a Superstore for those interested in lifestyle shopping. It also runs an open social network for anyone willing to join and radio streams that broadcast for 24 hours each day.

Littlefield held 9-11 memorial

The Memorial Region in Littlefield grid hosted the 9-11 tragedy memorial, as it does every year on September 11 of this month. The region hosts a replica of the Tower of Voices for Flight 93 among many other items that are still accessible to anyone willing to pay a visit.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:9-11 Memorial.

HG Safari group to tour the Luxor region in Wolf Territories Grid

HG Safari social group still continues to visit various OpenSim grids and will visit the Luxor region in Wolf Territories starting at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, September 27, and will run for two hours as usual.

Members of the international OpenSim tour group usually first meet at the HG Safari region on OSGrid at hg.osgrid.org:80:HG Safari then proceed to tour together and experience, highlight, and popularize interesting places around the hypergrid. The events are all planned with the host grid owners and it is a great way for grid owners willing to make known their interesting locations, items, and works in OpenSim.

You can know about the group’s upcoming visits or tours through its Facebook page, MeWe, and Discord group, and send a message or notecard to Thirza Ember if you are a grid or region owner who would like to host the group tour in your grid or region.

The hypergrid address is grid.wolfterritories.org:8002:Luxor.

Learn about health and disability issues at the Healthinfo Island and Virtual Ability grid

Virtual Ability’s Healthinfo Island region located in Second Life now has eight displays and exhibits meant to educate and raise awareness about different health concerns. The displays and exhibits address to obstructive sleep apnea, animal zoonotic diseases, managing sadness, coping with intense emotions, rhabdomyolysis, inflammatory bowel disease and Irritable bowel syndrome, Argh emotional meltdown, and red meat allergy.

You can click on the link provided above to teleport to the different exhibit locations, then find different posters with their descriptions about each of the various health conditions.

Virtual Ability is a US non-profit corporation with a mission to enable people with a wide range of disabilities and shares and creates awareness on physical inabilities and related support in the society through the website, Second Life, and its grid in OpenSim. The organization provides information about various health issues and links to different relevant products and services. This month, the organization is helping raise awareness about the sepsis condition now that September is Sepsis Awareness Month.

A survey of people with disabilities in the US states of Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada, and the Pacific Basin is also being conducted by Robyn R Gershon, College of Global Public Health, New York University. According to the organization’s blog, the survey will provide information on how ADA Coordinators are helping people with disabilities in their local communities and how they can further be empowered to do so.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Ansjela Grid, Ares World, Butschiland, CLC grid, Conectados Grid, Escape 2 Reality Grid, Genesis PR, Holo Neon, Humble Grid, Hypergrid City, Lailara Heya, Little Big City, Monarch Gardens, Nekolution, Old Europa Metaverse, SiN Grid, and Troiwia, Vanessa.

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 25 grids were marked as suspended this month: Adult Nation, Adventure Bay, Costa Isla, Eenhgrid, Elords, Etheria Grid, Farm World A Sua Vida Virtual, Happy Hour, Hasengang, Hot Gorean Nights, IBK Grid, Impulse Grid, OpenSim UAb, OpenSims Life, Pleasant Retreat, Proxy, Starfleet, Sweet Life, Troy, VR Playground, WaterSplash, Wonder, Youth Nation, Yow Now Free, and Yuriworld.

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 2,619 different publicly-accessible grids, 430 of which were active this month, and 270 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.

• OSgrid: 29,770 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 25,504 regions
• Kitely: 18,301 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,386 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 9,949 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,361 regions
• Groovy Verse: 4,432 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,583 regions
• TheKaz Grid: 2,110 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• German World Grid: 1,222 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 960 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 875 regions
• AviWorlds: 836 regions
• Kinky Haven: 653 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 626 regions
• ArtDestiny: 625 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Littlefield: 502 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• GorGrid: 428 regions
• 4Creative: 413 regions
• Craft World: 396 regions
• DreamNation: 381 regions
• AvatarLife: 337 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Neverworld: 268 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Soul Grid: 240 regions
• AviTron: 209 regions
• Counter Earth: 189 regions
• Adreans-World: 164 regions
• Outworldz: 154 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 149 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions

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.

Virtual world citizens are welcome to listen to the stories at the Halloween Merchant Mall in Kitely. There will also be a simultaneous video feed and chat on StoryLink’s YouTube Channel for all the stories.

The audiences can come to the performances dressed in theme for each of the particular stories or just as they are.

As is usual for all other story sessions hosted by StoryLink, a live host or storyteller will tell the story while the audience can also participate by chatting with each other and commenting about the stories, both in-world and over StoryLink’s YouTube channel.

The hypergrid address to the Halloween Merchant Mall is grid.kitely.com:8002:octoberworld. 

A new story every night

StoryLink will present a new short story every night throughout the month of September as countdown for Halloween continues.

The stories will cut across different genres, including haunts, ghosts, and suspense. You can follow the series on StoryLink’s YouTube Channel. The YouTube channel also currently has more than 100 archived stories for on-demand listening.

Here is the series of Halloween-themed stories from StoryLink Radio:

In The Pines: This is an Appalachian ghost or horror story by Karl Edward Wagner which pre-figures The Shining, a story that was published three years ago. Time and date: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, September 28.

Trouble in Braids: This is a supernatural noir hard-boiled detective tale featuring Los Angeles private eye Sam Hunter who does not have a soft side but an inhuman side. Time and date: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, October 5.

Heartseeker – Space Horror: This story will explore the extraterrestrial nightmares and horrors that happen in the deepest, darkest depth of space where the stars are cold and there is no benevolent first contact or utopian worlds. Time and date: 9 to 10 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, October 5.

Scary Stories at the Campout Sleepover: The Annual Campout Sleepover in the Haunted Forest will happen from 6 to 8 p.m. Pacific time, on Thursday, October 12. The fun and scary stories to be told are suitable for 10-year-olds and up. Come in your favorite Halloween jammies. There will be campfires, tents, sleeping bags, candles, pizzas, popcorn, candy flashlights, marshmallows, dark stormy night, and readings from Scary Stories for Sleepovers provided.

Friday Special: 1408 by Stephen King: In this story, Mike Enslin — the best selling author of true ghost stories — decides to spend the night in New York’s most haunted hotel room. The story has been made into a movie starring John Cusak, Samuel Jackson, and Tony Shalhoub. Time and date: 7 to 8 p.m. Pacific time, Friday, October 13.

Sticks: The lovecraftian, psychedelic gothic horror tale is a precursor to The Blair Witch Project. Time and date: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, October 19.

Trio of Alien Horrors, The City of Frozen Shadows, The Black Ocean, and Graveyard: Trio of Alien Horrors unravels horrors such as happens in movies Alien, Jaws, Terminator, X-Minus One, Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits. The  City of Frozen Shadows is about the last living man on Earth who hides in a gutted city that is haunted by alien exterminators. The Black Ocean is about astronauts who, adrift in a misty alien ocean, are attacked by a gigantic predator. The Graveyard story explores the deepest, darkest depths of space. The stars are cold, malevolent eyes looking across a vast vineyard of the unknown, the unnameable, and the undead. The planets are tombs, and the moons are haunted catacombs. Time and date: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, October 26.

A Halloween Story: A surprise Halloween-themed story about monsters and goblins. Time and date: 3 to 4 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, October 31.

One More Pumpkin: The surprise pumpkin tale will keep your little Halloween pumpkin flame lit. Time and date: 7 to 4 p.m. Pacific time, Thursday, November 2.

Halloween-themed items at the Halloween Mall and Seanchai Library

The Halloween Mall is open all year round and harbors free Halloween and Autumn merchant items while the Seanchai Library also hosts autumn-themed presentations, poems, and stories from numerous artists and storytellers during the autumn seasons.

This was an increase of 2,252 regions compared to last month.

Meanwhile, the total number of registered users on public OpenSim grids increased by 7,440 and the total number of active users rose by 666.

This was despite the fact that several grids did not report their stats this month, including The University of St Andrews’ School of Computer Science, which reported over 4,000 registered users last month, and Soul Grid, which reported 1,151 actives last month. Other grids that were missing stats this month included Etheria Grid, Youth Nation, Mathesis, WaterSplash, E Grid, Champions Gate, and the Impulse Grid.

We are now tracking 2,596 OpenSim grids in total, 422 of which were active and 271 of which published their statistics. The rest do not have accessible public stats pages. If you have a new stats page, please do let us know for inclusion.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely are still the three largest grids by land area.

OSgrid now has an equivalent of 29,281 standard-sized regions in total, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 25,440 regions, Kitely with 18,294, ZetaWorlds with 10,132, and Alternate Metaverse with 9,369 regions. German World Grid added the most regions or 637 in the past 30 days since we reported these statistics, followed by Alternate Metaverse with 473, Groovy Verse with 387, OSgrid with 351, and Galactic Virtual — a new grid — emerged with 123 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.

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 3,435 unique DreamGrids that have launched since DreamGrid started, according to Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 4,866 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 3,312 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,062 active users
4. Alternate Metaverse: 1,897 active users
5. GBG World: 1,814 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,591 active users
7. Neverworld: 1,552 active users
8. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,387 active users
9. ZetaWorlds: 1,324 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,250 active users
11. AviTron: 1,085 active users
12. Moonrose: 1,066 active users
13. Exo-Life: 993 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 775 active users
15. Jungle Friends Grid: 661 active users
16. Craft World: 629 active users
17. Kitely: 626 active users
18. Barefoot Dreamers: 622 active users
19. The City: 571 active users
20. Hartland: 571 active users
21. Trianon World: 557 active users
22. DreamNation: 497 active users
23. ProxyNet: 491 active users
24. German World Grid: 481 active users
25. Gentle Fire Grid: 470 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

Hartland is this month’s greatest gainer in the number of active users with 489 new active users, followed by Neverworld with 387, Darkheart’s Playground with 362, Alternate Metaverse with 274, and Wolf Territories Grid with an increase of 213 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.

Baller Nation gained the most number of registered users during the last 30 days, followed by OSgrid with 356, AvatarLife with 126, Alternative Metaverse with 74, and Kitely with 69 users.

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 20,056 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,784 product variations, 34,687 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 595 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 29,950 items both for sale and free.

Neverworlds’ Marketplace is another option for OpenSim grids, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently a few dozen items for sale to both residents and hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.

Neverworld also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measure from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and can support up to 5,000 prims, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

OpenSim grid news

Hosting4Opensim waives all grid hosting setup and support fees

Hosting4Opensim.com has waived all grid hosting set-up fees and setup-related support fees, meaning the grid hosting company is now offering all support to customers for free. The company is also allowing customers to use personal domains on all server packages, company CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business.

Complete grid setup packages with the company start at $80 per month for a private grid of up to 15 regions, and the package includes a Robust server, two free regions, and a user registration page. Commercial grid packages start at $150 per month. Region hosting packages start at $12.50 per month but one must own a grid to order region packages. The company also provides money server rentals with support for Podex and Gloebits.

AviWorlds to host 5,000th user party

AviWorlds grid will host a four-hour party at noon Pacific Time on August 27 at the AviWorlds Club to celebrate reaching the 5,000 user milestone. The party will feature live music by Rogue Galaxy.

“There will be a giveaway to people that attend and they can obtain our gift package at the club on that day,” grid CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business. “We will have a box with items inside for free that normally are paid-for items on Kitely or AviWorlds.”

The hypergrid address is login.aviworlds.com:8002:AviWorlds Club.

OSFest seeks volunteers, presenters

This year’s OpenSim Fest — a two-week event that includes art exhibitions, merchant expos, music, stores, and various presentations — will run from 1 p.m. on September 15 to 6 p.m. on September 30 at the OpenSimFest Grid, which is now live with 18 regions on which different activities will take place. This year’s theme is Jazz and Blues Era, late 1860’s to early 1970’s.

The event will open with a party from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time on September 15. There will be performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and all weekends. Other key events include Exhibit Tours scheduled from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, September 18, and Monday, September 25. Store tours will take place on Wednesday, September 20, and Wednesday, September 27, at the same time. The full calendar can be accessed on this page.

The hosts invite merchants, sponsors, exhibit presenters, and entertainment artists for exhibitions, sponsorships, and presentations. Those interested in exhibiting can reserve free parcels and present all kinds of art and items of all kinds from all around OpenSim, including but not limited to the event’s theme. As of this writing, 20 out of 68 total free exhibitor parcels and 8 out of 40 total free merchant parcels are still available.

Please register here for a free ticket and then contact the festival director, exhibitor organizer, or merchant organizer through the OSFest Discord channel or via opensimfest@gmail.com to get merchant and exhibitor parcels. As usual, the event’s exhibitor and merchant parcels will be 100 percent free thanks to the event sponsors shown on this page. The event still requires more sponsors as the full sponsorship amount required is yet to be reached.

Anyone willing to participate as a volunteer greeter, leader, host, and hostess, or performer can contact the Volunteer Organizer or Performer Organizer via the same Discord page. Enquiries can also be directed to the above-mentioned email address.

ZetaWorlds launches Community Event Spaces

ZetaWorlds grid has launched five event regions known as The Vault, ZetaWorlds Stage, OpenSim Convention Center, Estate Regions Art, and Maxwell Theatre, where individuals or groups can host and attend all sorts of events virtually. Following successful testing of the Events region last month, the grid this week announced more spaces to be used for events.

The event regions have different features to support different social events. The features include seating spaces, open spaces, dance floors, art installations or booths, stages with lights and particle effects, group meeting areas, open-air spaces for installations and displays, commercial lots, and some can even support event ads.

OpenMic Arts seeks talent

OpenMic Stage is looking for performers from around the hypergrid.  Chris Dayellis and Whisper Carfield host live open mic events on Alternate Metaverse on Saturdays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Singers, musicians, poets, storytellers, comedians, and freestyles are invited to participate. It is a great place to showcase a hidden talent.

To participate, visit alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Open Mic Arts.

Open Mic Arts is just one of the events featured on the art regions on the Alternate Metaverse grid. These regions also offer several facilities, including an art gallery, an arts magazine, a theatrical stage, a live performance stage, a party pavilion, and are home to the Inspiration Cafe, and the Annual Festival Of The Art.

Weekly prim-building classes start this September

Prim building classes for beginners will start on September 7 and thereafter take place every Thursday. Meanwhile, the advanced prim building course starts on September 2 and will take place every Saturday at the Koryphon Academy on the Alternate Metaverse grid. The advanced prim building classes will serve those who attended the starter classes in 2022.

The classes will be hosted by Rique Giano.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Koryphon Academy.

Download, 3D-print, and wear Peace for Ukraine jewelry in real life

The Monentes Jewelry store has released downloadable files of a recently-designed pendant named Peace for Ukraine on the collection’s  download page on Three Hills Grid — Marianna Monente’s grid has now been renamed from Virtual-HG to Three Hills Grid to avoid name confusion with the Virtual Grid. The new art can be downloaded and then 3D printed for wearing in real life for anyone who wants to support Ukraine following the war with Russia. The jewelry was designed by the store owner Marianna Monentes.

The store is also offering, on the same page, other new pieces of jewelry for download and 3D printing. All the art works are copyrighted and can therefore not be used elsewhere for commercial purposes.

New Firestorm version out

Firestorm Viewer has a new version 6.6.14.69596 published on August 14, which fixes some issues resulting from Linden Lab’s recent decisions. The new version comes with multiple improvements, including some that will make building and scripting better.

The new version also removes the “View Profile” from the V2 context menu for the resident’s own avatar, prevents profile texts from getting truncated in some cases, fixes multiple log warnings related to profiles, and fixes the profile notes under active editing getting discarded when the profile owner enters or leaves the region at the same time.

It’s story time with StoryLink Radio live

StoryLink Radio presents two storytelling sessions this week. The first one is titled High Seas Cthulhu — Swashbacking Adventure Meets the Mythos!, and will stream live on StoryLink Radio’s YouTube channel and in-world in Creative Collaborators region in Kitely grid and Nowhere Ville region in Second Life grid at 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, August 17.

Narrated by storyteller and StoryLink Radio owner Shandon Loring, the story will take you back in time when tall ships roamed the oceans and creatures lurked in the dark depths.

The second story, titled Midnight Dreary — Cthulhu Meets Edgar Allan Poe, will stream on the above-mentioned YouTube link and regions in Kitely and Second Life grids from 9 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, August 17.

StoryLink Radio presents literature of many genres in a themed virtual world setting but also, behind this, runs a literacy enhancement initiative, said Loring.

“We have great audiences that come to each of our performances, often dressing in theme for the story, but come-as-you-are is always welcome too,” he told Hypergrid Business.

As part of StoryLink’s Literacy Enhancement initiative for emerging readers and language learners, some story videos also feature in-video texts so listeners can read along.

The audience also can share with each other or with the host storyteller any thoughts they have about a story while it is being told live. The live chat streams alongside the story. StoryLink also archives past story episodes on its YouTube channel for on-demand listening by anyone.

More storytelling sessions are scheduled for September and October — the storytelling peak season.

OpenSim still needs more volunteer testers for the shift to .Net 6

Future releases of OpenSim are likely to support Microsoft .Net instead of the alternative called Mono, and developers and the community at large are focusing on and actively considering the shift. Although there are testers actively working on the changes and implementations, the number is likely inadequate, especially without automated testing of basic functions, Zetamex CEO Vincent Sylvester told Hypergrid Business.

Still needed are unit testers and overall testers, especially those who are familiar with nunit and xunit tests since these are the best options for OpenSim going forward, he said. Extensive testing will ensure changes are not introducing regressions.

Skimi 3D offering full year free license of new 3D game

Skimi 3D immersive gaming company has introduced a brand-new gaming section in Omnipolis grid and is offering a full year free license of Cosmic Ascension — the company’s first game in the grid.

The company is also introducing special gaming licensing packages for residents who will now get a number of game activations depending upon their Patreon membership level. Non-members can also take advantage of the offer by purchasing a license membership.

The introduction of the game and gaming region in Omnipolis marks Skimi 3D’s venture into virtual world gaming after spending years in crafting 3D assets for Second Life since 2006 and then later on moving to OpenSim.

Avitron is closing. Or not.

AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a history of abruptly shutting down grids he runs, including AviWorlds when he was the owner and the short-lived Virtual Ville, without warning and causing users to lose content.

Pomposelli announced in a Facebook post that he’s since taken down that he plans to shut down AviTron at the end of August due to declining revenues. Then he said he may keep it running but would need to cut costs.

AviTron has been unstable, changing business models frequently, switching hypergrid status, and experiencing downtime. That’s very typical for Pomposelli, and, if the grid does stay up, users are warned not to invest more time or money into the grid than they can afford to lose.

For more information, check out our recent article on the topic.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Adult Life, Galactic Virtual, MetaverseGrid, Pineapple, Small Town X, Spes, Tanduria, Twiztid Timez Grid, and Virtual Islands.

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 17 grids were suspended this month: Anderian Online, Calypso, Darkheart’s Realm, Elords, Etuvia, IBK Grid, Jatlan, Keraith Grid, LoboWorld, NukoGrid, Rennoc World, Society of the Sacred Grove, The Shirelands, Twisted Grid, and Virtual Melody.

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 2,584 different publicly-accessible grids, 419 of which were active this month, and 268 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.

• OSgrid: 29,281 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 25,440 regions
• Kitely: 18,294 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,134 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 9,399 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,298 regions
• Groovy Verse: 4,387 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,582 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• TheKaz Grid: 1,361 regions
• German World Grid: 1,186 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 960 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 875 regions
• AviWorlds: 851 regions
• Kinky Haven: 637 regions
• ArtDestiny: 625 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 615 regions
• Littlefield: 491 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• GorGrid: 427 regions
• 4Creative: 413 regions
• DreamNation: 406 regions
• Craft World: 386 regions
• AvatarLife: 330 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Neverworld: 252 regions
• Soul Grid: 239 regions
• AviTron: 223 regions
• Counter Earth: 184 regions
• Adreans-World: 164 regions
• Horse Island: 162 regions
• Outworldz: 154 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions
• AviVerse AlterEgo: 126 regions

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. 

For example, New Life Italy did not report its active user stats this month — it had over 400 last month. Other grids that had over 100 active users last month but were either down or did not report stats this month include Arkham Grid, Sharing Is Caring Family, Virtual Melody, Calypso, and Impulse Grid. Finally, Eureka World, an educational grid, was down by over 500 active users, mostly likely due to the summer holidays.

We are now tracking 2,584 OpenSim grids in total, 419 of which were active this month, and 268 of which published statistics.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely are still the three largest grids by land area.

OSgrid reported an equivalent of 28,808 standard-sized regions this month, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 25,472 regions, Kitely with 18,255, ZetaWorlds with 10,099, and Alternate Metaverse with 8,896 regions. OSgrid added the most number of regions at 1,483 this month, followed by Groovy Verse with 487, Perfect Life with 199, Alternative Metaverse with 107, and ArtDestiny with 96 additional standard 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 since DreamGrid started. 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.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 4,759 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 3,044 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 1,950 active users
4. GBG World: 1,633 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,569 active users
6. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,327 active users
7. ZetaWorlds: 1,264 active users
8. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,229 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,165 active users
10. Soul Grid: 1,151 active users
11. AviWorlds: 1,069 active users
12. Moonrose: 1,056 active users
13. Exo-Life: 993 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 816 active users
15. Craft World: 783 active users
16. One Life Grid: 665 active users
17. Youth Nation: 630 active users
18. Jungle Friends Grid: 617 active users
19. Trianon World: 599 active users
20. Kitely: 582 active users
21. WaterSplash: 581 active users
22. ProxyNet: 571 active users
23. Barefoot Dreamers: 561 active users
24. Kid Grid: 502 active users
25. The City: 501 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. The most popular grids are also not necessarily the most active.

Wolf Territories Grid is this month’s biggest gainer, with an increase of 404 in their active user numbers compared to last month. Next were Darkheart’s Playground, having added 369 active users, followed by Jungle Friends Grid with 247 new actives, Piggy Bank Grid World with 207, Dorena’s World with 147, and Caribou Grid with 107.

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.

OSgrid registered the highest number of users with 294, followed by Perfect Life with 102, Kitely with 99, Wolf Territories grid with 93, and Alternative Metaverse with 81 registered users. Baller Nation, which had 1,513 registered users last month, did not publish stats this month.

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 20,020 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,735 product variations, 34,644 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 592 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 29,994 items both for sale and free.

Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which launched last month, is another option for OpenSim grids, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists a bunch of items for sale to both residents and hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.

Neverworlds also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measures from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and of up to 5,000 prim limits, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

OpenSim grid news

Play VR games on Mech Lab; new security shop opens

Simphony Vive runs a virtual reality-enabled Mech Lab region in OSgrid where people can play VR games, explore VR scenes, and build their custom merchandise. Users who want to build items on the world can find add-ons for the items from the merchant stores such as the Mech Lab Security mini-shop, which opens on Sunday, July 16.

Pro members can also share 360 degrees and VR images with friends at the Mech Lab.

The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Mech Lab.

RRD fashion store to reopen with newer mesh styles

The RRD Fashion Exclusives fashion region store on the My Virtual Beach grid will close for one week at a time to be determined next month and then reopen with newer mesh styles and designs such as Athena, Athena Petite, Legacy, and Legacy Perky.

Trizzy Hunter, the store owner, announced that the currently available styles and designs will also undergo revamping during the closure. She is also open to suggestions and requests on improving the texture and colors of existing meshes and items.

The region hosts mainly clothing designs created for Rayvn’s Roost Designs and those made by Trizaria Hunter. The store also regularly releases new clothing designs and textures.

The hypergrid address is grid.myvirtualbeach.com:8002:RDD Fashion Exclusives.

Social region to open on I Love You Grid

The Sea of Tranquility is the name of a new social adult hypergrid-enabled region set to open on the I Love You Grid, with lots of activities and places for couples to explore. It will host, among other activities, weekly social parties hosted at the Beach Club, which is also set to open in the region. Other activities will include nude sailing for couples and safe moorings.

The hypergrid address is iloveyougrid.net:8002:Sea of Tranquility.

My Virtual Beach grid to close for backups

My Virtual Beach grid will be offline next Thursday, July 20 for a grid-wide backup exercise that is set to take between a few hours and the entire Thursday night, according to an announcement by grid owner Mistress Dalgato.

Al Capone Homes giving away free parcels

Region 002 of Piggy Bank Grid World grid has free parcels of up to 2,000 prims for residents. They can then build or bring in items on the land. Anyone willing to take land can join via this link.

The hypergrid address is al-capone.homes:8002:Free parcels 002.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Beha Second, Friends Grid, Neogrid 3, Farm World A Sua Vida Virtual, and Sparta II.

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 22 grids were suspended this month: Angel Grid, Brillyunt, Chubelz Grid, CopyKat, Destinations, Destinationz, Fresh MetaVers, Grid Network, hg.rocketworld.top, Impulse Grid, KittyBlue, MajHome, Miki Kiti Tiki, NasMaison, PMGrid, Rainbow World, Rocket World, Slanted and Enchanted, Tenebris Mysterium, VirtuaLifeNewGrid, WestWorld, and Pmgrid.

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 2,584 different publicly-accessible grids, 419 of which were active this month, and 268 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.

• OSgrid: 28,808 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 25,472 regions
• Kitely: 18,255 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,099 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 8,896 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,489 regions
• Groovy Verse: 4,000 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,577 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 960 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• AviWorlds: 892 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 839 regions
• Tomi’s World: 676 regions
• Serenity: 625 regions
• ArtDestiny: 625 regions
• Kinky Haven: 617 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• German World Grid: 549 regions
• Littlefield: 491 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• GorGrid: 413 regions
• 4Creative: 413 regions
• DreamNation: 409 regions
• Craft World: 381 regions
• Neverworld: 364 regions
• AvatarLife: 331 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Soul Grid: 240 regions
• Perfect Life: 209 regions
• Counter Earth: 197 regions
• Adreans-World: 164 regions
• Youth Nation: 161 regions
• Horse Island: 160 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 140 regions

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. 

The Discovery Grid will host its seventh anniversary party on Saturday, July 1 at the Louisville region, featuring a virtual Thunder Over Discovery 2023 aviation event which will coincide with the real-life Thunder Over Louisville aircraft event, showcasing vintage and modern aircraft in action.

Both grid residents and hypergrid visitors are invited to the experience. The hypergrid address is discoverygrid.net:8002:Louisville. 

Arrive early for each session because doors close to prevent possible disruptions as people enter the region. You will also need to set your OpenSim viewer to a shared environment, enable advanced lighting for the full effect, and set your viewer camera and music and sound settings as suggested by the hosts here, to enjoy the sessions at best including scenery with fast-flying aircraft.

Planned are two Thunder Over Discovery showing sessions, one starting at 2.00 p.m. Pacific Time to accommodate the grid’s Euro-zone residents and visitors. The other will take place from 6 p.m. Pacific Time and will cater to the grid’s North and South Americas region residents and visitors.

An hour of DJ music will precede each of the aircraft showing sessions, the first music session hosted from 2.00 p.m. to 3.00 p.m. by DJ Calliope Angel at Club Thunder and the second by DJ Jack Stone from 6 p.m to 7.00 p.m. Pacific Time at the same venue. These two music sessions will feature thunderous music, dance, and light show according to Discovery Grid.

After each of the two DJ music sessions, there will be a vintage airplane wing-walking acrobatics and skydiving airshow for 15 minutes by the Puddle Jumpers, followed by F-22 maneuvers for five minutes, followed by a precision acrobatic and formation flying performance by the Blue Angels for 20 minutes — all with surround sound.

The PyroVR company will then conclude each of the two flying sessions with a pyro-musical fireworks performance for 20 minutes. The fireworks synchronize with a music soundtrack and there will be a new custom effect for this year. Please wear headphones or connect to a surround sound system, and pick a sound HUD to enjoy a precise 3D audio mix.

Here are videos of similar performances during the Discovery Grid’s 2022 Anniversary.

• DG Blue Angels Airshow 2022 performance.
• PyroVR fireworks performance 2022.

More details about the event, the Blue Angels, PyroVR, and Puddle Jumpers are here.

AvatarLife grid will host a virtual Pride Week for residents and visitors from other grids starting at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, June 24, with events running through Friday, June 30.

The Pride Week, which coincides with and has events that match those held during the United Nation’s Pride Month but in virtual world settings, will start with the Color Fiesta art submission contest at 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time on June 24 to June 28 at the AvatarLife Museum, with prize winners being announced on July 1.

A gaming contest where participants can win prizes in cash will also take place at the Diesel Games region and run for five days starting from June 25. A guest speaker session and an open mic session will be held at 11:00 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific Time on June 30 at the Rainbow region. During the open mic, attendants will have an opportunity to win prizes by sharing any stories, poems, songs, and other things they would like.

AvatarLife is not hypergrid-enabled, so users can’t simply teleport to the regions. Instead, visitors who don’t already have accounts on the grid will need to register here, then add the grid URI — grid.avatarlife.com:8002 — to the list of grids in the settings tab on their OpenSim viewer as per these instructions.

“We at AvatarLife would like to do what we can to encourage and celebrate diversity,” AvatarLife CEO Sushant Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business. “And we would like to be socially responsible and active that in the future months we will look at  hosting events for significant United Nation’s international days such as poverty and environment and others.”

In addition to the Color Fiesta, other AvatarLife events that correspond to those held during Pride Month include the rainbow-themed Virtual Pride parade which will take place on June 30 at the Rainbow region. There also will be a Pride Disco at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, June 25 at the Vox City region.

“The Virtual Pride Parade or match is mainly a gathering of people with music and light dancing, and importantly people can socialize and maybe have some fun,” added Chandrasekar.

Color Fiesta contest and the new virtual museum

The Color Fiesta contest and the new Art Museum will be a major focus during the Pride Week. Participants can, starting on June 24, submit up to three art entries each and win prizes for each submission. The Fiesta will mark the launch of the newly-built art museum.“Each participant will win 500 AV$ for participation,” Chandrasekar said. “The arts will be shared on our social media platforms and people will come and vote on the art. The art for submission can be digital or hand-drawn, and should not be black and white.”

There also will be a tour of several nominated art submissions in the Art Museum on June 29. “The top 16 artworks will be hosted in our virtual art museum and will be permanent there,” he said.

The submission ends on June 28. Voting for the participants’ art submissions will start at 9 p.m. Pacific Time on June 28 and end at 9.00 a.m. Pacific Time on June 30. The results of the voting will be announced on July 1 after which there will be an awards ceremony.

Anyone at the open mic event to win 500 AV$

Anyone who speaks for a minute during the open mic will win 500 AV$.

“Open mic is a different event where we all meet together, and everyone gets one minute to turn on their mic and speak about anything they want to or show their talent like storytelling, singing, or poetry,” said Chandrasekar.

Generous rewards at the Skill Gaming Fever marathon

Gamers at the Skill Gaming Fever Marathon can show off their gaming skills and win prizes in the grid’s in-world currency — which can be changed for real-world money. The grid hosts and supports player-versus-player, player-versus-computer, and play-to-earn types of games.

Although the event is mainly for playing games, game creators are also welcome to attend and meet up. The skill games which will be played are the games hosted at the grid and are similar to most of those available at Second Life and some OpenSim grids, said Chandrasekar .

“For example, we have the famous Zyngo game and other Slingo skill games,” he said. “We have various high scores contests and other contests with generous AV$ prizes. The exchange rate is approximately one USD for 250 AV$.”

Final showdown

The final showdown will take plac on June 30 and will involve live music and virtual dance, soulmate search, and speed dating, all at the Music Island region.

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.

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.

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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 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.

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.

“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

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.

• OSgrid: 27,325 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 25,520 regions
• Kitely: 18,299 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,156 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 8,789 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,581 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,636 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,613 regions
• TheKaz Grid: 2,110 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 960 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• AviWorlds: 922 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 839 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Kinky Haven: 617 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• Serenity: 576 regions
• ArtDestiny: 529 regions
• German World Grid: 519 regions
• Littlefield: 489 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• GorGrid: 422 regions
• 4Creative: 413 regions
• DreamNation: 408 regions
• Craft World: 385 regions
• Neverworld: 363 regions
• AvatarLife: 317 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Soul Grid: 233 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Youth Nation: 200 regions
• Counter Earth: 187 regions
• Adreans-World: 171 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• Champions Gate: 136 regions

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. 

Land area is also up, to the highest it’s been since last October. We now have the equivalent of 117,869 standard regions on the public OpenSim grids. As a quick comparison, Second Life currently has 27,778 regions, according to Grid Survey. That means that OpenSim currently has more than four times the land area of Second Life, and that’s not even counting private grids. This is mostly due to the fact that OpenSim regions are significantly cheaper, and sometimes free, and OpenSim offers school and companies much greater control, privacy, and security.

However, the total number of OpenSim active users dropped to 41,620 — 566 lower than last month — due to seasonal changes, grid shutdowns, and service interruptions.

We are now tracking a total of 2,563 OpenSim grids, 428 of which were active this month, and 282 of which published statistics.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely, are the three most extensive grids by land area, with Wolf Territories also being the fastest-growing grid by land size having added 2,800 new regions in the last month. It is also the fastest-growing by number of actives having added 1,484 new active users in the last month.

Wolf Territories has a very active Discord channel, and you can also follow them on Facebook and YouTube. But one of the most impressive things they offer is their land package — £20.00 a month (US $25) for a two-by-two region that can hold up to 120 avatars and 1.2 million prims. These regions are geographically contiguous, meaning that they are connected via waterways or land area so that you can travel overland to visit your neighbors. Plus, the grid promises that your regions will be ready within ten minutes of the order being placed. And you can rent these giant regions in bulk — £35 a month for two var-regions, and £120 a month for 100. No wonder they’re growing fast.

This is an excellent example of how OpenSim’s infrastructure can be deployed in such a way as to lower costs and improve performance for users.

ZetaWorlds is second by the number of regions added in the past one month with 1,136 new regions, followed by Groovyverse at 265, and OSgrid with 260 new standard region equivalents.

ZetaWorlds 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.

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.

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

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, or 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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 4,847 active users
2. Wolf Territories Grid: 2,170 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 1,917 active users
4. GBG World: 1,718 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,520 active users
6. ZetaWorlds: 1,379 active users
7. Soul Grid: 1,145 active users
8. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,098 active users
9. AviWorlds: 1,067 active users
10. Moonrose: 1,056 active users
11. Exo-Life: 993 active users
12. Neverworld: 970 active users
13. Kitely: 861 active users
14. Eureka World: 840 active users
15. Craft World: 829 active users
16. Party Destination Grid: 827 active users
17. The City: 657 active users
18. Jungle Friends Grid: 628 active users
19. Youth Nation: 578 active users
20. Trianon World: 550 active users
21. Offworld: 517 active users
22. Barefoot Dreamers: 486 active users
23. DreamNation: 468 active users
24. Astralia: 421 active users
25. Arkham Grid: 413 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 added the highest number of new active users in the last 30 days with 1,484, followed by Impulse Grid with 277, The City with 248, Virtual Worlds Zone with 244, and ProxyNet with 299 new active users. Four other grids also each got more than 100 new actives in the same period.

Regarding surprise decreases in active user numbers which happen mainly due to downtimes and closures, WaterSplash active user numbers went down by 629 users in the past month, followed by Piggy Bank Grid World‘s by 217, and Eureka World by 178.

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 19,884 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,337 product variations, 34,254 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 585 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.

Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which launched last month, is another option for OpenSim grids, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 44 items for hypergridders. It is a place for sourcing free and extremely cheap items since most are priced at under $3.

Neverworlds also offers free virtual land to residents who can then set up shop and craft or bring in virtual items for sale or give away at the marketplace. The free parcels measures from 3,000 to 16,000 meters in size and of up to 5,000 prim limits, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.

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.

“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.

XMIR grid now using .Net 6 version of OpenSim

Xmir Grid no longer runs any simulators on mono and is now fully using the platform that is in development version 0.9.3.dev. The grid has a total of 62 public regions plus a robust server, a dedicated database server, and a number of non-public test regions.

The implementation is working well so far and the team has not noted any significant misharps so far, said grid owner Geir Noklebye.

“Performance is good, maybe slightly better than mono on the same hardware, but it is hard to tell unless you actually benchmark it,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Memory use seems to be somewhat down over mono.”

“I am running it and or testing it on anything from modest Intel processors, Xeons, and Apple M1 and M2 processors and there are no processor-specific issues I have discovered. Am running Debian 11, or macOS 12.x and 13.x.”

The limitations, he pointed out, are you can only run Bulletsim physics and the Y-engine scripting engine, so depending on your start point from where you upgrade, you might find issues related to that and not .Net in itself. Plugins such as Opensim search currently don’t work, he added, and if you have grown your own they may need some recoding.

“If people want to test the performance and compatibility the region at grid.xmir.org:8002:Dayturn is a 512 by 512 VAR running on a 10-year-old 1.4 GHz i5 with only 4 Gb memory on the machine,” he said. “The grid mainland at grid.xmir.org:8002 runs on Xeon processors. The grid database is running MySQL 8.0.33 on an Apple Mac Mini with an M1 processor and very fast SSD, which helps.”

Neverworlds grid to host Jerry Garcia Digital archive museum

Neverworlds will launch the Jerry Garcia archive museum with a grand opening on July 6 in a new official collaboration with Jerry Garcia, said grid owner Govega Sachertorte.

“There will be about 100 art pieces in the museum inside and outdoor art garden,” she told Hypergrid Business. “The museum may have changing exhibits to highlight different themes. What many ppl are not aware Jerry was first an artist and he created 2000 pieces during his lifetime.”

The museum will become accessible to the public after the launch.

Neverworlds has also now enabled the Gloebits money system and virtual OpenSim currency. The grid also has a new calendar online. It has also started events with three live singers weekly and a rotation of DJs, as well as a weekly new member social and Never Riders, a weekly bicycle touring group. The group tours sims inside Neverworlds and the schedule will soon be on the calendar.

“The touring group does only Neverworld road tours at this time as we have a really extensive road system,” said Sachertorte. “It’s fun and a way to visit all the sims in the continent. All are invited to join in.”

The group has already toured the Jerry Garcia Foundation.

Virtual Beach has a new owner

Nichole aka Mistress Dalgato, who has been a resident at the Virtual Beach grid, is now the new grid owner. The Virtual Beach grid team is working on a new welcome region, The grid has also launched a few new regions and is planning on a few more features, events, and dinkie parties, said Dalgato.

“We’re hoping we can find some DJs to have monthly parties,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Were are also hoping in the next few months to bring back karaoke but we’ll see. We also have very reasonable land sale prices.”

Although the grid may be a small one right now, he noted, they are like a family.

“We have been getting some new members coming from Second Life who are really good at building,” he said. “If we can get the support and bring some of the old members back, who knows, we could go back to some of the meet and greets we used to do once a week.”

AviVerse AlterEgo now offers Vivox for home regions

AlterEgo grid, which is now known as the AviVerse AlterEgo, provides full Vivox voice support for use on all sims including the virtual regions that users install on their computers at home. Region owners do not need to create an account with Vivox to use the voice system. The choice to make available the voice in this manner was made to help those who can no longer have an account on Vivox, grid admin Gin Ego told Hypergrid Business.

The home-based regions are similar to those that people can get on OSgrid. The service is free, and the installer is available here.

As far as we know, no other grid currently offers free Vivox voice for home-based regions. Email us if anyone else does!

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Alecia Grid, Atlas Grid, Avie Realm, Darkheart’s Estates, Deep Playa, Grid Network, Grid Racers, Happy Hour, Impulse Grid, New Life Italy, ProxyNet, SSG Sacred Grove, The E Grid, Virtual Learning Village, WKD Bucket Grid, and Zodiac.

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 27 grids were marked as suspended this month: Acearia, Admeja, admeja.net, Almost Heaven, AnKaBi Grid, Avi Resurrection, blackswan.dyndns-server.com, Casadamici, Dreamscape, EasterHome, Forlorn Hope, Gabngio, Gyssy, HD Skin World, Insanity Grid, Laguna Bay, Legacy, Matrix, Mreža regij, Nightwalker Services, Nymph Paradise, Old Fuori Grid, Open Dream, Paradwys, Quintonia, Virtual Harmony, and Your World.

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 2,563 different publicly-accessible grids, 428 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.

• OSgrid: 27,145 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 21,520 regions
• Kitely: 18,366 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 10,085 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,874 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,544 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,625 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,545 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,246 regions
• GBG World: 950 regions
• AviWorlds: 938 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Serenity: 676 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• Kinky Haven: 601 regions
• ArtDestiny: 529 regions
• Littlefield: 488 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• German World Grid: 470 regions
• GorGrid: 417 regions
• DreamNation: 408 regions
• Craft World: 391 regions
• Neverworld: 359 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• AvatarLife: 266 regions
• Soul Grid: 242 regions
• New Life Italy: 239 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Seconds: 202 regions
• Youth Nation: 193 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• Adreans-World: 172 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• Tangle Grid: 138 regions
• The Public World: 126 regions

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. 

However, the total number of active public grids has reached a new record high of 421 grids, despite the fact that we’ve cleaned out our database and set many grids to “private” because they didn’t have public websites or other indicators that they wanted people to stop by. The total number of grids we’re tracking is now 2,543, but many of them are school and company grids closed to outsiders, private grids just for family or friends, or personal grids that someone is running on their home computer and not usually accessible to outsiders. Of the public grids, 283 reported statistics this month.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely, are the three largest grids by total land area, and OSgrid was the fastest-growing, having acquired an additional 732 new regions since this time last month. Alternate Metaverse gained the equivalent of 412 standard regions, Serenity gained 352, Wolf Territories Grid gained 282, and Discovery Grid grew by 86 regions. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the list of the top 40 grids by land area.

Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

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

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.

Hypergrid Business newsletter now available

Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.

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: 4,837 active users
2. DigiWorldz: 1,968 active users
3. GBG World: 1,739 active users
4. Alternate Metaverse: 1,568 active users
5. ZetaWorlds: 1,459 active users
6. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,315 active users
7. Soul Grid: 1,244 active users
8. Moonrose: 1,225 active users
9. AviWorlds: 1,132 active users
10. Neverworld: 1,022 active users
11. Eureka World: 1,018 active users
12. Kitely: 995 active users
13. Exo-Life: 993 active users
14. WaterSplash: 962 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 862 active users
16. Craft World: 753 active users
17. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
18. Offworld: 629 active users
19. Barefoot Dreamers: 599 active users
20. Youth Nation: 513 active users
21. DreamNation: 493 active users
22. Astralia: 476 active users
23. One Life Grid: 476 active users
24. Trianon World: 454 active users
25. Arkham Grid: 436 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.

Piggy Bank Grid is, for the second month in a row, the fastest growing grid with 260 new active users, followed by Offworld with 197, Moonrose with 176, Trianon World with 148, and Jungle Friends with 145 new actives.

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 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 19,804 product listings in Kitely Market containing 39,001 product variations, 33,926 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 581 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 those for free.

Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which launched last month, is another option for OpenSim grirds, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 44 items for hypergridders.

A free Neverworld account also grants access to more free gifts from the marketplace.

Weekly OpenSim developer meetings discuss .Net 6 testing

The latest OpenSim release will likely be the last one on Mono and OpenSim developers and stakeholders who meet on Tuesday of each week are now discussing the future of OpenSim whose future releases will run on .Net 6.

Mono is the open source alternative to Microsoft’s .Net application platform.

OpenSim on .Net 6 will still require some Mono dependencies like LibGDIPlus for dynamic textures to function. This will eventually need to be resolved through creation of a new graphics rendering system built that runs without those dependencies because the future of Mono and its adjacent dependencies is unclear, said Zetamex Network CEO Vincent Sylvester.

“Primarily we are looking for people to help test the .Net 6 version and for some with development experience to look into writing new unit tests to go along with that as the existing tests no longer work with this runtime version,” he told Hypergrid Business.

Zetamex seeks machine learning volunteer

Zetamex Network has posted a job listing for a volunteer position in the field of machine learning. The person will research and test machine learning language models and data, with a goal to applying them in OpenSim and virtual worlds. The internal project has a prospect to benefit the entire OpenSim metaverse when finished, said Zetamex’s Sylvester.

“The internal project that posting relates to is currently in the planning and research phase, but if it succeeds would vastly improve the interaction of people in virtual worlds in regards to communicating with each other,” he told Hypergrid Business.

He said although using ChatGPT and similar AI-powered chatbots can be helpful in trying to answer general support questions, finding general answers to research questions, and talking to lonely people, they currently offer very little when it comes to technical matters such as OpenSim coding.

“With the limited data they have and a clear lack of understanding of more complex topics in programming there is little they can do, much less in an environment like OpenSim with a code base scattered across so many functions that unless it parses the entire code base ChatGPT will never be able to properly identify structural deficiencies in the code leaving only optimizing single functions,” he said.

Trianon World to launch fun-filled Funzies World next week

A fun-filled region is about to launch on the Trianon-World grid next week at 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, April 22. It features beautiful scenes that include family picnic areas, cottages, marketplace, a water slide tower, and much more. The region is ready for preview and anyone who wishes to do so before the launch day is welcome, said grid owner Shadow Raven.

“Those who can’t wait to experience this special environment, this is an invitation to come and have a preview look,” she told Hypergrid Business. “Although some sites are still in progress there is plenty to see and do.

And don’t hesitate to bring your tall friends on non-dinkie events days. They may bump their heads a bit and have to scrunch into the seats but they can still enjoy everything here.”

Some of the attractions include the Dinkie-scaled cottages available for rent just a few meters past the Welcome area, after which you meet a family picnic area. After this is a dance floor where Dinki Band and DJs will entertain residents and visitors. The latter site is under development, she said, but she promises it will be a winner.

There is also a playing field, which is home to the Dinki Pussball Plate, and a marketplace where you can buy all sorts of items. Clicking a sign on the tall Water Slide tower overlooking the bay takes you to the highest spot in the World where you can admire all the world around you.

“The tranquil bay is open to boating, the beaches that surround the whole area, the magnificent mountains encircling the island, and the stunning Kakabeka Falls with its 1,000-foot sheer drop,” she added. “Perhaps later you will take a boat out to explore, though not too close. Sea dragons have been reported in offshore waters.”

The heart of the Funzies World is the Funzies Emporium which is an all-year-round permanent Midway and hosts a merry-go-round for kids, a roller coaster, and many other rides. The Midway, she said, would not be complete without carnival barkers, soothsayers, and card readers eager to have your business.

GridPlayGrid is back up online

GridPlayGrid has returned online after a long shutdown, which was caused by a lack of time to take care of it and back-end issues, said grid owner Christopher Strachan. He is currently focusing on rolling out more legal content on the grid.

It currently has nine sims online but more will be added later on, spreading across its four servers. It also has its own currency, a custom website, and a focus on the mainland but there will be no selling of private sims. The grid will also soon have Kitely Market enabled.

“We plan to also have our own marketplace website soon, probably similar to the old XStreet that Second Life had, using in-world drop boxes,” he said.

However, hypergrid teleports and asset exports are disabled at the moment, he added.

DreamGrid V5.35 released

The new DreamGrid Version 5.35 features the latest OpenSimulator 0.9.2.2 with Smart Start and many other modules compiled in. This release has a feature that allows anyone to run DreamGrid as a service on Windows, said Micro Technology Services CEO Fred Beckhusen.

“Restarting a PC for any reason such as an update will automatically start DreamGrid,” he told Hypergrid Business. “This includes Robust, all enabled regions, Apache, MySQL, Joomla, WordPress, IceCast, Text-To-Speech, and other services such as the visitor counters and automatic backups. You can log out and DreamGrid will continue to run. You control the service by starting DreamGrid, which will give you control of the regions and access to Robust and region consoles.”

This release also includes a control panel for load testing up to 100 avatars. They can sit, stand, run, and fly, as well as teleport using Smart Start and Smart Boot.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: BradleyVille, Bubble Grid, Cajungrid, Duros Pr, LoboWorld, P7, Science Circle, Society of the Sacred Grove, VirtuaLifeNewGrid, and Vivo Sim.

Closed grids

After a grid has been inactive for two months, we mark it as suspended.

The following grids were marked as suspended this month: Ardalia, Ardiva, Avi Resurrection, Aviarium, Blackswan, Dreamscape, Fiethiel, Gyssy, HD Skin World, Insanity Grid, Keraith Grid, Laguna Bay, Land of Sinners, Mreža regij, NuGrid, Nymph Paradise, OsDreaming, Outlandish Grid, Paradwys, PrimGrass, Rael’s World, Schutz American School, SKIMI3D Space, TexLand Grid, Thrae, Twisted Grid, TwistedGrid, Vatnfjel, and Your World.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address and we don’t notice. If that’s the case, email us and let us know.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,543 different publicly-accessible grids, 421 of which were active this month, and 283 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.

• OSgrid: 26,885 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 18,720 regions
• Kitely: 18,376 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,949 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,797 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,600 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,617 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,280 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,524 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,070 regions
• GBG World: 949 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Serenity: 676 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• Kinky Haven: 601 regions
• ArtDestiny: 529 regions
• German World Grid: 499 regions
• Littlefield: 489 regions
• Furry World: 472 regions
• GorGrid: 417 regions
• 4Creative: 414 regions
• DreamNation: 413 regions
• Craft World: 404 regions
• Neverworld: 325 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 294 regions
• Soul Grid: 238 regions
• AvatarLife: 238 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Youth Nation: 190 regions
• Counter Earth: 185 regions
• Adreans-World: 172 regions
• Seconds: 167 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• Tangle Grid: 129 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions

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. 

Littlefield grid turns ten on Saturday, April 1, and will host a week-long birthday party on its Anniversary region.

There will be a live performance by OpenSim renowned artist Rogue Galaxy at 5 p.m. Pacific time on April 1, followed by a live DJ dance party with Littlefield’s own DJ Walter Balazic, and a host of exhibitions created by the grid’s residents.

The grid is also running a rental promotion for new residents during the entire week of the celebrations, said Littlefield grid co-owner Walter Balazic. A local account is required to get the deal.

“Our premium regions which include 30,000 prims and a free Shoutcast server will be reduced in price from $15 to $10 for the entire month of April,” he told Hypergrid Business. “In addition, we will be doing a buy-one-get-one-free promotion opening week where anyone who rents a region from April 1 through April 8 will get an additional free region with their first rental.”

Contact Balazic in-world on the Littlefield grid or email him at walterbalazic@gmail.com for more details.

The grid’s Anniversary region opens at 6 a.m. Pacific time on April 1 and will remain open for the exhibitions until 6 a.m. on April 8.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Littlefield Anniversary.

Littlefield prioritizes listening to the user community so as to make the grid a home for all, Balazic told Hypergrid Business. There are monthly grid meetings for the residents where they can ask any questions they might have, make suggestions, or make admins aware of any issues that come up that the admins may not be aware of. There also are six full-time grid admins to take care of any daily issues.

“We have said to the residents many times that the grid is where we admins live, this is our home, so we want it to run its best for all of us,” he said. “We think this concept makes all the difference. If you don’t live on your grid full time, you don’t know how well or poorly it runs day to day, and you aren’t there to speak directly with your residents to find out what they may see that you don’t.”

The grid recently migrated from OpenSim version 8.2 to version 9.2 after spending an entire year in testing and development. This was done slowly, he said, because the residents’ needs were prioritized, to ensure that the residents did not lose what they had spent many years developing.

It currently runs nine production data servers at a US-based data centers, including two mirrored grid servers and one hot backup server.

A “hot” backup is one that can be switched to instantaneously in case of a problem, versus a “cold” backup that needs to be restored first before it can be used.

Littlefield’s journey started in 2011, with about 50 regions OSgrid. It then became a standalone grid in 2013 because the admins and owner wanted to do things differently — including making it an adult-only grid. They also felt it was unfair to overutilize OSgrid’s resources since OSgrid is a volunteer-run, non-profit grid.

Besides Balazic, the two other cofounders were lead developer Ashton Nobilis and engineer Dirk Mathers.

There are also some residents who’ve been around for the full ten years, including Xi Shi who runs the Ruritania region, Windrunner Constantine who is now one of the grid admins, and Muddpuddle Cleanslate who is responsible for several Art regions including Pepperland and All Things Must Pass.

“We have been very blessed over the years to have several incredible builders and content creators as grid residents which helped with Littlefield’s original content,” Balazic said. “Ada Wong and admin Camryn Darkstone were integral in creating clothing for the grid. Toy McBride, also a grid admin, filled the grid with her original furniture for the residents, and last but certainly not least Aine Caoimhe the creator of PMAC and most importantly the Paramour Dance Ball which is the de facto dance system utilized by almost all OpenSimulator grids. Having this talent on the grid certainly assisted in making the grid what it is today.”

Development of Crystal Frost — a mobile-friendly Unity-based Second Life viewer which is now in beta trials — will continue despite Second Life recently announcing its own mobile virtual world viewer.

Crystal Frost is currently a downloadable Windows virtual world viewer like Firestorm, but will also be available on Linux and Macs — and on mobile devices, said project lead and developer Berry Bunny.

“I do however think that due to the fact that the [Second Life] project was suddenly postponed last year that the timing of them announcing it now is not a coincidence,” she told Hypergrid Business. “I think they expect me to be deterred, but no. No, this is happening regardless. They only way they can stop it is if they buy the project from me.”

The viewer uses the LibreMetaverse protocol — a set of commands used by Second Life viewers to communicate with the servers. This is the same mechanism used in OpenSim. What is now remaining for OpenSim to work in beta is exposing the OpenSim loginURI, she said, and that will come.

“It is just not exposed at this time because I don’t test on OpenSim at this time,” she said. “OpenSim loginURI setting will be available long before it is publicly usable.”

The viewer is already being tested on the NGC version of OpenSim. and there will be a plugin module allowing people to “roll their own grid client,” she said.

“For the most part it will be up to the OpenSim community to make a grid client that can be used in their specific grids,” she added. “The reason for this is that there are a myriad of differences between OpenSim grids caused by the OpenSim community’s blatant refusal to maintain compatibility with the reference viewers. I am not the hero OpenSim wants, just the hero OpenSim deserves.”

Here is a video preview of the viewer.

Currently, she is limiting the number of patrons to test the viewer but anyone can choose to support the project by pledging through the project’s Patreon page.

Not initially planned as a web viewer

Unity does work in browsers, but the Crystal Frost viewers is not initially intended to be a web-based way to access virtual worlds.

That might be a mistake, said Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov. Current OpenSim and Second Life users don’t mind the desktop-based viewer, but a simple one-click access to a virtual world might bring in brand new visitors.

Berry Bunny said she is not opposed to a web version only that it might take a little bit more time, effort, and resources as it would require a completely different code base.

Worries about support for OpenSim

The fact that the viewer prioritizes Second Life and not OpenSim seems to suggest that it may not work well for OpenSim. Plus supporting OpenSim now days would require more code base changes than merely exposing the loginURI, said Zetamex CEO Vincent Sylvester.

“If you look at the recent tickets on the bug tracker as well as the weekly meetings, there is now a bigger difference in how some things are handled versus Second Life,” he said. “So to support OpenSim absolutely requires code changes to basic functionality.”

The fact that the viewer is based on Unity can also result in performance issues, which has been a problem for past Unity-based viewers. Primitives, for example, may not render well.

Primitives are basic geometric shapes used to create 3D objects in Second Life and OpenSim, and are an older technology compared to mesh.

“Mesh is easy as you can just render as is, but primitives change shape in multiple ways, generate faces where there were not any before and even change their triangle count as you apply more modifiers,” said Sylvester. “On small scales you hardly notice, but if you throw a couple thousand primitives at it things get complicated quickly.”

A new viewer, actively supported and interested in supporting OpenSim, ,would open up new possibilities according to Sylvester. Maintaining compatibility with Second Life aside, he said, protocols can be expanded and additional data processed, which could finally allow things not previously possible. Given that Second Life has started another push to implement things people have been asking for years and OpenSim had ever since the requests came up, he added, it would probably push them to implement major changes if OpenSim were the ones showing off the capabilities. According to him, there is plenty that can be easily upgraded to vastly improve the capabilities, but without viewer support there is no point.

“For that to happen a viewer needs to make the effort to not treat OpenSim like an afterthought or chore,” he said.

What Crystal Frost viewer actually offers

There seems to be a list of several features supported on Second Life viewers which very many developers have spent many years implementing. A new viewer will, therefore, need to support all these features and make them better or add in more to be able to complement, compete effectively with, or completely replace the existing Second Life viewers and that is going to take a lot of time and resources, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

“That said, creating a new Unity-based viewer that only implements a very limited subset of the features Second Life or OpenSim users have grown accustomed to is definitely doable,” he told Hypergrid Business.

Crystal Frost seems to differentiate itself from Firestorm by offering a more realistic virtual reality support. It currently supports all forms of objects except rigged mesh, fitted, bento, and animesh. It also supports textures, sim sun position tracking, and animates physical objects, while the water levels adjust to the height of the sim. It also features normal camera functionality just as found on Firestorm or other Second Life and OpenSim viewers. There also is object scale, rotation, and movement changes. It also supports most object and color changes.

The viewer currently manages a frame rate of 30 FPS, a third of what Firestorm offers, but it will go up when the team does dynamic occlusion culling as done in Firestorm viewers.

Some functionality will, however, not be available with an open source viewer. The water system, for example, is a proprietary Unity functionality that has to be paid for.

“Unfortunately the open source version will not be able to have the fancy water system in it,” she said. “I will provide a dependency switch in case someone wanting to make their own Crystal Frost wants to buy the fancy water system, but I don’t have a license to distribute the source to the water system in question.”

Even though Unity’s best, proprietary water system won’t be available, the viewer does actually offer some advantages over current viewers, via override tags, for special effects such as underwater tunnels and mirrors.

“The water prims, for example, use an override tag,” she said. “You put a #waterbox hashtag in the description of a prim and the next time a Crystal Frost viewer sees that prim is rezzed, it ends up being a box of water with the same dimensions and rotation as the prim in question, and with the same color, which is how you could make a pool of blood for instance.”

The water prims can be used to make pools of water, pools of blood, and pools of slime, and objects can be interacted to make water waves that emanate from objects moving through the water.

She will also add a water-hole override tag to the viewer. The override tag will make it possible for creators to make boats that can cut into the water so it would be possible to, for instance, go under water with the boat without any water getting into the boat. Looking around through while in boat will provide realistic view of the water.

“This will also make building underwater sims with glass tunnels to be realistic without having to worry about the water fog outside the glass dome, or tunnel, or whatever, but not inside,” she said.

Much improved VR support

She is planning to add what she calls proper VR support after the initial public release of the viewer, and once the textures decoding performance issues are solved. Already, the feature is being worked upon, she said, and it will include such unseen features as pop up menus that a user can virtually hold and move around with their hands, rather than a static viewed menu that is always at the edges of an ordinary VR headset.

“Well, as far as I know, the only VR option available at this time is a modded Firestorm and they have got everything handled entirely wrong, but I don’t blame them,” she said. “Anybody who can code can look at the Linden Lab’s code which Firestorm inherited and tell that it is a giant heaping helping of spaghetti.”

OpenSim also added close to 3,000 new registered users this month, reversing the hefty loss of 8,000 registered users recorded last month due to AviTron no longer publishing its statistics.

The public OpenSim grids now have a total of 111,452 standard-sized regions in total virtual land area. We are now tracking 2,534 OpenSim grids, 420 of which were active this month, and 285 of which published statistics.

OSgrid, Wolf Territories Grid, and Kitely, were the three largest grids this month by land area, while ZetaWorlds is the fastest-growing grid this month by land area having acquired an additional 757 new regions since we lastly reported these stats. OSgrid gained the equivalent of 595 standard regions, GBG World gained 297, and Tag Grid and Wolf Territories Grid grew by 64 regions each. Browse to the bottom of the page to find the list of top 40 grids by land area.

Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid has a total of 8,519 grids all of which have a total land area of 65,638 standard regions according to a January 2023 report from Micro Technology Services — a company that owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz. 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 using graphical interfaces. This includes 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 offers free OARs — complete region files — which you can load to your grid easily and with little effort. The company reported on January this year that the software has saved its users a combined total of over $35 million in setup and land rental fees in 2022 when compared to the Second Life price equivalents.

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, or 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.

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: 4,918 active users
2. DigiWorldz: 2,010 active users
3. GBG World: 1,732 active users
4. Alternate Metaverse: 1,705 active users
5. ZetaWorlds: 1,409 active users
6. AviWorlds: 1,201 active users
7. Soul Grid: 1,171 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,123 active users
9. Moonrose: 1,049 active users
10. Eureka World: 1,036 active users
11. Neverworld: 1,030 active users
12. Piggy Bank Grid World: 1,001 active users
13. Exo-Life: 993 active users
14. Kitely: 900 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 877 active users
16. Craft World: 773 active users
17. One Life Grid: 748 active users
18. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
19. The City: 565 active users
20. Kid Grid: 565 active users
21. Barefoot Dreamers: 562 active users
22. DreamNation: 487 active users
23. Astralia: 486 active users
24. Youth Nation: 471 active users
25. Dorena’s World: 435 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.

Piggy Bank Grid is the fastest growing grid this month with 434 new active users, followed by One Life grid with 255, La Grilla de Don Javi with 234, Calypso with 153, and Tangle Grid with 113 new actives.

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 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 19,924 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,930 product variations, 33,859 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 577 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 those free.

Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which launched last month, is another option for OpenSim grirds, and does support hypergrid shoppers. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 44 items for hypergridders.

News

Neverworlds grid is offering free virtual parcels to all of its residents. The parcels range between 0,000-70,000 meters each and up to 8,000 prim each. Most are in developed areas with waterways and road systems, which means there is no terraforming needed.

To get the parcels, simply visit the Free land tab from the website menu and click the category of land from the list. Once you teleport in, click the mailbox  on any available parcel in the region by looking for the black and gold Available Sign.

Society of the Sacred Grove hosts Gnome Quest

Society of the Sacred Grove, a grid that’s new to Hypergrid Business, is ready for the spring. The grid — which focuses on health and well-being of the whole person, body, mind, and soul — will be hosting the Gnome Quest starting from 10 a.m. Pacific Time on March 21.

Residents and hypergridders will, during the event, get free gifts made by local creators . The prizes are virtual items that you can use at your grid or region such as table scene, magic box, ornaments, painting, welcome plague, deck, bench, and shelf. The quest will also take place quarterly in mid-June, mid-October, and mid-December.

More information and maps will be provided at the welcome area.

The hypergrid address is ssggrid.org:18235:SSG Welcome.

Easter market open at Chubelz

Chubelz Gid now has an Easter Market ready for the upcoming Easter holidays. The market contains various items both for sale and freebies for Easter celebrations, which you can pick for use back at your grid and region. They include clothing, attire, decorations, eggs, rabbits, and carts.

The grid has various shops where you can find items of varying applications including formal wear, tattoos, shoes, costumes, hair, stockings, wedding attire, jewelry, and avatars.

The hypergrid address is chubelz-grid.de:8002.

New grids

The following grids were added in our list of new grids this month: BradleyVille, Casadamici, Darkheart’s Realm, EscapeLands, Hosting4OpenSim Test Grid, Konecta Radio, Little Whitecat, LoboWorld, Lovely Paradise, One Life Grid, SiLi, Society of the Sacred Grove, Solaria, Vivec, and WKDVR.

Closed grids

After a grid has been inactive for two months, we mark it as suspended.

The following 20 grids were marked as suspended this month: Ardalia, Ardiva, Aviarium, Cube Graphics, Keraith Grid, Land of Sinners, NuGrid, OsDreaming, Outlandish Grid, OzKanga Grid, PaderGrid, Pleasure Grid, PrimGrass, Rael’s World, Schutz American School, Sweet Life, TexLand Grid, Thrae, Troy, and Wiccan Grid.

Sometimes, a grid changes its loginURI or website address and we don’t notice. If that’s the case, email us and let us know.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,535 different publicly-accessible grids, 420 of which were active this month, and 288 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.

• OSgrid: 26,153 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 18,432 regions
• Kitely: 18,376 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,946 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,385 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,514 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,629 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,280 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,528 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,058 regions
• GBG World: 948 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Kinky Haven: 649 regions
• Tomi’s World: 625 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• Littlefield: 488 regions
• German World Grid: 486 regions
• ArtDestiny: 484 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• DreamNation: 431 regions
• GorGrid: 417 regions
• 4Creative: 414 regions
• Craft World: 394 regions
• Serenity: 324 regions
• Neverworld: 320 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 289 regions
• Soul Grid: 234 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• AvatarLife: 212 regions
• Youth Nation: 190 regions
• Counter Earth: 182 regions
• Adreans-World: 172 regions
• Seconds: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• Tangle Grid: 127 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions

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. 

Speaking of new grids, the total number of public OpenSim grids that we track is now up to 418, a record high. This is even though we’ve recently reclassified many grids as private because they do not have websites or social media pages or other indicators that they’re open to the public.

Please send us a link to your grid’s public page through a direct email or this form in case you find that your grid is marked as private and you want it to be back on our lists.

Active numbers grew slightly, by 444 active monthly users, but the actual growth is probably quite a bit higher. That’s because AviTron stopped reporting their statistics this month, and, last month, they had more than 3,000 actives. If AviTron had reported their stats this month, our active users numbers would have shown significant growth this month.

The AviTron users are probably still there — though their active user numbers have fallen by nearly 1,000 over the past three months.  The grid also recently turned off the hypergrid connectivity.

Hypergrid Business editor Maria Korolov has previously recommended that people do not use an AviTron account as their primary hypergrid avatar because the grid owner has been known to shut down the grid completely with no prior warning.

“He’s also repatedly turned hypergrid connectivity on and off on a whim,” she said. “That creates havoc for anyone trying to run a business or organize events.”

For users, this means that people who depend on hypergrid friend lists or landmarks will lose access to those, and if they depend on their avatar inventories, they will lose access to those as well. Korolov recommends that users use an account on OSgrid or Kitely or another stable grid for their primary avatar and not keep any money or objects in their AviTron avatars that they’re afraid to lose.

We are now tracking a total of 2,527 OpenSim grids, 418 are active public grids, out of which 287 made their stats available for this month’s report.

In summary, AvatarLife registered the highest number of users this month or 422, while Piggy Bank Grid World got the highest number of active users or 331, and or 5,184, in a month since we lastly reported these stats. OSgrid, Kitely, and TAG grids still dominate in terms of land area, usage, and online marketplaces.

Wolf Territories Grid was the fastest-growing grid this month by land area, with an increase of 5,184 standard region equivalents. OSgrid was in second place  with 1,861 new regions, followed by Virtual Worlds Grid with 748, German World Grid with 282, and ZetaWorlds with 152 standard region equivalents.

OSgrid maintained its lead in terms of total virtual land area with 25,558 regions, followed by Wolf Territories Grid which has overtaken Kitely in second place, having 18,368 regions. Kitely has 18,325 regions, ZetaWorlds has 8,189 regions, and Alternate Metaverse is fifth biggest grid with 7,339 total regions.

Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid reports a total of 8,519 grids with a total land area of 65,638 standard regions. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz. The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz 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 using graphical interfaces. This includes 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 offers free OARs — complete region files — which you can load to your grid easily and with little effort. The software saved its users a combined total of over $35 million in setup and land rental fees in 2022 when compared to the Second Life price equivalents.

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, or 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.

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: 5,164 active users
2. DigiWorldz: 1,997 active users
3. GBG World: 1,738 active users
4. Alternate Metaverse: 1,684 active users
5. ZetaWorlds: 1,340 active users
6. AviWorlds: 1,287 active users
7. Neverworld: 1,145 active users
8. Eureka World: 1,119 active users
9. Soul Grid: 1,081 active users
10. WaterSplash: 1,049 active users
11. Exo-Life: 993 active users
12. Moonrose: 971 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 923 active users
14. Kitely: 870 active users
15. Craft World: 826 active users
16. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
17. Barefoot Dreamers: 649 active users
18. The City: 623 active users
19. Kid Grid: 623 active users
20. Piggy Bank Grid World: 621 active users
21. Dorena’s World: 586 active users
22. Astralia: 575 active users
23. Offworld: 548 active users
24. One Life Grid: 493 active users
25. DreamNation: 490 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.

Piggy Bank Grid was the fastest growing grid this past month, with 331 new active users, followed by OSgrid with 276, WaterSplash with 268, The City with 239, and Kid Grid with 238 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 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 19,889 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,834 product variations, 33,764 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 576 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 those free.

Another online marketplace which we will be reporting stats for is the Neverworlds’ Marketplace, which just launched. The site currently lists 33 items for sale to residents and 41 items for hypergridders, but if the project takes off, we hope to be including its stats in this section in the future.

Neverworlds offers free land and new online marketplace

Neverworlds Grid has started two online marketplaces, one for residents and another for hypergridders. The marketplaces currently offer a small selection of items,   including rigged clothing and building supplies.

Unlike the Kitely Market, however, the Neverworlds marketplace also offers freebies.

“All the items offered are made by creators,” Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business. “Members get exclusive items.”

“The members of Neverworld do get premium content, more freebies and reduced prices for anything that costs money,” she added. “The hypergrid area however is still good for free and we believe we have some of the best original content out there and this is also a growing project.”

The grid has also kicked off a continent project which spans across 200 regions. It has integrated road system, water ways, and most of it is made of free parcels. The regions are developed with parcels for residents ranging in size from 12,000 meters to about 45,000 meters, said Sachertorte.

“They are free and the prim limits are 5000 prims per parcel,” he told Hypergrid Business. “We currently have a few dozen parcels and are adding more daily as the need arises. We also do allow self hosted regions to attach to the continent, if they agree to use the same road system and textures.”

Free virtual land on One Life Grid

One Life Grid, which is a new grid, is also offering free land — specifically, 4096-square-meter, 938-prim parcels to any newly registered avatar. A user just needs to sign up and wait for activation, which happens within 24 hours.

The grid also has shopping areas for different meshes including adult ones.

The hypergrid address is onelife-grid.de:8002.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Casadamici, Darkheart’s Realm, EscapeLands, Hosting4OpenSim Test Grid, Little Whitecat, Lovely Paradise, One Life Grid, SiLi, Solaria, Vivec, and WKDVR.

The following 20 grids were marked as suspended this month: Acearia, Ampleverse, AvatarLife Testing, BritGrid, Encitra Home Grid, HiddenDreams , Jomac Silveras Grid, MajHome, Open Waifu, OzKanga Grid, Planet 3L, Pleasure Grid, PrimGrass, Savannah Grid, Skytec Grid, Tnet Grid, Tnet Grid, Verth, and Wiccan Grid.

After a grid has been inactive for two months, we mark it as closed.

Sometimes, a grid changes its loginURI or website address and we don’t notice. If that’s the case, email us and let us know.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,527 different publicly-accessible grids, 418 of which were active this month, and 287 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.

• OSgrid: 25,558 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 18,368 regions
• Kitely: 18,325 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,189 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,339 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,637 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,625 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,279 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,070 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Tomi’s World: 784 regions
• GBG World: 651 regions
• Kinky Haven: 649 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• HD Skin World: 497 regions
• Littlefield: 486 regions
• ArtDestiny: 484 regions
• German World Grid: 479 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• GorGrid: 417 regions
• 4Creative: 413 regions
• Craft World: 393 regions
• DreamNation: 371 regions
• Serenity: 324 regions
• Neverworld: 317 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 285 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Soul Grid: 211 regions
• AvatarLife: 193 regions
• Counter Earth: 184 regions
• Youth Nation: 184 regions
• Adreans-World: 169 regions
• Tangle Grid: 165 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• Seconds: 143 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions

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. 

The public OpenSim grids now have a total of 103,859 standard-sized regions in virtual land area. The OpenSim metaverse is now a virtual home to 480,003 registered users.

All grids without a publicly accessible website, social media page, OpenSimWorld listing, or other public presence are now marked as private in the Hypergrid Business database. Please submit the link to the grid’s public page through a direct email or this form in case you find that your grid is marked as private and you want it to be back on our lists.

We are now tracking a total of 2,516 OpenSim grids, 406 of which were active, public grids, and 280 of which published their stats this month.

OpenSim virtual land area chart. (Hypergrid Business Data.).OSgrid, which is OpenSim’s test grid, leads in size with 23,697 total standard region equivalents. Kitely is second with 18,307, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 13,184 regions, ZetaWorlds with 8,037, and Alternate Metaverse with 7,584 regions. Scroll to the bottom of this article for a full list of the top 40 largest grids.

Our stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid reports a total of 8,519 grids with a total land area of 65,638 standard regions. Micro Technology Services owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

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 using graphical interfaces. This includes 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 offers free OARs — complete region files — which you can add to your new grid easily. The software saved its users a combined total of over $35 million in setup and land rental fees in 2022 when compared to the Second Life price equivalents, according to the latest presentation by CEO of Micro Technology Services Fred Beckhusen at the developer AvaCon conference last month.

DreamGrid now supports 3D VR view for OpenSim in Beta 5.28. Examples can be viewed on this page. With it, users can save Firestorm Photos in a folder and they appear on the viewer. Another new feature — the Terms and Conditions Pop Up — which was in beta testing, has also been finalized. It includes a TOS editor and integration with the Diva Panel TOS. As promised, it does not depend on Diva or Apache to be enabled, Beckhusen told Hypergrid Business. 

OpenSim-as-a-service which enables users to run a grid on boot, and grid-wide classified ads is also one of the latest features from the team. It is live on http://ostworld-os.com:8002 and http://www.outworldz.com:9000 grids.

“The user interface controls between foreground and background modes are being updated,” said Beckhusen. “Beta version is coming by the end of January. It includes Terminal for regions and robust while running as a service, and you can install a .exe file on any machine and connect to  the Region and Robust remotely and securely.”

Yet another new feature known as Classified Ads is still not complete and is a low priority for DreamGrid right now.

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, or 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.

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: 4,888 active users
2. AviTron: 3,047 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,023 active users
4. GBG World: 1,713 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,617 active users
6. ZetaWorlds: 1,341 active users
7. AviWorlds: 1,254 active users
8. Soul Grid: 1,106 active users
9. Eureka World: 1,090 active users
10. Exo-Life: 991 active users
11. Neverworld: 983 active users
12. Moonrose: 956 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 880 active users
14. WaterSplash: 825 active users
15. Kitely: 805 active users
16. Craft World: 744 active users
17. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
18. Barefoot Dreamers: 639 active users
19. Dorena’s World: 552 active users
20. Offworld: 550 active users
21. Astralia: 511 active users
22. DreamNation: 486 active users
23. Littlefield: 430 active users
24. Youth Nation: 419 active users
25. Gentle Fire Grid: 393 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.

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 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 19,813 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,695 product variations, 33,623 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 570 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 own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, lists and sells a total of 28,286 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.

Logicamp grid upgrades tech, seeks funding

Logicamp grid has successfully repaired and upgraded its OpenSim server and website following service interruptions and crashes that happened in May 2022 and July 2022.

“As part of the upgrade process, we also had to modify our code to accommodate the transition from MySQL to MySQLi,” the company wrote in a press release sent to Hypergrid Business. “We are confident that these updates will significantly improve the performance and stability of our platform.”

The grid also encountered a router crash that required a complete reconfiguration of the network infrastructure, but this too has been fixed.

Profiles and grids are also working well after the team upgraded the OpenSim version. The team has also configured a mail server with a digital signature to improve the security and authenticity of their outgoing emails.

The team is now seeking funding to further update servers and hire more people to improve user experience.

“While there is still much work to be done, we are committed to continuously improving and expanding our platform,” the company wrote in a press release. “We are currently seeking funding or rental of land in order to update our servers and hire more team members to organize events that will enhance the user experience in our metaverse.”

Logicamp was founded in 2010 as a French-language grid with a focus on Belgian tourism, but has since become more of an educational grid, with regular classes in OpenSim, design, building, and LSL scripting.

Free land offer on OffWorld grid

OffWorld grid is giving out free residential OpenSim land plots measuring 5,184 square meters and 949 prims to anyone who joins the grid. This is their usual offer to attract new residents and the admin will help to set up the land.

Visit the grid for more information or contact Bella Fegte or Genie Fegte in-world.

The hypergrid address is offworld.eu:8002.

Erasmus explores virtual worlds for teaching math

Mathesis — a new private grid that surfaced in November of 2022 — is exploring the use of virtual worlds in attracting students into math and science subjects and improving their skills in these subjects. The grid is run by the Department of Computer Engineering & Informatics in the School of Engineering at the University of Patras, which is based in Greece.

According to the Mathesis project explainer page, one of the hardest parts of teaching math to students is keeping them interested in the topics and the project will target covering math classes with various learning activities offered in the 3D virtual worlds. It adds that these environments are more attractive, engaging, and entertaining for school pupils and hence will improve learning efficiency.

One of the specific objectives of the project is to promote and implement 3D worlds as an innovative teaching method in schools in partner countries. The project will design learning materials and a series of learning activities which will then be administered by teachers to students in 3D and web.  The project will avail 3D objects scripts, and guides to students during its 2-year duration.

Nara’s Nook grid has a new YouTube channel

Nara’s Nook grid is introducing a new Next Dimension Tales YouTube channel that will focus on 3D story telling.

The team will use the channel to tell 3D stories and release animated content. The team will release further details on the project.

Kalasiddhi closes to transition to Meta’s Oculus platform

The Kalasiddhi grid, which focuses on Buddhism in virtual reality, has been taken down because it is transitioning to Oculus — the VR platform owned by Meta.

The team is now building on Unity and will decide later how to present it on the platform, grid coordinator Drang Po told Hypergrid Business.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Alterlifes, Arielle’s Grid, Cajun Grid, Calypso, Chubelz Grid, Dead Frog, E-LIVE Virtual World, Fresh MetaVers, Land of Sinners, Legacy, Omnopolis, Piggy Bank Grid World, Virtual Melody, and WaterSplash.

Suspended grids

The following 20 grids were marked as suspended this month: Ampleverse, Ancient Rome, Clone Fantasy, Concadia, Creatrix World, Destinationz, EasterHome, GridPlay Grid, Hasengang, Insanity Grid, KittyBlue, MisFitz Grid, OB, PrimGrass, Savannah Grid, Second Meta , Test Grid, Tropical Isle, and Your Worlds.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,516 different publicly-accessible grids, 407 of which were active this month, and 280 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.

• OSgrid: 23,697 regions
• Kitely: 18,307 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,184 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,037 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,584 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,637 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,632 regions
• Groovy Verse: 3,144 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,487 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,085 regions
• GorGrid: 964 regions
• Tomi’s World: 784 regions
• GBG World: 650 regions
• Kinky Haven: 649 regions
• AviTron: 613 regions
• Piggy Bank Grid World: 613 regions
• HD Skin World: 494 regions
• Littlefield: 483 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• ArtDestiny: 441 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 437 regions
• Counter Earth: 418 regions
• 4Creative: 411 regions
• Craft World: 361 regions
• Neverworld: 341 regions
• DreamNation: 330 regions
• Serenity: 324 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 284 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Soul Grid: 212 regions
• Tangle Grid: 198 regions
• German World Grid: 197 regions
• Youth Nation: 177 regions
• Adreans-World: 171 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 168 regions
• Seconds: 144 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions

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. 

Ever since Vivox announced last year that it was planning to discontinue its free voice service for OpenSim, the community has been searching for an alternative.

The goal is to find a free or open source system that offers positional audio and works for Windows, MacOS, and Linux viewers. Unfortunately, the most viable Vivox alternatives are facing funding and resource difficulties.

Other Vivox alternatives are proprietary which makes them prone to future monetization issues and policy changes as happened with Vivox voice.

Unity plans to keep the free OpenSim Vivox voice version 4 up and running at least for the foreseeable future, Shirley Chu, the director of communications at Unity, told Hypergrid Business. However, the free version is deprecated and no longer available for new grids.

Meanwhile, latest version 5 is only available for free for up to 5,000 users after which it costs between $1,000 and $2,000 per 5,000 users per month. It could theoretically be used for OpenSim — but it first would need some work to get it fully integrated.

Some believe that OpenSim should go it alone, instead.

OpenSim requires a self-hosted decentralized voice alternative that is easier to integrate and does not depend on private companies, said Olivier Van Helden owner of the Speculoos grid.

“The need for external services like Vivox, FreeSwitch, Mumble, and others makes it painful to setup, painful to debug, and exposes to a sudden need to change provider and redo all this setup with a new environment,” Van Helden told Hypergrid Business.

Besides, Vivox struggles with quality issues overall and has very low bandwidth, Zetamex Network CEO Vincent Sylvester told Hypergrid Business. 

The concerns have also been reported on some grids where users complain that the voice randomly stops working. However, grids such as Kitely report that it works fine.

Vivox may also be less suitable for grids with stringent commercial regulatory challenges for instance due to encryption issues. This means its usage may not meet regulatory and security obligations as needed in the military, education, health industry, business, and other applications in sensitive industries.

Funding, resources, and integration huge concern for alternatives

Most teams working on full Vivox alternatives are unable to finalize their work because of inadequate development resources yet viewer developers need to make changes specifically for OpenSim, which can be a hard sell, said Sylvester.

“As you know there is only really one developer currently working on OpenSim and most viewers also have only a single person doing support for it, so a lot of groundwork has to be done by a solution in order to get it into OpenSim and the viewers because those developers can’t do all the work alone,” he said.

Mumble, for instance, has stalled even after successful tests and proofs of concept because of resource issues.

The amount of work involved is also immense with little reward. While creating a voice solution that hooks into OpenSim is not a huge challenge in itself, the difficulty is in making a spacial audio, and switching channels from parcels, calls, and group calls, because all have different setups.

Although it is possible to reverse engineer the Vivox client code into a workable alternative, he said, that would be the same amount of work as developing a solution from scratch.

Besides, the use of voice in OpenSim has declined, he said, with people looking for other ways of communicating.

“At the moment the big priority for OpenSim is the runtime upgrade to .Net 6, so most of the other things are somewhat set aside until that has reached stability and feature parity,” he said. “There are a number of things that potentially need re-engineering as a result of the changes in the runtime. No way to tell yet when this process is complete either as the only metric for proper operation, until tests, are completely out of the picture due to requiring a rewrite.”

EchoVoice development delayed by funding

EchoVoice, which has been delayed by funding, offers the most potentially ideal alternative since it can be self-hosted, is encrypted by default and can be used with OpenSim in strict regulatory requirements such as in defense applications. It is more suitable than Vivox in those environments for privacy and also has group text chats, which is not offered by Vivox.

While the design is complete, the coding effort is still awaiting funding, said Lisa Laxton, the CEO at Infinite Metaverse Alliance. 

“It will work on all major operating systems — Windows, Linux, and Mac,” she told Hypergrid Business. “Free to use with the ability to self-host server for privacy.”

“We are hoping that EchoVoice becomes a really good solution not only for the OpenSimulator community but also for other virtual world platforms because it won’t be limited for use by OpenSimulator alone,” she said during the 2020 OSCC conference.

The team plans to have three funding phases for the project to raise over $60,000 for the first and second phases, which according to their GoFundMe page, will complete engineering, development, testing, and documentation. The project is still receiving funding from well-wishers.

EchoVoice has been tested and works on all viewers but requires manual configuration, which needs to be fixed. Some of the features it will have include spatial sound, chat and conference capabilities, speech-to-text, text-to-speech capabilities for severely disabled persons, and support for other platforms.

It is meant to serve new grids that cannot connect to Vivox and those commercial regions and businesses that do not want to connect to Vivox or have licensing issues with using Vivox.

FreeSwitch spacial sound issues

FreeSwitch is probably the most common alternative to Vivox currently. It, however, can be difficult to get working. It uses the FreeSwitch server that works with the SLVoice.exe on the viewer.

FreeSwitch, including the Moses grid adaptation, works well for the OpenSim except that there is no lip sync on the avatars — the lips do not move as avatars speak and there is no indication above the head of the avatar speaking to indicate to other people who are speaking.

It also does not have spacial sound components so you hear everybody speaking with the same volume when the speaker is in a noisy environment. This makes it great for meetings and class presentations, but there are usability issues where spacial sound is required.

Matrix and Riot-Element  

Matrix is a voice, video, and text chat that is self-hosted and thus uses a decentralized server. It is used alongside Riot-Element client for OpenSim voice and chats communications although there are other more than ten desktop, web, command-line, and mobile clients that it works with. It can be integrated into third-party applications.

This alternative gives greater freedom with regard to the flow and storage of information because it is installed on the user’s app server. It has end-to-end encryption, supports real-time collaboration, is private without tracking, and allows VoIP calls.

However, the server and client can be complicated to integrate into an app. It may not even be worth the effort for ordinary OpenSim usage.

When used separately, the Element cloud solution, which is a ready-to-use solution based on Matrix, can be very expensive. It can be used for cross-app voice, video, and text communications, which means the user does not need to download, install, and create accounts with multiple chat apps to communicate with his users.

To integrate, a user needs to pick a client such as Riot-Element, sign up, and install Synapse or other home server implementations that let one run own home server used to store the communications and to which the client connects. The Element client — like many other clients — can also be installed on one’s web server as per this documentation instead of running it as a desktop or web application. Once this is done, a grid or region owner or event organizer can create rooms on the Matrix server through which other users can join to participate.

Other servers, including the OpenSim viewer’s SLVoice server, can then communicate with this server through the client.

Whisper and Mumble hard to work with

Whisper, which is based on Mumble — the first VoIP application especially for gamers — was taunted as the most viable replacement for Vivox but its development is also in shambles.

The server consists of an OpenSim or Aurora-Sim region module known as Whisper Server — and which handles registering voice parcels and users, and the Mumble voice server.

Mumble works on Windows, Mac, and Linux and delivers a spacial sound. However, it requires modifying the viewer since the SLVoice in the viewer code cannot communicate with Mumble normally. This obviously increases the setup time.

Whisper client replaces the SLVoice.exe with MumbleVoice.exe code in the viewer, which will then communicate with the instance of Murmur associated with the Aurora-Sim region. It, however, saves the SLVoice.exe such that it is possible to switch between Vivox and Mumble.

Switching back to the Vivox may also require the removal of the Mumble.

Discord and Skype

Discord and Skype are also common alternatives for voice communications. Both are popular for OpenSim in-world events and work great for encrypted communications, except that they do not have lip sync, are centralized, and would be difficult to integrate into viewers by the developer teams. They would also risk deprecation as a private service.

For a regular user who needs to use Discord as a voice solution for instance in an OpenSim event or meeting, setting up Discord voice and text for use with OpenSim requires downloading the Discord client and activating the Games Overlay from the Discord settings.

The overlay shows up at the corner of the viewer. After setting up, the user will need to set up a dedicated voice and chat channel into which other people or in-world users can then join to participate in the voice and chat. After that, you and other people do not have to switch between the viewer and Discord to communicate.

With Firestorm OpenSim viewer, you do not even need to add Firestorm as a game activity from Discord’s Game Activity settings tab. You do not also need to run a Discord chat server for your community as normally would be needed. Once you set up Discord, you can see text channels, resize and move the chat windows, and make and receive calls to and from other users in-world. It also delivers text and voice notifications.

Some of the increase could be due to the recently-concluded OpenSimulator Community Conference , or due to the fact that people are home from work or school for the holidays, and have time to go into virtual worlds.

The public OpenSim grids now have a total of 102,917 standard-sized regions in virtual land area. The OpenSim metaverse is also home to 475,905 registered users.

All grids without a publicly accessible website, social media page, OpenSimWorld listing, or other page are now marked as private in the Hypergrid Business database. Please submit the link to the grid’s public page through a direct email or this form in case you find that your grid is marked as private and you want it to be back on our lists. Despite that, the number of active grids in our database is 407 — another record high.

OSgrid and Kitely are still largest grids by total regions and registered user numbers.

OSgrid has 23,117 hosted regions in total followed by Kitely with 18,390, Wolf Territories Grid with 13,168 regions, ZetaWorlds with 8,035, and Alternate Metaverse with 7,507 regions. Scroll at the bottom of this page for a full list of top 40 largest grids.

The largest land area gainer this month is OSgrid at 885 new regions, followed by Alternate Metaverse with 488, ZetaWorlds with 143, Groovy Verse with 63, and Discovery Grid with 48 new standard 256 by 256 regions hosted.

These stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid is now tracking a total of 8,519 grids all time. 331 new DreamGrids were created with the software in October this year based on the unique DNS name.

DreamGrid now also hosts a total of 6,743 regions — both var and standard ones — all of which have a total size equaling 65,638 standard 256 by 256 Second Life regions, said Fred Beckhusen, the CEO of Micro Technology Services Inc which owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

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

The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here. DreamGrid offers 230 free OARs which you can add to your new regions easily. The software has saved its users a combined total of over $35 million in setup and estate purchase/rental fees this year when compared to Second Life prices, according to the latest presentation by Beckhusen at the developer AvaCon conference this month.

DreamGrid is working on new features including support for 3D VR view for OpenSim in Beta 5.28, OpenSim-as-a-service which enables users to run a grid on boot, and grid-wide classified ads. It is also now beta-testing a GDPR or terms of service pop-up at LostWorld-os.com:8002.

“It is built into DreamGrid, and does not require Apache or PHP or changes to OpenSim,” he told Hypergrid Business. “It uses the same terms of service as is shown on the Diva page. It has a built-in web page editor to make it simple to use.”

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.

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: 5,447 active users
2. AviTron: 3,585 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,054 active users
4. MetaverseLife Grid: 1,758 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,690 active users
6. GBG World: 1,684 active users
7. ZetaWorlds: 1,356 active users
8. Eureka World: 1,202 active users
9. AviWorlds: 1,184 active users
10. Soul Grid: 1,050 active users
11. Kitely: 1,005 active users
12. Exo-Life: 990 active users
13. Neverworld: 915 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 912 active users
15. Moonrose: 889 active users
16. Craft World: 798 active users
17. Dorena’s World: 751 active users
18. The City: 696 active users
19. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
20. Kid Grid: 663 active users
21. Littlefield: 550 active users
22. Astralia: 545 active users
23. DreamNation: 508 active users
24. OpenSimulator Community Conference: 486 active users
25. Gentle Fire Grid: 423 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.

AviTron has of late accelerated registrations and this month — for the second time in a row — earned the top spot by number of newly registered users at 390. Kid Grid, MetaverseLife, and OpenSimulator Community Conference grids also reported significant increases in activity.

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 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 19,780 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,548 product variations, 33,476 of which are sold with export permission.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 569 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 own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, lists and sells a total of 28,286 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.

Catch up with discussions at this year’s OpenSimulator Community Conference

The OpenSimulator Community Conference, an annual event that brings together OpenSim developers and users took place on Saturday, Dec. 10, and Sunday, Dec. 11, and in case you missed anything, you can catch up with the discussions from the conference’s YouTube page as streamed from the event.

This year’s event attracted over 400 hypergrid users, over 100 OpenSim expert speakers, and multiple workshops and exhibitions by sponsors and other users. It hosted interesting discussions on how AI is being used to generate art, collaboration in the metaverse, how to detect and prevent copybots, teaching and learning in metaverse, gaming in metaverse, matrix game system for team play, among many topics.

OSCC is the largest developer and user conference in OpenSim.

Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, and Christmas Stream at Littlefield Grid

Littlefield Grid will be hosting Christmas Eve and Christmas Night Dance parties from 9.00 p.m. Pacific Time on December 24 and 8.00 p.m. Pacific Time on December 25 at Christmas Island.

There will be rides, ice skating, a Christmas shopping area,  and a dance with DJeeing with DJ Walter Balazic.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Christmas Island.  

The annual New Year’s Eve Formal Dance Party will also take place on New Year’s Eve on New Year’s Island. Activities scheduled include rides, skating, and New Year’s Party favors. There also will be a Formalwear Shop that offers free tuxedos and gowns and dance with DJ Walter Balazic.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:New Years Island.

The grid will also be running the Christmas Stream throughout the holiday until January 6, playing your favorite holiday classics throughout the day and night, Littlefield Grid co-owner Walter Balazic told Hypergrid Business.

The hypergrid address is holiday.littlefieldgrid.com:9950.

Winterfest in Alternate Metaverse this month

The Alternate Metaverse grid will host a Winterfest starting on December 22 through January 1 at the Wintervale region.

There will be winter events including skiing, ice skating, snowboarding, fantasy snow globes, Wintervale Palace, ice fishing, cafe on ice, sledding, winter carriage riding, snowman builds, a winter ballroom, and a photo booth. Other activities and events include a carnival, karaoke, a tree decorating contest, belly dancing, live performances, and DJing.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Wintervale.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Freya’s Shadow World, Grid Land, Kid Grid, Konecta Radio, OsDreaming, Sovaria Estates, and Trianon World.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,497 different publicly-accessible grids, 407 of which were active this month, and 277 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.

• OSgrid: 23,117 regions
• Kitely: 18,390 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,168 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,035 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,507 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,637 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,684 regions
• Groovy Verse: 2,685 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,483 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,068 regions
• GorGrid: 1,052 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Tomi’s World: 676 regions
• Kinky Haven: 649 regions
• GBG World: 648 regions
• AviTron: 620 regions
• ArtDestiny: 529 regions
• HD Skin World: 491 regions
• Littlefield: 482 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• Counter Earth: 422 regions
• Tangle Grid: 418 regions
• Craft World: 361 regions
• Neverworld: 354 regions
• DreamNation: 347 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 282 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Soul Grid: 209 regions
• GerGrid: 191 regions
• Serenity: 169 regions
• Adreans-World: 165 regions
• German World Grid: 161 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• PMGrid: 139 regions
• Youth Nation: 132 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions

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. 

The active user numbers include both local residents and hypergrid visitors, which means that some users may be counted twice — however, users would also be counted twice if they visited other grids by creating new local user accounts there.

Meanwhile, land area fell by 16,896 standard regions during the same period. The reduction in the land area was almost entirely due to administrative housekeeping at OSgrid.

OSgrid co-owner Dan Banner confirmed that a cleanup was responsible for a 16,449 drop in their region count this month. Since OSgrid is a “free-to-attach” grid, anyone can run a region on their home computer and have it be part of OSgrid just by running OSgrid’s region installer software. These regions are only up, however, while their owners are running them on their computers. If the computer is shut off, the region disappears. To keep other regions from grabbing their map locations, the locations are reserved. Every so often, the grid cleans out old reservations for regions that haven’t been seen for a long time.

Despite the cleanup, OSgrid remains the largest grid in land area with 22,232 regions in total, and is the most popular in terms of active users with a total of 5,461. Kitely is the second largest grid with 18,394 regions in total, followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 13,200, ZetaWorlds with 7,892, and Alternate Metaverse with 7,019. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the top 40 largest grids by total land area.

The public OpenSim grids now have a total of 103,180 standard-sized regions in virtual land area. The OpenSim metaverse now is home to 475,167 registered users.

Alternate Metaverse, reported the biggest growth in land area this month, with 397 new regions. Serenity was second with 177 new regions, followed by The Verse with 47 regions, ArtDestiny with 45 regions, and Littlefield with 32 new regions.

These stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

The total number of DreamGrids — or home grids created with the software — has grown from slightly more than 2,000 in September 2020 to more than 7,000 today.  Beckhusen is CEO of Micro Technology Services Inc which owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

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

The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here.

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 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: 5,461 active users
2. AviTron: 3,915 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 1,939 active users
4. GBG World: 1,784 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,751 active users
6. ZetaWorlds: 1,474 active users
7. MetaverseLife Grid: 1,194 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,128 active users
9. Soul Grid: 1,125 active users
10. Eureka World: 1,078 active users
11. Kitely: 1,031 active users
12. Exo-Life: 989 active users
13. Party Destination Grid: 949 active users
14. Moonrose: 940 active users
15. Neverworld: 926 active users
16. The City: 850 active users
17. Dorena’s World: 742 active users
18. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
19. Craft World: 682 active users
20. Astralia: 612 active users
21. Discovery Grid: 552 active users
22. Barefoot Dreamers: 517 active users
23. DreamNation: 502 active users
24. Littlefield: 497 active users
25. Gentle Fire Grid: 426 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.

MetaverseLife Grid added the most active users this month, growing from 80 to 1,194 actives. However, the grid has never had more than 100 actives in one month before, and we couldn’t find any record of major events on the grid this past month, so this statistic may be an administrative error.

Eureka World showed the second-most growth in actives, with a 384 increase, followed by Alternate Metaverse with a 279 increase, OSgrid with 250, and Discovery Grid with 188.

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 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 19,689 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,322 product variations, 33,256 of which are sold with export permission.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 565 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 own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, lists and sells a total of 28,286 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.

Littlefield upgrades server, finds undocumented issue

Littlefield has upgraded to OpenSim 0.9.2.1 after seven years on an earlier version of the software.

Although the upgrade went well, the grid would like to let everyone know about a vital setting that is not in the sample Robust.ini files, is undocumented, and may prevent a successful upgrade to the latest OpenSim version, said Chuck Simmons, Littlefield’s chief technology officer and grid architect. He is also known in-world as Ashton Nobilis.

“There were a few small issues during the upgrade that other grids should be mindful of when going from 0.8x to 0.9x, but the one that really sticks out is the change in the format of the fsassets datastore directory tree,” he told Hypergrid Business. “In older versions of OpenSimulator, an asset with the UUID of 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 would be stored in a path similar to /data/000/000/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.gz. Somewhere in the 0.9x development cycle, it was decided that asset should reside at /data/00/00/00/0000/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.gz, which is a completely different directory path which can prevent the existing asset datastore from being able to be seen by OpenSimulator.”

“Fortunately, there is a setting that can be placed in the Robust configuration files to specify the older format so that the asset datastore doesn’t have to be converted,” he added. “For the benefit of your readers that may still be on 0.x, using fsassets, and wanting to upgrade to 0.9x, the UseOsgridFormat = true command should be placed in the [AssetService] section of the Robust.ini to preserve the older format.”

Simmons was able to do this after parsing the source code but many users may be unable to do this which could interfere with a successful upgrade.

“I’m not sure why this feature is not documented, perhaps it is an oversight, but I don’t see any reason for it to be tucked aside considering the amount of frustration that can be caused,” he said. “We appreciate all the hard work the OpenSimulator developers have done and continue to do, but I think it might be beneficial to the OpenSimulator community to help ensure information is easily available to all.”

The grid is now back up and running on a new server with multiple Robust instances serving its multi-terabyte database and asset datastore to the residents in a safe, stable environment, he said.

The grid has also made minor changes to its region pricing structure., adding a new 15,000-prim region for $10 a month.

Littlefield to host ninth annual Thanksgiving event next week

Littlefield’s ninth Thanksgiving — a recreation of the WKRP Turkey Drop, a classic Thanksgiving TV bit from the 70s in the United States — kicks off at 3.00 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, November 24.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Littlefield.

A Thanksgiving dinner is also among the activities prepared and is open to anyone including hypergrid visitors. It will take place at the Stonehaven Region.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Stonehaven. 

The Thanksgiving Dance Party will be held at the Speakeasy Dance Club starting at 8.00 p.m. Pacific Time.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Speakeasy. 

WLFG Radio will be playing Alice’s Restaurant and several Thanksgiving-related tunes all day long.

The annual WLFG Holiday Radio stream will be opened on November 25. The stream, which is open for anyone to tune into, will be playing Christmas Music all day and every week until January 6, 2023, Littlefield grid co-founder Walter Balazic told Hypergrid Business.

The hypergrid address is holiday.littlefieldgrid.com:8050. 

Littlefield’s Christmas Island will be opened on Friday, November 25. The region will be offering free Christmas decorations that visitors can take away and use to decorate their own areas; free sleigh rides, and other attractions.

The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Christmas Island.

Winterfest in Alternate Metaverse next month

The Alternate Metaverse will host a Winterfest starting on December 22 through January 1 at the Wintervale region.

There will be winter events including skiing, ice skating, snowboarding, fantasy snow globes, Wintervale Palace, ice fishing, cafe on ice, sledding, winter carriage riding, snowman builds, a winter ballroom, and a photo booth. Other activities and events include a carnival, karaoke, a tree decorating contest, belly dancing, live performances, and DJing.

The hypergrid address is alternatemetaverse.com:8002:Wintervale.

Monentes Jewelry closes down

The Monentes Jewelry store — which offers free and full perm customizable virtual jewelry in OutWordz and Virtual-HG grids– will be closing down temporarily this month until January 2023 for remodeling. The owner also offers a free Monentes Jewelry Store OAR as a gift to the community so that anyone who wishes can rez their very own jewelry store at their own grid, and will continue to do so.

The remodeling will result into a cozier store and new jewelry designs, said Monentes Jewelry owner and designer Marianna Monentes.

“My main store was in need of a bit of a remodel that it seemed so huge I am thinking of something a bit cozier,” she told Hypergrid Business. “We will see. I am still pondering. January I will open a little satellite store where I will present new pieces so those store owners who rez their jewelry stores at their own grids can pick up and add new pieces to their own store collections. I am also considering making exclusive pieces for each individual store for whoever asks me so that each store will be unique to the owners.”

The Monentes Jewelry store OAR can be picked up at Outworldz.

“I decided to make the jewelry free so that people could check out the jewelry prior to any purchase they might make,” she said. “Giving the store OAR seemed logical and I love that others can have the store on their grids.”

The hypergrid addresses is virtual-hg.com:8002:Monentes Jewelry.

Winter and Christmas shopping at Free Souls

The Lunaria region of the Free Souls grid is themed for the winter season with beautiful winter sceneries and events, including cross-country skiing and skating.

It also has Christmas decorations and Christmas markets where visitors can go shopping for Christmas. There are areas for exploring, trolling, and driving the carousels.

The hypergrid address is free-souls.de:8002:Lunaria.

Winter and holiday events and music at New Hope

The Aria region of the New Hope Grid is ready for winter holiday events and is themed for them with an ice rink, Christmas trees, lighting, and winter blossoms.

The region also hosts regular live music and entertainment events that feature different OpenSim and real-life artists including Rogue Galaxy and Clairde Dirval.

The hypergrid address is login.newhopegrid.com:8002:Aria.

Novale preparing for winter after successful autumn activity

The Novale region of the CreaNovale grid is preparing for winter events this November after concluding its successful autumn season events and activities.

The Novale’s autumn season — which ended on November 12 — had a host of activities including cereal and fruit growing and harvesting, horse riding, boat tours, a guided tour of the Halloween attractions, and a Caves Hunt.

The hypergrid address is hg.creanovale.ca:8052:NOVALE.

Metaverselife opens new winter store

The iPleasure region at the Metaverselife grid has a new Winter Store which will start offering new winter items as freebies. The region has a new Skin Store for skin freebies. It offers female and male fashion freebies and animations freebies.

The hypergrid address is metaverselife.org:8002:iPleasure. 

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Mathesis and Nymph Paradise.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,491 different publicly-accessible grids, 369 of which were active this month, and 267 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.

• OSgrid: 22,232 regions
• Kitely: 18,394 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,200 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 7,892 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 7,019 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,589 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,745 regions
• Groovy Verse: 2,622 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,483 regions
• PMGrid: 1,297 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,249 regions
• GorGrid: 1,052 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,045 regions
• Serenity: 961 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Tomi’s World: 729 regions
• Kinky Haven: 649 regions
• GBG World: 647 regions
• AviTron: 632 regions
• ArtDestiny: 529 regions
• HD Skin World: 491 regions
• Littlefield: 484 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• Counter Earth: 422 regions
• Tangle Grid: 400 regions
• Neverworld: 396 regions
• DreamNation: 355 regions
• Craft World: 344 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 281 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Soul Grid: 210 regions
• Adreans-World: 196 regions
• GerGrid: 191 regions
• German World Grid: 158 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions
• Horse Island: 125 regions

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. 

Sushant Chandrasekar, a renowned gaming developer at Second Life, and Gaurav Gupta, a former high-profile consultant at Bain & Company, have completed a seed funding round of $1.5 million with InfoEdge Ventures to develop AvatarLife grid with skill-based play-to-earn games, community content building, marketplace, freebies, and in-world currency. That brings the total valuation of the grid to $7.5 million.

AvatarLife will be expanding the types of games offered on the grid, but games of pure chance are prohibited, said Sushant Chandrasekar, one of the co-founders and a former developer at Second Life who has 15 years of experience in virtual worlds.

“We are a grid for skill-based games,” Chandrasekar told Hypergrid Business. “Roulette and casino machines are prohibited on AvatarLife.”

The hypergrid address is grid.avatarlife.com:8002. The grid can be accessed through its own Windows, Linux, and Apple viewer or other general OpenSim viewers.

AvatarLife will also have role-playing, campaigns, action, and strategy games, said Chandrasekar.

Chandrasekar is involved primarily in building OpenSim virtual worlds for AvatarLife while the other co-founder Gaurav Gupta will be involved in building AvatarLife’s Web 3.0, blockchain, and crypto partnerships.

AvatarLife also owns parcels of virtual land as a creator in Decentraland and Roblox.

“We own eight parcels of land in Decentraland and have created some skill-based games there,” said Chandrasekar. “We hope to get these games on other lands on Decentraland through partnerships with land owners in Decentraland.”

AvatarLife is currently offering a host of features in addition to play-to-earn games, including building free islands for its resident creators, who can then earn by selling accessories and games. It is also offering accessories freebies and will be providing more games through celebrity creator involvement and partnerships.

AvatarLife also has an in-world currency called AV$ that can be bought through PayPal and will be including automated cryptocurrency and in-world currency payments.

Skill-based games and virtual land

Currently, residents can sign up at the grid and play a host of available skill-based games including Whacky Taxi, Paracheesi, Gold Roller, and Flash, among others. There are multiple other games provided for residents through partnerships with celebrity creators who include the following:

Aargle Zymurgy: He has recreated Zyngo, a  premier game in Second Life which in turn made many other Lindennaires. Zyngo is now live and ready to play in AvatarLife.

Shane Nielson: The creator of Dawgs, one of the most played games in the past. The grid-wide jackpot on Dawgs is massive and can go up to 10,000 times the buy-in of players.

Sorina Garrigus: An active owner of the Celestial Game Tower, which is now active in AvatarLife. She is a uniting force for the gaming community in AvatarLife.

Many more games will be available through such partnerships with celebrities and companies, said Chandrasekar.

AvatarLife is also partnering with celebrity creators of virtual worlds who include the following:

Serenah Rainier: She developed massive builds in AvatarLife. Ancient Rome has come to life in AvatarLife through the work of Serenah.

Saad Zarf:  Zarf has built the AvatarLife beach sim for residents to hang out and relax.

Uno Blokke: A developer who customized and developed Western Town island for a beautiful western-themed island on AvatarLife.

Sweet Sugar: Avatar creator on Second Life who is now on AvatarLife to provide male and female avatars.

Free Islands for creators

At the moment, creators can claim free islands built for them by the company. It does not charge any money to set up a region, and there are no monthly tiers. The company will, instead, take 10 percent of the money earned by the creators through gaming and other creations on these islands.

“If a creator does not earn anything, then we don’t mind not being paid for the island,” said Chandrasekar. “Also if a creator is earning lots and feels that they are losing out on a lot of money by paying us 10 percent of their final cash out, they can choose to pay a standard $99 a month tier towards their land.”

Users can get the free islands by signing up for an account on the AvatarLife website and sending a message in-world to the avatar Sushant AvatarLife. Creators can then create games or other things from scratch for sale or other income-generating opportunities on these islands, he said.

“The LSL OpenSim scripting is fairly simple, and any resident with a fair amount of coding or building experience in Second Life or any other virtual world can easily build anything they want,” he said.

Players can earn income from play-to-earn games on these islands or anywhere on AvatarLife. They or other visitors can also purchase these games and operate them on their islands.

“Skilled players have a clear edge over unskilled players,” he said. “Apart from playing on the games, we also give rewards on our game places just for playing on our games. Also, a lot of free-play games are available to play at AvatarLife in-house grid.”

Fun, historical, and gaming destinations

AvatarLife comprises many gaming destinations, including Ancient Rome, Kart Racing where players can race against their friends, and a romantic hangout forest destination known as Forest of Dreams.

Bonuses on in-world currency AV$

AvatarLife uses an in-world currency AV$ which can be bought using real-world money through PayPal and with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It costs $1 for 250 AV$.

Currently, people buying the in-world currency can get replay bonuses on the gaming system. Buying 10,000 AV$ will win you a 1,000 AV$ worth of reply bonus, while buying 100,000 AV$ can win you a 25,000 AV$ bonus at the gaming system.

“As and when we develop more partnerships with cryptocurrency coins, we will keep adding them to our website as an option for residents to buy AV$,” said Chandrasekar. “At this point, we still accept cryptocurrency manually and offer AV$ purchases. This will be automated in the near future.”

AvatarLife is partnering with a cryptocurrency called JejuDoge coin. The JejuDoge community is paying for and developing two islands that are themed based on the real South Korean Jeju Island and its volcano.

“We will be having many more such partnerships with cryptocurrencies and developing regions for them,” said Chandrasekar.

The hypergrid addresses to the Jeju Islands are grid.avatarlife.com:8002:Jejudoge Island One and grid.avatarlife.com:8002:Jejudoge Island Two.

Freebies stores and multiple shopping places

Some grid residents have set up stores that sell accessories like clothing, skins, hair, and wearables. However, there are freebies islands at AvatarLife grid where residents can get free clothes, skins, hair, and wearables. One of those freebies is the Shopping Center. The hypergrid address is grid.avatarlife.com:8002:Shopping Center.

Residents can earn free AV$ by making use of the camping sites on JejuDoge Island, and there are free JejuDog coin t-shirts for anyone who visits the island.

The AvatarLife Games Freeplay Island is a place where players can come and test all games offered on the platform for free and learn how to play them. Players can also earn free payouts when they beat a certain score in some games.

The hypergrid address is grid.avatarlife.com:8002:AvatarLife Games Freeplay Island. 

NFTs are a possible upcoming feature

The company is also trialing NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — and NFT gaming which may then be deployed on the grid and other places like Decentraland and Roblox where they also have virtual land. NFT holders will access benefits across all platforms where AvatarLife has virtual land.

NFT holders on AvatarLife will earn benefits like 10 percent extra rewards on winnings, ten percent cashback on loss, and access to high roller games, among other benefits, said AvatarLife co-founder Gaurav Gupta.

“We are deliberating the idea of adding a play-to-earn layer on top of this and are already trying this out in Decentraland,” he told Hypergrid Business. “If we see positive momentum there, we can always expand it to all platforms, but for now, we are testing a few ideas with nothing concrete, although we do plan to have separate NFTs to offer royalties to our holders for passive income.”

OpenSim land is very attractive because land prices are dramatically lower than in Second Life. In fact, the average price of a standard-sized OpenSim region is now under $13 a month.

OpenSim has registered nearly 5,000 new users and added the equivalent of nearly 4,000 regions since this time last month. The total number of active users has also gone up — by 759.

Numbers often go up in the fall as education is a popular use case for OpenSim. Also, people might be spending more time inside as the temperatures drop.

The public OpenSim grids now total 120,008 standard-sized regions in area. The OpenSim metaverse now is home to 473,217 registered users with 42,202 being active users this month. Hypergrid users account for 98% of active users and 98% of OpenSim land is hypergrid-enabled.

Overall, OSgrid remains the largest grid in land area with 38,681 regions total, the most popular in terms of active user numbers with 5,211 actives in total, and was also the fastest-growing grid this month with 1,526 new regions.

Kitely is the second largest grid with 18,569 regions in total followed by Wolf Territories Grid with 13,184, ZetaWorlds with 8,011, and Alternate Metaverse with 6,622. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the top 40 largest grid by total land area.

Furry World was second in terms of total land area added this month with 457 new regions, followed by Groovy Verse with 180 regions, GBG World with 108 regions, and Soul Grid with 104 new regions.

These stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

The total number of DreamGrids — or home grids created with the software — has grown from slightly more than 2,000 in September 2020 to more than 7,000. This year, as of this report, the software has added 1,933 new grids, according to Fred Beckhusen. Beckhusen is CEO of Micro Technology Services Inc which owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz.

“The grid database contains a count of 4,701 DreamGrid regions, equal to 50,637 Second Life estates,” he told Hypergrid Business. “DreamGrid is about twice the size of all Second Life sims, and is over five times the size of all their private estates according to Second Life Grid Survey. This number will get larger as older grids update to code that sends counts to my server as part of the free Dynamic DNS system.”

There are 10,325 distinct items marked “Show in Search” with 604 regions in DreamGrid Viewers and at Outworldz Search. Only a small portion of grids select the free publicity button as they wish to remain anonymous, he said.

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

DreamGrid also now has additional code that stops griefers from rezzing objects, even after loading OARs that previously allowed it.

The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here. Anyone can create a grid with the DreamGrid software and add it manually via the same link if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. The software now allows grid owners to report the number of regions per grid, total land area, as well as active users.

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: 5,211 active users
2. AviTron: 3,900 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,063 active users
4. GBG World: 1,826 active users
5. ZetaWorlds: 1,637 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,472 active users
7. AviWorlds: 1,225 active users
8. Soul Grid: 1,124 active users
9. Kitely: 1,040 active users
10. Exo-Life: 989 active users
11. Neverworld: 982 active users
12. Party Destination Grid: 901 active users
13. Moonrose: 876 active users
14. The City: 736 active users
15. Dorena’s World: 710 active users
16. Eureka World: 694 active users
17. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
18. Craft World: 591 active users
19. Barefoot Dreamers: 542 active users
20. Astralia: 539 active users
21. DreamNation: 508 active users
22. Freedom Grid: 486 active users
23. Littlefield: 445 active users
24. Free Life: 381 active users
25. Clone Fantasy: 370 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.

Again, the most popular are grids with the most active users in total but are not necessarily the top gainers of new active users over the course of the last month.

Top gainers of active users this month are The City with 729 new active users, due to a database issue that resulted in a large drop in users last month. It was followed by AviTron with 316 new active users, Eureka World with 283, while Etheria and HiddenDreams added 245 new users each.

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 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 19,650 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,212 product variations, 33,149 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 561 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 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 own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, also lists and sells a total of 28,281 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.

OutWorldz releases historical OARs

OutWorldz’s 220 free OARs now include historical OARs which users can download and use at their OpenSim grids.

The historical OARs include the University of Edinburgh sim by Ai Austin, and his variant of the OpenVCE collaboration region themed for the open Metaverse Interoperability Group’s efforts to provide meeting and collaboration spaces on multiple platforms, said Beckhusen.

Outworldz has also purchased exclusive redistribution rights to the DreamLife grid, the Hobbit regions from Seas O fThassa, all of Lost World, and the Galaxy Wars grid.

Clarice Alelaria recently released a large collection of free avatars in the avatars warehouse.  It’s one of many exclusives to the DreamGrid OARs that are only licensed to run on DreamGrids.

Invited to build on Bountiful Continent Project in Neverworld

Neverworld grid is inviting anybody to build on free parcels being offered as part of the grid’s Bountiful Continent Project, which now comprises 121 interconnected sims. The sims are connected by a road system, an airport, and waterways.

“We have free parcels there for any Neverworld resident meaning residents only, although anyone can visit,” grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business. “Parcels are between 8,000 to 16,000 meters square with a 5,000-prim limit.”

Residents can build items on it and even sell the parcels later on.

The hypergrid address is hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002:Silverbell. 

Halloween Requiem coin hunt on Neverworld

A Halloween hunt is ongoing at the Neverworld’s Requiem sim. Residents and hypergridders can find and collect coins amongst fall foliage, brushes, the catacombs, the castle, the house, and the grave as well. They can then redeem the coins found for prizes at the Redemption Center.

The hunt also features a leaderboard that shows each collector’s daily collections. The coins will be hard to find because, in addition to being hidden, they are similar to the autumn-colored landscaping.

The whole idea as you do the coin hunt is to explore, feel, and sometimes maybe get lost in the beautiful Halloween scenery, cobwebby haunted house, the ton of brush, dance club, catacombs, and other things at the sim.

First-ever AviTron grid photography contest

The AviTron grid is inviting grid residents to vote for the winners of its first-ever photography contest in which 27 artists are participating and there are prizes to be won.

The photo submission concluded on October 11 and participants are waiting for prize announcements but need to have their photos voted on by residents to win. The voting takes place until October 18.

To see the entries, visit the Echoes landmark at avitronlogin.avitron.net:8002:iEchoes where all the participating photos are displayed.

“Only AviTron residents will be able to cast valid votes,” AviTron grid owner Alex Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business. “To vote, click on the photos you choose as your favorites. Each photograph can only receive one vote per resident”

The winner of first place will receive the equivalent of US $40 in grid currency. The second place prize is $20 and third place is $10.

“They can use it to pay for their private regions also if they own one or buy content from original content creators or pay for services,” said Pomposelli.

Exo-Life is celebrating its eighth anniversary till October 21

Exo-Life Virtual World’s three-week eighth-anniversary celebration which kicked off on October 1, will end on October 21. The biennial anniversary event features pavilions showcasing merchant and creator items, and freebies. There also is a grid-wide Great Rose Hunt.

A special anniversary rose has been added to the Great Rose Hunt. A special fish has also been added to the Gone Fishin’ locations. These are ultra-rare items that will only be available during the celebration.

The long-awaited Lore of Exo-life will also be released and canonized at the event in a ceremony during the Grand Opening festivities.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Adult Nation, Ampleverse, Argentoratum, Avalonia Virtual, BunnyLand, Dajas Grid, DowGrid, Dyvall, Fashionistas, Hermopolis Chimera, HiddenDreams , Horse Island, Insanity Grid, Kantarobasta Grid, Kindred Spirits World, La Grilla de Don Javi, Laguna Bay, NuGrid, Paradwys, Planet Jikan, Privilege Club, Rocket World Grid, Second Meta , SV3D, Sweet Life, The Verse, Volterra, Yuriworld, and Zirconia.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 2,480 different publicly-accessible grids, 351 of which were active this month, and 269 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.

• OSgrid: 38,681 regions
• Kitely: 18,569 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,184 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,011 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 6,622 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,587 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,726 regions
• Groovy Verse: 2,905 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,491 regions
• PMGrid: 1,297 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,249 regions
• GorGrid: 1,052 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,046 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Tomi’s World: 841 regions
• Serenity: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 665 regions
• GBG World: 646 regions
• AviTron: 613 regions
• Wyldwood Bayou: 565 regions
• HD Skin World: 490 regions
• ArtDestiny: 484 regions
• Furry World: 473 regions
• Littlefield: 452 regions
• Counter Earth: 410 regions
• Tangle Grid: 409 regions
• Craft World: 396 regions
• Neverworld: 393 regions
• DreamNation: 351 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 277 regions
• GerGrid: 235 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Soul Grid: 204 regions
• Adreans-World: 202 regions
• German World Grid: 148 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• The Public World: 125 regions

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.

There currently is no easy way for OpenSim users to agree to a grid’s privacy policies and terms of service or give data use consent as required by the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

GDPR is a data security law enacted by the European Union in May 2018 that applies to all organizations that deal with the personal data of European citizens and residents — and breaking its rules can result in severe fines and penalties.

Although almost all OpenSim grids implement their terms of service and GDPR compliances, it requires more than just a user authentication module that allows users to click a checkbox to agree to terms and give consent, said Ilan Tochner, CEO of Kitely.

“Among other things, GDPR compliance requires handling certain data in ways that OpenSim isn’t set up for and requires reengineering to support,” he told Hypergrid Business. “For example, GDPR defines a right to be forgotten, which requires the removal of personal data – as defined by GDPR – from your system, including from your server logs and backups, under certain conditions.”

A company must implement a long list of technical and procedural requirements to support GDPR, said Tochner.

“You’ll likely need to use the services of a lawyer or one of the many companies that specialize in helping companies achieve GDPR compliance,” he said.

Kitely, on its part, uses a custom solution that is more comprehensive and addresses all the GDPR requirements.

“Kitely was one of the first OpenSim grids to support GDPR, way back in 2018 before GDPR came into effect,” said Tochner. “One of the long list of changes we’ve had to make to support this legislation is to require people to submit a web form before they can teleport their avatars into Kitely from third-party grids.”

Existing user authentication modules

Grid owners can use a few OpenSim authentication modules, including jOpenSim and the newly launched HGauth.

HGauth, for instance, enforces a web form submission using a set of PHP scripts that require a user to click on a link.

PHP is an open-source scripting language that can be used for different Internet operations — including connecting to remote servers — and is often used for creating and operating online forms.

The HGauth link takes a user to a web page outside the viewer with the grid’s custom terms of service. The user must accept the terms of service before they can teleport to the grid.

The HGauth module is better to have on a grid than not using any solution at all, said Tochner.

Database configuration and port blockage issues

It can be a long, involved process to enforce terms of service and GDPR compliance even with an almost automatic system such as DreamGrid for what is supposed to be a single-click solution, said Fred Beckhusen, CEO of Micro Technology Services Inc, which owns OutWorldz and DreamGrid software for making home-based grids.

“All solutions I know of use PHP, which uses a web server to print the license and get back the ‘I agree’ checkbox result,” he said. “PHP requires configuration and database integration, which DreamGrid does automatically.”

According to Beckhusen, DreamGrid also includes a fully configured, secure Apache. Apache is open-source web server software that allows users to deploy websites.

“But not everyone wants to turn it on, and Internet service providers often block the port,” he said.

A different port can be used, he said. “But then there are additional issues to deal with, such as SSL certificates.”

SSL certificates ensure a website is secure and encrypted, and not having one can leave a website vulnerable to hackers.

Dreamgrid does support free SSL certificates that auto-renew, he said. “But that requires Port 80 to be used, which is, again, often blocked.”

Beckhusen said he was able to get an alternative module called Diva front end — created by Diva Canto — to work in a standalone version of DreamGrid called DreamWorld.

“But that code is not suitable for DreamGrid,” he said. “It was close to ideal, though, as it uses the grid port, typically 8002, which can’t be blocked.”

DreamGrid does support WordPress with its W4OS plugin for OpenSim, he said. “Also, there is jOpenSim running on Joomla on PHP on Apache web server.”

But it’s a lot of work to integrate code from Apache, WordPress, and jOpenSim, he said. “And you still have the issue of Internet service providers blocking the web server port.”

DreamGrid has a solution to make things easier.

“DreamGrid has its own built-in web server on a user-selectable port for Diagnostics, the in-world partner system, a Text to Speech API, Automatic Updating Teleport signs, and more,” said Beckhusen. “It’s a simple solution to this issue for the EU users who want GDPR and others who want a pop-up ToS.”

Micro Technology Services will be developing its own custom and in-built OpenSim authentication module for grids instead of using a module like HGauth as it requires Apache to be enabled, said Beckhusen.

Lenovo this week released ThinkReality VRX, a new mixed reality headset meant for improving virtual 3D immersive enterprise remote training, collaboration, visualization, and meetings.

The device will be available for early access to select clients by the end of this year and to the general public in early 2023.

Lenovo is using a combination of hardware, software, and services-oriented solutions to help enterprise metaverse clients achieve speed-to-solution and realize a faster return on investment while offering a fully engaged customer experience, said Vishal Shah, general manager of XR and Metaverse at Lenovo.

“Hardware and software are critical and you really can’t do much in the metaverse without them,” he told Hypergrid Business. “But the combination of hardware, software, and services is going to be a major differentiator in the nascent XR industry — because speed-to-solution is what is going to accelerate in the new business reality of the enterprise metaverse and give first-mover advantages to firms that get it right.”

The new XR device can be used for hands-free remote assistance and guided workflow to enable technicians to complete tasks with the support of experts who are seeing the same images or by artificial intelligence-assisted prompts in their field of vision.

“Businesses are experiencing up to four times faster training on soft skills compared to classroom training and 275 percent more confidence in applying skills learned in virtual reality,” said Lenovo in a press release. “In addition, VR training can reduce the risk of injury at the workplace by up to 43 percent.”

Tethered or standalone

The ThinkReality VRX operates as a standalone device or tethered to a PC or workstation. It can also use cloud-based solutions such as NVIDIA CloudXR for XR-graphics intensive experiences that need GPUs.

The device supports six degrees of freedom tracking thanks to four front-mounted cameras and also has two full-color, high-resolution pass-through cameras.

Pass-through technology lets users superimpose 3D virtual reality environments on top of the real world in a blend of physical and digital called mixed reality.

The device works alongside the ThinkReality software platform, which is device and cloud agnostic and allows customers to build, deploy, and manage their custom applications and content on a global scale.

Lenovo also offers consulting, content creation, cloud deployment, customer support, and other services for this and other devices.

Three stages of the metaverse

Lenovo is targeting to offer solutions at each of the three stages of the metaverse – namely the creation layer, visual layer, and delivery layer, said Shah.

“The creation layer is how content is built and we can see how metaverse interest is creating job growth for 3D artists and engineers today,” he said. “The visual layer is where 3D apps and tools are developing next-gen solutions and applications.”

The third layer is the delivery layer where distributed computing is a critical component to enable greater device utility, he said, adding that Lenovo’s ThinkReality XR solutions, ThinkShield security solutions, ThinkEdge edge computing solutions, and services serve this need.

Some of the most notable grid outages that affected the stats this month include Ignis Fatuus, which had 69 regions and 36 actives last month, AlterEgo, which had 126 regions and 172 active users, and Love Lemon, which had 35 actives last month

OSgrid remains the largest grid in terms of total land area with 37,155 regions and the most popular in terms of total active users with 4,984 active users. However, AviWorlds added the most land area this month with the equivalent of 681 regions. AviTron added the highest number of registered users with 558, while Virtualife was the most active having added 570 active users.

OpenSim land area now stretches 116,084 regions in total, across a total of 1,779 grids tracked by Hypergrid Business. The metaverse is home to 468,245 registered users of which 41,443 were active this month. 95 percent of these are hypergrid users and 99 percent of the land is hypergriddable.

OSgrid is the largest in terms of total land area with 37,155 regions, followed by Kitely with 18,631, Wolf Territories Grid with 13,200, ZetaWorlds with 8,079, and Alternate Metaverse with 6,607 regions. Scroll to the bottom of the report to see the top 40 grids by land area.

AviWorlds added the most land area or 681 regions, followed by Alternate Metaverse with 229, Discovery Grid with 170, Groovy Verse with 108, and Tomi’s World with 57 regions.

These stats also do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid — a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

The total number of DreamGrids — or home grids created with the software — has grown from slightly more than 2,000 in September 2020 to more than 7,000 as of September 2022. The software has so far 2022 added 1,933 new grids, Fred Beckhusen, CEO at Micro Technology Services Inc which owns both DreamGrid and OutWorldz, told Hypergrid Business. 

With the free-to-use DreamGrid 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.  

The total list of grids tracked is available here. Anyone can also create a grid with the DreamGrid software and add it manually via the same link if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. The software now allows grid owners to report the number of regions per grid, total land area, as well as active users.

The Outworldz website is also now offering 212 free OARs — for download and 403 more are in review, set to go online this year.

“In August, we released six free OARs — Legend of Darkport, Darkwood, Airforce Research Lab, Lands End, VR Airport, and an updated Hypermall,” he said. “GalaxyWarz grid has been merged into OutWorldz grid and LostWorld grid is being rebuilt as a free OAR showcase.”

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: 4,984 active users
2. AviTron: 3,584 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,104 active users
4. GBG World: 1,779 active users
5. ZetaWorlds: 1,583 active users
6. Neverworld: 1,447 active users
7. Alternate Metaverse: 1,384 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,374 active users
9. Kitely: 1,016 active users
10. Soul Grid: 997 active users
11. Exo-Life: 962 active users
12. Party Destination Grid: 913 active users
13. Moonrose: 840 active users
14. Quintonia: 744 active users
15. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
16. Dorena’s World: 657 active users
17. Craft World: 609 active users
18. Virtualife: 591 active users
19. Barefoot Dreamers: 565 active users
20. Astralia: 558 active users
21. DreamNation: 501 active users
22. Littlefield: 474 active users
23. Arkham Grid: 466 active users
24. Freedom Grid: 436 active users
25. Eureka World: 411 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 the most active users in total but are not necessarily the top gainers of new active users over the course of the last month.

Virtualife was the biggest gainer this past month with 570 new active users — but this was a statistical fluke because of server issues resulting in a stats disruption last month. Alternate Metaverse was in second place with an increase of 455 actives, Moonrose with 446, Eureka World with 335, and Neverworld with 219 additional active users.

The active user stats are 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 19,605 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,073 product variations, 33,024 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to  559 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 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 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.

Empire Island reborn offers free content to visitors

Empire Island, one of the sims that existed on the Clone Life grid which closed in 2019 and after which Zone Nations was born, is now back in operation at the Zone Nations grid.

The sim is still focused on providing entertainment content including discos set in different themes, dance animations, lighting effects, consoles, and more.

Over 1,000 animations – group, couple, and single dances – are now available on the sim for anyone to pick and use elsewhere for free, said  Gabriele Frasca aka Druskus War, owner of Zone Nations.

“The implementation took about six months and we have 80 percent native content and content found around in other grids without changing the actual creator, all provided free of charge to everyone, for the spirit of sharing,” Frasca told Hypergrid Business.

“Any visitor will be able to take the contents with pre-assigned permissions and we ask that you respect them without changing the name of the original owner,” Frasca added. “Unfortunately, turning to other grids we found the original Clone Life content modified, changing the model and creator name, but performing an inspection, we found that our original trademarks and signatures were still present.”

The setting is always in a modern key and the works are made in both prim and mesh. Statuses made by Cherry Manga are seen as soon as you land on the sim.

The hypergrid address is login.zonenations.com:8002:Impero Island.

Storylink launches a Halloween graveyard and cemetery tour

Halloween is approaching and Storylink Radio is preparing fans by putting together an in-world Graveyards and Cemeteries tour guide book for the event.

The guidebook will comprise of a list of scary graveyards and cemeteries you can check out during Halloween 2022, and Storylink Radio is thus calling on everyone who knows any in-world graveyards to share them with Storylink.

“We will make this available to Second Life as well as OpenSim audiences,” Storylink Radio owner Shandon Loring told Hypergrid Business. “We will plan to organize some fun guided tour trips also.”

You can share a name or list of graveyards and their locations by leaving a comment on Storylink Radio’s in-world graveyard blog page or by sending an email to storylinkradio@gmail.com.

Already on the list are the Lunaria Cemetery and the Cimetiere Romantique both on the OctoberWorld, Boothill and The Burial Grounds both on WestWorld, the Pirate Graveyard, Senefers Tomb, and Castle de Cornauille Family Plot on the StorylinkRadio region on the Kitely grid, and the Newgrange Passage Tomb on the Celtic World region on Kitely grid.

Storylink Radio hosts a series of storytelling events and has included Halloween Countdown stories that can be viewed and listened to on the Radio’s Channel on YouTube.

Kitely’s OctoberWorld region ready for the Halloween

The OctoberWorld sim on Kitely is ready for Halloween next month. The Halloween Mall in this region already has 25 merchants and is inviting new merchants who wish to set up Halloween-themed stores and offers on the site.

The mall remains open throughout the year and has numerous spaces available for new stores for anyone willing to set up a store. For more information, contact Storylink Radio owner Shandon Loring at storylinkradio@gmail.com.

“Basically, we just ask them to come check out the area, get added to the group, and set up their shops and wares,” Loring told Hypergrid Business. “Once added to the group, they will be able to rez their stuff and set up their shop. They do not need to make their items group-owned unless they want to. They can put in full shops, single stand-alone vendors along the pathways, random decorations, or even just a sign redirecting to their own online store or another grid.”

It is free to set up shop and sell so merchants keep all their proceeds. Vendors are encouraged to be creative and to provide lots of signage and or teleports as appropriate, and the admins will give them the teleport scripts if needed, said Loring.

Numerous merchants are already offering a host of Halloween merchandise and paraphernalia including clothing, costumes, animesh scene vignettes, monsters, decorations, artwork and many more. Numerous custom products have also been created this year too, said Loring.

“In addition to items for sale, there are lots of freebies scattered about the full sim mall,” Loring said. “There is a giant castle to explore, and RP opportunities abound. There is a themed storytelling area in the southeast corner of the property and we will host numerous live storytelling sessions in October, helping to bring in traffic and shoppers.”

The live storytelling sessions include a special two-hour Scary Story Campout to take place at 7 p.m. Pacific Time on October 13.

The region also has two graveyard sites set up ready for the Halloween season. These include the Lunaria Cemetery and Cimetiere Romantique.

The hypergrid address to the mall is grid.kitely.com:8002/OCTOBERWORLD/123/148/3173

Zone Nations implements a new rental system

Zone Nations grid is testing a new rental system which allows residents to list simsfor rent and see a list of sims available for renting, and to rent them easily. It works similarly to the rent systems in Second Life, allowing people to rez a box in the sim or lot they want to rent, and edit a notecard entering the rental price.

“You will see the available lots or sims and those that are occupied indicating the name of the person who rented them and a direct teleport button to help those interested in renting,” Gabriele Frasca aka Druskus War told Hypergrid Business. “By connecting to the website, you will be able to upload an image showing the lot or sim that will be put up for rent.”

It is also available to hypergridders although all features are not 100 percent functional.

“We are working to allow on a weekly or monthly basis to be reset by the main manager, in this case Zone Nations who owns it and show existing rents and grids still active,” Frasca said. “This is to have an active rent system that shows active grids and not closed ones.”

Kitely turns 14 this Sunday

Kitely grid is inviting people to join them in celebrating its 14th birthday from 1 p.m. Pacific Time until 3 p.m. this Sunday, September 18 at the Kitely Welcome Center. This will signify the 14 years since the date Kitely’s Co-Founders, Ilan Tochner and Oren Hurvitz, signed Kitely’s Founders Agreement.

The activities lined up include entertainment by Latin singer Nazirah, DJ Rosa performing a 50s Sock Hop theme, and Acid Loop who will perform in Trip Hop, Funk, Jazz, and Rock themes. Shandon Loring will also read a thrilling excerpt from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Some Kitely Market creators will be providing gifts to attendees.

The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Welcome Center.

Exo-Life to celebrate 8th anniversary next month

Exo-Life Virtual World will celebrate it’s eight anniversary for three weeks starting on October 1 to October 21.

The biennial anniversary event will feature pavilions showcasing merchant and creator items and freebies. There also will be a grid-wide Great Rose Hunt.

A special anniversary rose has been added to the Great Rose Hunt. A special fish has also been added to the Gone Fishin’ locations. These are ultra rare items that will only be available during the celebration.

The long awaited Lore of Exo-life will also be released and canonized at the event in a ceremony during the Grand Opening festivities.

You can also check the full schedule of event at the Garden Island, which is the landing point.

The hypergrid address is hg.exo-life.onl:8032.

AviTron launches new clothing collection for female avatars

AviTron has launched a new clothing collection called Neon Adventure for female avatars. It was launched during this week’s Fashion Show in Metavision event at the grid’s Vancouver region.

The event was sponsored by BLZ Fashion Property, Kel Angel of MetaVision, and Avitron grid.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Brogals World, Nave Metaverse, and Verth.

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.

• OSgrid: 37,155 regions
• Kitely: 18,631 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,200 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,079 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 6,607 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,507 regions
• DigiWorldz: 4,009 regions
• Groovy Verse: 2,725 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,491 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,249 regions
• AviWorlds: 1,128 regions
• GorGrid: 1,053 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
• Tomi’s World: 841 regions
• Serenity: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 601 regions
• AviTron: 581 regions
• Wyldwood Bayou: 565 regions
• GBG World: 538 regions
• HD Skin World: 488 regions
• ArtDestiny: 484 regions
• Littlefield: 452 regions
• Craft World: 442 regions
• Neverworld: 439 regions
• Tangle Grid: 409 regions
• Counter Earth: 407 regions
• DreamNation: 351 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 276 regions
• GerGrid: 235 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Adreans-World: 200 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 143 regions
• German World Grid: 137 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 124 regions
• Trans Sidera: 107 regions
• Infinite Grid: 101 regions
• Utopia Skye: 100 regions

Many companies are following the hype and rushing to invest in the metaverse.

According to a July survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 66 percent of 1,000 business executives reported their company is actively engaged in the metaverse — but what these companies are developing and what their customers want to do with the metaverse don’t match up.

As a result, not all of these technologies and the efforts by companies will be rewarded or even make it to the cut, said Emmanuelle Rivet, vice chair of US technology media and telecommunications and global technology leader at PwC.

“Sixty-five percent of customers want to use the metaverse to explore new places virtually, 58 percent to interact with health providers, 53 percent to interact with customer service agents, and 52 percent to attend courses without having to walk to campus,” she told Hypergrid Business.

“However, there’s a disconnect between what consumers want and what businesses are planning to do in the metaverse,” she said. “Nearly half of businesses, or 42%, plan to use the metaverse to provide onboarding and training.”

Identifying the right metaverse tech

Given the disconnect, a company needs to correctly identify metaverse tech to invest in right from the start and what aspects it must include to best serve its customers and employees while staying true to its brand.

“At PwC, we recommend business leaders consider all aspects of the metaverse, broken into six areas – the economy, interoperability, governance, identity, experience, and persistence,” said Rivet. “With these in mind, business leaders can identify which line of business or opportunities work best for them. They can then identify the metaverse technology and building blocks that will help them on their journey to their desired business outcome.”

Staying relevant

At the same time, a company planning to invest in metaverse tech needs to stay flexible and adaptable to be relevant and successful because many of these technologies are nascent, still evolving, and bound to change with customer needs, said Rivet.

“The metaverse will operate well with specialized technologies, but specialization isn’t always necessary,” she said. “For example, cryptocurrency works inside and outside the metaverse, but so do credit cards.”

Of the companies currently investing in the metaverse, 53 percent already have key talent focused on cryptocurrency, according to the PwC survey. The results further reveal that 82 percent of companies already have or plan to create job roles focused on the metaverse, with 46 percent of business executives considering it a top priority to hire for metaverse skills.

Privacy concerns

Companies investing or planning to invest in the metaverse need to keep customers’ worries and concerns when utilizing metaverse technologies.

“Consumers are anxious about the metaverse’s societal impacts and its impact on privacy,” said Rivet. “Businesses must remain steadfast in building trust, as it will continue to be instrumental in developing a metaverse where their company can thrive, and consumers can enjoy interacting in the decentralized, digital world.”

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.

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.

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.

“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 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 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.

“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.

“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.

• OSgrid: 37,216 regions
• Kitely: 18,678 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,184 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 8,062 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 6,378 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,337 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,997 regions
• Groovy Verse: 2,617 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,491 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,249 regions
• GorGrid: 1,053 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• Serenity: 841 regions
• Tomi’s World: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 601 regions
• Wyldwood Bayou: 565 regions
• AviTron: 557 regions
• GBG World: 537 regions
• HD Skin World: 487 regions
• Craft World: 458 regions
• Littlefield: 451 regions
• AviWorlds: 447 regions
• ArtDestiny: 441 regions
• Furry World: 425 regions
• Neverworld: 414 regions
• Tangle Grid: 410 regions
• Counter Earth: 363 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• DreamNation: 335 regions
• EdMondo: 276 regions
• GerGrid: 235 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Adreans-World: 197 regions
• Soul Grid: 176 regions
• German World Grid: 151 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 145 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 124 regions
• Trans Sidera: 123 regions

Metropolis closed at the end of June so that the owners could focus on educational projects. The grid was one of the three oldest worlds, the fourth most popular by active users, the fifth largest by registered users, and the 12th largest by land area.

Several smaller grids also experienced downtime this month, did not report their stats, or had other issues. In addition, there is often a seasonal drop to OpenSim statistics in the middle of the summer as people spend more time outside and schools close for the season.

The total tally for registered OpenSim users is 464,887. There were 112,581 standard region equivalents and 38,957 active users. This month we collected stats for 276 grids in total. Of these grids, 98 percent are accessible via the hypergrid, meaning that users can teleport in from other grids without having to create a new account.

Wolf Territories Grid gained the most land area in terms of the number of standard region equivalents this month at 1,600 additional regions, followed by OpenSim Fest which hosts the OpenSim Fest 2022 event until August with 115 regions, Serenity with 59, 3rd Rock Grid with 25, and Xmir with 15 new regions.

Grids that did not report stats this month yet we had their stats last month include The Great Canadian Grid, which had 43 regions and 198 actives last month, and Virtual Life,  which reported 292 actives last month.

Panthera grid, which had 109 actives and 43 regions last month, also had an inaccessible stat page. Other notable offlines are Bernicia Prime which had 110 actives last month, Perfect Life which had 130 regions last month, Chan Grid which had 31 actives last month, Victoria Lane, which had 46 actives last month, and Darkworldz, which had 29 actives.

Those could have been temporary outages and the grids may well be back online by the time you read this.

OSgrid is still the largest grid at 36,590 regions in total, followed by Kitely with 18,678, Wolf Territories Grid with 13,200, ZetaWorlds 7,961, and Alternate Metaverse with 6,500.

These stats 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.

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.

OutWorldz now has over 1,100 users according to latest update from Fred Beckhusen, CEO at Micro Technology Services Inc. that runs both DreamGrid and OutWorldz. On the other hand, DreamGrid continues to grow each month with a total of 6,241 unique grids, which is about 92 percent of all hypergridable grids. A total of 3,504 grids, an average of 292 new grids per month, were crawled in 2021 alone by Hyperica software, which has now been integrated into OutWorldz.

In 2022 so far, there are an average of 285 per month or a total of 1,423 new grids crawled. This is according to a table from the Outworldz Dynamic DNS system, which is an easy-to-use, free service for grids for the Outworldz.net and Inworldz.net domains that make a “grid of grids.”

There are currently 8,145 distinct items listed — ignoring duplicates — at outworldz.com/search along with links to 115 grids, 581 regions, 127 parcels, and 105 events — it appears in the viewer in ‘Search.’ Only assets, regions, parcels, and grids marked ‘Show in Search,’ along with an enabled ‘Publicity’ checkbox in DreamGrid will appear. This also populates the Destination Guide, which was also a part of Hyperica.com.

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. Outworldz DreamGrids have access to over 170 free OpenSim Archives, which are complete region files. 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: 4,779 active users
2. AviTron: 2,861 active users
3. DigiWorldz: 2,140 active users
4. ZetaWorlds: 1,506 active users
5. AviWorlds: 1,421 active users
6. GBG World: 1,395 active users
7. Kitely: 1,088 active users
8. Neverworld: 1,006 active users
9. Alternate Metaverse: 991 active users
10. Party Destination Grid: 982 active users
11. Exo-Life: 949 active users
12. Soul Grid: 756 active users
13. Craft World: 730 active users
14. Astralia: 703 active users
15. Wolf Territories Grid: 686 active users
16. OpenSim Fest: 638 active users
17. Quintonia: 619 active users
18. Eureka World: 564 active users
19. Dorena’s World: 558 active users
20. DreamNation: 510 active users
21. Moonrose: 501 active users
22. Littlefield: 478 active users
23. Arkham Grid: 473 active users
24. Freedom Grid: 466 active users
25. 3rd Rock Grid: 454 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 since we reported stats.

This month, OpenSim Fest grid led in terms of the total number of new active users gained over the past one month with 638 users, Fire and Ice grid with 400, Neverworld with 161, AviTron with 145, and Cooperation Creative with 143 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 19,576 product listings in Kitely Market containing 38,622 product variations, 33,477 of which are exportable to other grids.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 554 OpenSim grids to date, which 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 2,8305 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.

OpenSim Fest 2022 enters second weekend

OSFest 2022 was packed with a host of weekend performances as it entered the second weekend.

Meanwhile, a new navigation tool has been added to the grid calendar. To check in to an event, find the grid calendar in-world and check the details, and click on any name of any performer whose event you would like to see, and time of the event. You will see details and three different teleport buttons that work with different viewers. Click on any to visit.

About 20 OpenSim Fest 2022 merchants from different regions across the grid are also ganging up this week starting July 18 to July 24 for a sale promotion event dubbed Merchant Sales Event featuring freebies and low-cost inventories. Check out the different merchants from this link or via the event’s calendar.

80 OpenSim Fest 2022 parcels filled up

Meanwhile, even as 80 parcels at the OpenSim Fest 2022 are filled up with product and service exhibitions by merchants and sponsors, the event is still welcoming new late entry exhibitions and sponsorships. Please sign up or contact the moderators, admins, and hosts including in-world at OpenSim Fest grid or through website contacts if willing to participate.

You can watch the exhibitions and events live on YouTube through this link.

Vogue College launches in AviTron

Rafaela Kaplan de Heartsong, owner of the Vogue Entertainment Group,  has opened Vogue College to teach modelling, blender, English, building, other classes in AviTron grid. The classes launched on July 13 and the first class to be taught was  a building class on July 14. You can enroll for future classes by joining the group in-world or signing up on the website and filling an enroll card.

The class are free to attend and the teachers are also donating their time. Some are weekly, others monthly, and others occasional according to this calendar.

We have enrolled about 15 students,” she told Hypergrid Business.

She moved to AviTron from Second Life due to price advantage since the former is cheaper to rent. She is now renting a four sims region for about $15 to $20 a month and a second region for $10 to host all her operations.

“I used to have a a whole sim in Second Life which was very expensive. I used to pay about $260 per month for just the land and of course you know maintaining the ball rooms and all that, we don’t get any money from there,” she said.”

She has other operations on AviTron including ball rooms, mall, stores from different people, concerts, dances, weddings, and other special events.

Neverworld is offering self-hosted regions

Neverworld grid is offering self-hosted regions through their OpenSim viewer. The service is free, said a Neverworld grid admin.

“You can have as many regions as you can fit on your home computer, no limits,” the admin told Hypergrid Business. “We do from time to time clear out dead or unused self hosts to free up space but as long as you are using it, we welcome people to run their own. Less stress on our servers and everyone is happy.”

To set up a self-hosted region, you simply download and install the Neverworld Region Server installer, check the open ports on your system that you can use to forward or open up the ports as per these instructions, install the software, and then start creating a region. Find the OpenSim.exe file in the Bin folder and click on it to run it.

Open the Bin folder and find a file named OpenSim.ini, open it, and edit the listener port to a unique and different port to the one you will be using for the region port.Each region needs a separate open port. Install Firestorm, open it, and use it to visit Neverworlds to see the positions of the current regions and find an empty spot for your region on the map. Pick a place.

Go back to the Bin folder and find the OpenSim.exe file and click on it. After this, answer the questions that follows including the new name of the sim, location, the port you will use for the region, and the estate of the owner. It creates the region with a unique UUID then asks for the name of the estate owner. You can now teleport to the region.

Migrating Coconut merges with Youth Nation

The Migrating Coconut grid has merged and migrated to Youth Nation grid and is calling on its residents to register there and put Kofi as your grid sponsor to access their sims and other data. Members will have their inventories approved for free.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Proud Rainbow, AusVirtual Grid, and OpenSim Fest,

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 1,7623 different publicly-accessible grids, 348 of which were active this month, and 276 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.

• OSgrid: 36,590 regions
• Kitely: 18,678 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 13,200 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 7,961 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 6,500 regions
• Discovery Grid: 5,280 regions
• DigiWorldz: 4,062 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,491 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 1,248 regions
• Tomi’s World: 1,089 regions
• GorGrid: 1,054 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• Serenity: 900 regions
• AviWorlds: 717 regions
• Kinky Haven: 601 regions
• Wyldwood Bayou: 565 regions
• GBG World: 541 regions
• AviTron: 503 regions
• HD Skin World: 484 regions
• Craft World: 465 regions
• Littlefield: 450 regions
• Furry World: 425 regions
• Neverworld: 417 regions
• Tangle Grid: 405 regions
• ArtDestiny: 400 regions
• Encitra Home Grid: 344 regions
• DreamNation: 326 regions
• Counter Earth: 306 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 276 regions
• GerGrid: 235 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
• Adreans-World: 204 regions
• German World Grid: 162 regions
• Soul Grid: 161 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 145 regions
• German World: 144 regions
• AlterEgo: 126 regions
• Trans Sidera: 123 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 115 regions

Griefers can be a real nuisance in OpenSim.

Also known as bad faith players, they can fill a world with various self-replicating items to deliberately irritate other users.

There are a number of ways to do away with the objects left by griefers, including automatic detection, shutdown, and restarting of overloaded and unresponsive regions once they are affected.

Kitely has a system that automatically detects and shuts down an affected region or sim after a few minutes of being affected, which limits the effect of griefing to that world. The grid will then offer assistance to restore the affected region or sim to the last automatic daily backup when the sim or region owner requests help, said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.

“We have had very few griefers attempt scripted object attacks in Kitely over the years because our system makes it very easy to overcome their denial of service attempts,” he told Hypergrid Business. “We place no more than four worlds per server and no two worlds are adjacent, thus preventing scripted objects from quickly spreading from one world to another.”

Kitely also uses and keeps detailed logs that the admins can review to see who initiated the attack and ban them in multiple ways from visiting the grid, he said.

“By limiting the automatic spread of scripted objects between worlds and being able to very easily recover from such attacks we have made it hardly worth the effort for griefers to attack Kitely, which is why the few people who have ever attempted to do so quickly left to other grids where their efforts can have a much bigger impact,” he said.

Banning griefers is a good option for grid owners who do not want to keep manually dealing with them.

Otherwise, it is easy to clear items from known griefers, one of whom has been using an avatar named Priscilla Kleenex, said Thirza Ember, Hypergrid Safari founder and CEO.

“Priscilla Kleenex has opened at least 25 accounts that I am aware of, probably many more, joining any grid that allows you to make an account without question,” she told Hypergrid Business. “It takes about five seconds to clear up the mess — you just go into Preferences and remove all items owned by Priscilla.”

Grid owners may have to look into additional methods of verifying users like verifying an email or using captchas to prevent spammy users, she said. Many smaller grids are using this approach or having account applications reviewed manually by admins before being allowed, she added, although this takes longer.

Otherwise, griefing is a way for the attacker to get attention, said Ember, adding that the attacker uses scripts and prims of different shapes and forms which self-replicate. Her own Safari sim on Avacon was griefed less than a month ago but she has since cleaned it up.

“Priscilla Kleenex is the name now used although I am willing to bet it is the same Jack Mariolane who used to plague OpenSim years ago – possibly living in Italy, because of course all the grid owners can see perfectly well the geolocation of the computer used,” she said. “Apparently, blocking the Mac address will keep her out of your grid whatever new account is made.”

Last week, Kleenex attacked Speculoos World from four different accounts that she started creating on May 12. The grid later figured out how to ban her avatar and deleted all items she had created, but needed to confirm the effects because the procedure was permanent, said Gudule Lapointe, owner of Speculoos World.

“I made a bash or Myql script to find the griefer and their alt and ban them and delete their objects,” he told Hypergrid Business. “It would be interesting to see if other grid owners have alternative or better solutions and share them.”

However, banning an attacker is not the most efficient way of dealing with the problem because it is widely known that attackers will use different IPs and grids.

Cleaning may also be less effective because the rez, scripts, and terraforms by anyone are by default settings in OpenSim core.

The default settings also follow the OARs so you could load an OAR after the cleanup and still become vulnerable. There have been some challenges in dealing with the issue because there are no quick and easy tools except manual methods to find which regions and sims have the default settings turned on.

Traditionally, a way of dealing with the problem was to use the World-Parcel Details or Control-R in Firestorm viewer to return objects from the attacker and also uncheck the default settings for Edit Terrain, Build, and if desired, Run Scripts but the latter causes HUDs to stop working though it also stops pushing and particle spam. However, most grid owners do not appear to know this.

DreamGrid version 5, which was released mid-last month, deals with this problem by disabling the default OpenSim core settings for rez, scripts, and terraforms by commenting out a line of code that controls the settings in Opensim/framework/landData/cs, said Fred Beckhusen, CEO of Microstrategy Technologies Ltd, the company which owns and runs DreamGrid and Outworldz.

“It allows DreamGrid owners to see all region parcels that have these settings enabled,” he told Hypergrid Business. “The image below shows that the column labeled ‘Parcels Settings’ in Region “Welcome” that parcel ‘Your Parcel’ has Build and Land editing for anyone.”

DreamGrid lets users create virtual worlds and small grids on their home computers.

ZetaWorlds grid also uses automatic methods to detect and deter griefing when it happens. The tools are effective in keeping out griefers despite the grid still having a few regions left with open permissions, said Zetamex CEO

“In the end it comes down to grid operators knowing the platform well enough to know what they need to check and where holes might be,” he told Hypergrid Business. “With a bit of administration and regular checking you can maintain a decent service quality and avoid most pitfalls of OpenSim as a software and people as troublemakers.”

Most grid owners are reluctant to consult about how to secure their grids, he said.