Is Second Life the biggest virtual world geographically?

[Gopi Passiflora]

Not counting space simulator games such as Dual Universe and No Man's Sky which span thousands of kilometers (or even light-years) I think Second Life is the biggest virtual world compared to open world games like Grand Theft Auto V and The Crew 2. There's so much real estate in Second Life to live and explore in!

[Prokofy Neva]

I believe it has to be. Unless you're going to start defining amazon.com as a virtual world or something. Philip Linden used to say there were X petabytes, which were more than terrabytes I believe? And that it was the largest. Think of it, some 28,000 servers, many are 65,536. To be sure, Sinespace may be catching up.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

My man used to play a MMO called Rappelz and a "GM" told him the game's world only used like 10% of it's grid. The GM took him to some unused areas which were bare or had test stuff. This was very long ago. One common thing both that game and SL has is lag!

Edited May 28, 2021 by Kimmi Zehetbauer
Chasing the bears.

[animats]

27 minutes ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

Not counting space simulator games such as Dual Universe

Dual Universe is planet-scale huge, but it may not hold up as people build more stuff on the planets.

There's a fixed monthly charge. You can build but you have to mine raw materials first. They let you script, so you can automate things. You can take over land, but may have to defend it. The designers thought that would keep people from paving over the planets.

Luca Grabacr, who makes those great SL videos, went over there, and started mining. After three months she had worked up to "Fur Admiral Luca", with three full-scale carriers and their smaller spacecraft, a base, a temple, and automated factory operations. Then Dual Universe changed the rules so that no one person could build that much. Luca's comments on that:  https://youtu.be/qfIrKJkP0bc

More recent news is about the CEO being kicked upstairs to a board seat, and game reviews along the lines of "Is DU a dead game?"

 

 

[stlshayne]

I was actually wondering what the "size" of SL was the other day, and I found this article from 2015 that said that - at the time - SL's grid covered 1640.3 square kilometers, which would have made it larger than the US state of Rhode Island at the time. I have to imagine it's even bigger now, especially with the new continent they've added. 

[Rowan Amore]

Second Life Main Grid size as of 23 May 2021

Ownership	Total	General	Moderate	Adult	Offline	Total Area (km�)
Total	26843	2633	16623	7581	6	1759.18
Linden Owned	8622	1568	6647	407	0	565.05
Private Estates	18221	1065	9976	7174	6	1194.13

[Rowan Amore]

http://gridsurvey.com/

[WereBeast Alpha]

I think Second Life is the biggest virtual world at least I know it has more people than what IMVU has in general of population. I know a lot of people have left IMVU and come to Second Life or vice versa just to see how both vary in networking. To be honest I think it is one of the biggest top social worlds out there for PC or Mac users. 

[Ceka Cianci]

I remember years ago someone saying, if you laid SL out into the real world it would be the size of Manhattan NY..

I think that was before it had it's big boom..

It was years ago, so I'm just going from memory, which a cup of coffee from a waffle house might get you farther.

hehehe

[Sid Nagy]

According to the info Rowan provided Sl is about 3.500 km2,
So yeah, still almost as big as Rhode Island.

RI = 4005 km2 (water and land) land only is 2700 km2

Edited May 28, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Bree Giffen]

I just saw a video about this recently! There are bigger virtual worlds...

 

[Amanda Crisp]

SL is huge, but driving sim-to-sim is STILL the struggle…….

If Sl is the biggest or not….at my rate I’ll never know……

 

 

[Sid Nagy]

The secret magic word if you want to travel fast in SL is............teleport.

Edited May 28, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Amanda Crisp]

29 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The secret magic word if you want to travel fast in SL is............teleport.

But that way I miss meeting people 🙂

Especially the ones asking, “why is your car  stuck through the wall and lodged in my bed?”

[ChinRey]

The hypergrid is bigger, probably more than ten times the size of SL.

The nominal area of a virtual world is meaningless in itself though. There are at least three other factors we have to consider.

The first is scale. Everything in both SL and hypergrid tend to be oversized. So is IMVU come to think of it. That means the effective area is much smaller.

The second is continuity. Sims that aren't directly or indirectly connected aren't really parts of the same virtual world. You can assign them to different adresses and make a map that show them as being part of the same grid but that's just semantics. They are still separate "pocket realities" and transferring from one to the other is really no different from logging off from one virtual reality and on to another.

Finally there variety. Make a simple sim and upload 4,294,967,296 copies of it to a grid. Yes, technically that would make a virtual world more than half the size of RL earth but what's the point? Who cares?

Edited May 29, 2021 by ChinRey
Typo

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

10 hours ago, animats said:

and game reviews along the lines of "Is DU a dead game?"

I've heard that before, somewhere...

[Arielle Popstar]

29 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

The hypergrid is bigger, probably more than ten times the size of SL.

The nominal area of a virtual world is meaningless in itself though. There are at least three other factors we have to consider.

The first is scale. Everything in both SL and hypergrid tend to be oversized. So is IMVU come to think of it. That means the effective area is much smaller.

The second is continuity. Sims that aren't directly or indirectly connected aren't really parts of the same virtual world. You can assign them to different adresses and make a map that show them as being part of the same grid but that's just semantics. They are still separate "pocket realities" and transferring from one to the other is really no different from logging off from one virtual reality and on to another.

Finally there variety. Make a simple sim and upload 4,294,967,296 copies of it to a grid. Yex, technically that would make a virtual world more than half the size of RL earth but what's the point? Who cares?

As of May 15, OpenSim’s public grids were reporting the equivalent of 101,367 regions in land area. That does not include private grids or the DreamGrid installs. In some sense not really bigger but layered parallel universes separated by their IP addresses but still accessible to each other.

[ChinRey]

38 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

As of May 15, OpenSim’s public grids were reporting the equivalent of 101,367 regions in land area.

Oh. It's shrunk a bit since the last numbers I saw then.

 

39 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

In some sense not really bigger but layered parallel universes separated by their IP addresses but still accessible to each other.

Yes but that's not really fundamentally different from how SL is organised. All regions are nominally on the same grid here of course but that's just a technicality and doesn't make much difference from a practical point of view.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

A quick calculation of total active SL regions (26,843) vs region sizes gives a total usable contiguous surface area of 1,759.182 square kilometres, or 1,093.105 square miles.

For comparison, the map in Grand Theft Auto 5 is 127 square kilometres, or 49 square miles. Which means SL's usable surface area is 13 times the size of the GTA 5 map.

In the real world, SL would cover an area only slightly larger than West Falkland (1,749 square km) in the Falkland Islands.

Edited May 28, 2021 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Oh. It's shrunk a bit since the last numbers I saw then.

Oh, according to the latest from HGB it was a first ever to go above 100k. Not that I particularly agree with how the numbers are counted but a milestone nonetheless.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I can't help feeling acreage alone is meaningless, surely the content is a meaningful meaningful measure of the world? Anybody with a mind to replicate some film I vaguely remember sleeping through years ago about a race to get a mile of secondhand cars across a desert to a sales lot could just put up a million pinhead islands and demand they have the prize.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 5/28/2021 at 10:14 AM, ChinRey said:

The hypergrid is bigger, probably more than ten times the size of SL.

The nominal area of a virtual world is meaningless in itself though. There are at least three other factors we have to consider.

The first is scale. Everything in both SL and hypergrid tend to be oversized. So is IMVU come to think of it. That means the effective area is much smaller.

The second is continuity. Sims that aren't directly or indirectly connected aren't really parts of the same virtual world. You can assign them to different adresses and make a map that show them as being part of the same grid but that's just semantics. They are still separate "pocket realities" and transferring from one to the other is really no different from logging off from one virtual reality and on to another.

Finally there variety. Make a simple sim and upload 4,294,967,296 copies of it to a grid. Yes, technically that would make a virtual world more than half the size of RL earth but what's the point? Who cares?

But the hypergrid isn't a contiguous layout.

If you are teleporting or logging in to another grid as you go along, even if they are part of the same system, that doesn't count.

I have trouble getting people to understand this, but my hospital chart, my work Slack, some teledoc, an email, these are all part of a virtual world. They are the Metaverse. Not a very fun one -- one that breaks down and is stupid and completely forgettable. No dragons or 3D wonders. But still meta, still verse, still virtual.

So the 4..etc uploads already happened, and then some.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 5/28/2021 at 12:14 PM, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

A quick calculation of total active SL regions (26,843) vs region sizes gives a total usable contiguous surface area of 1,759.182 square kilometres, or 1,093.105 square miles.

For comparison, the map in Grand Theft Auto 5 is 127 square kilometres, or 49 square miles. Which means SL's usable surface area is 13 times the size of the GTA 5 map.

In the real world, SL would cover an area only slightly larger than West Falkland (1,749 square km) in the Falkland Islands.

Thank you. Those are the numbers.

PS note that Mainland is 8000+ now due to Bellisseria, which the Lindens say isn't Mainland and their fans angrily defend this marketing proposition. "Not Mainland," as Desmond knows, is a powerful advertising draw.

But it is Mainland. It is reachable by sea if not by land. It is part of a contiguous continental system.

 

[Sid Nagy]

Who cares if Bellisseria is mainland or not?
And who decides in the end if that is the case or not, customers or the company?
It has other rules, different pricing, no land sales. I can't buy as much as I want or do with it whatever I like. So is it really mainland? Doubtful.

Anyway, IMHO Belliseria is nicer and more of a community than the traditional mainland, less eyesores, no partly ridiculous land prices.
And that is what counts for me.

Edited May 29, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Persephone Emerald]

All I know is trying to collect, open and dispose of all the free gifts in SL is like trying to view all the pages of the Internet.