Tyche Shepherd

Currently there are 29411 Main Grid Regions , 23806 Private Estates and 5605 Linden owned, These are scattered across the grid covering a box 464.6km by 476.4km which comes to 221361.9 sqkm, an area slightly smaller than Laos (236800sqkm) and a bit bigger than Guyana (214969sqkm) which are the 83rd and 84th largest countries.

Of course a lot of this area is unused and actual usable area on the grid is 1927.47sqkm (less than 1% of box)

So how big is 1927.47 sqkm ?

Well if Second Life was a country it would be 178th largest coming between Mauritius (2050sqkm) and The Faroe Islands (1393sqkm)

Private Estates (1560.15sqkm) are about 12 regions more than Cape Verde (1557sqkm) whilst Linden Mainland (367.32sqkm) neatly slots in between St Vincent and the Grenadines (389sqkm) and The US Virgin Islands (347sqkm)

If Second Life it was a city it would be the 31st largest, beaten by San Paulo at 1968sqkm but pushing Baltimore (1768sqkm) down to 32nd.Though San Paulo clearly has much better servers as their current Residents in world figure is 19.8 million and I understand there is little lag.

Compared with RL Islands, its small, out of the rankings but slightly smaller than Kuiu Island in Alaska (1962sqkm) but bigger than Maui in Hawaii (1888sqkm)

You'd need a lake the size of of the Ukrainian Kakhovka Reservoir (2155sqkm) to flood all the regions.

If you put all the regions end to end they would stretch for 7529km which is exactly the same distance from Canberra,Australia to Beijing China, though with over 29000 sim crossings to negotiate it would take you over a week to travel using the fastest jet.


List of countries and outlying territories by total area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
City Mayors: Largest cities in the world by land area (1 to 125)
List of islands by area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kakhovka Reservoir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


EDIT: Oh and I forgot to say what was the stimulus for this post - In a recent press release Linden Lab claimed that the nearly 2 billion sqm of land (i.e. 1927 sqkm) was roughly the size of the State of Rhode Island - Well it's not - Rhode Island is over twice this size at 4002sqkm

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Conifer Dada

I think I worked out that if you added together the land area of the mainland continents, they came to something like one third the size of the county of Dorset in southern England. I think a bit more land has been added since then.

What I wonder is how big will Second Life get? I can't see it getting much bigger in the forseeable future, unless they open up more and more of the 'dead' ocean non-sims so we can sail/swim/fly over them.

It will be interesting to know how big some of the future 'behind the firewall' grids become, and what sort of organisations or communities run them.

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Couldbe Yue

just something to throw into your mix..

I rediscovered this little information lode yesterday. NINJALAND » Stats Unfortunately it stops in June but it's been very revealing as I dip in and out doing some pattern recognition and data analysis..

for your purposes though this page may be interesting (or not) NINJALAND » Stats

I don't think your overall stats cover those hidden private estates. These figures (I assume) do. Even with the increase I doubt the total mass is the size they claim.

it's back to the old joke I suppose..
Q How do you know when a marketer is lying?
A Their lips are moving..

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Tyche Shepherd

Mainland is only about 1/7th of Dorset (2653sqkm) , it's more like an Isle of Wight (384sqkm) with the Needles trimmed off


Total Second Life is more like Warwickshire (1975sqkm) (With Zindra being Lemington Spa )


In general you are right - I cover visible Main Grid Regions . There are to my knowledge c220 Teen Grid Regions and c500 Landstore Pool regions I don't survey* as well as any top secret private estates , However my surveyed figures for Private Estates has always been in line with LL's published figures(when they did publish) which is what Elanthius uses for his Ninjaland charts, any discrepancies are more a factor of time of surveys (I tend to survey around 5or 6pm GMT - they report the previous midnight SLT figure) and certainly not 3000 regions difference as those June 2009 figures seem to indicate

The June 2009 reported figures are now generally thought to be an error on LL's part it's discussed here Second Life private simulator data, December 2006 to May 2009 - Massively


EDIT: Just to add I don't really run a Survey - I run a Census as my figures are based on the complete population of visible Main Grid regions

Couldbe Yue

hmmm that jump certainly was interesting. She was right about the zindra sims being counted as estates as that looks to be the way that LL avoided hitting us for tier for that month or so. Even a month ago I think some people were saying that their zindra plot was still showing estate.

I just assumed the june jump was the homestead offer they had. I seem to remember your stats showing a significant jump around that time.

lies, damn lies and statistics

Lewis Luminos

I remember when I first joined SL, it was said that the grid was the size of Luxembourg, which is 2500 sq km approximately. Does this mean that the grid has shrunk, or was that first estimate incorrect?

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Tyche Shepherd

The current Main Grid has shrunk from it's all time high back in October last year. My last survey before the Openspace price rise announcement saw a peak of 31687 regions in total - which is 2076.6sqkm so still only 80% of a Luxembourg .

Aisuru Rieko

Seems bigger when you're in it!

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Archer Braun

That's what SHE said...*rimshot*

paglialite

Surely you should add in the total footprint of all the skyboxes?

Ann Otoole

As big as the boil on rezzable's odalesque's butt?

Ann Otoole

Actually I use "sky sims" On ground level I can have one sim surround mountain range, 1000 meters up a different one, 2000 meters a third, 3000 meters a fourth, 4000 meters a 5th. Each level would look just like a sim only bigger and better. Just no windlight water except on ground level (which renders anywhere in sim at all altitudes and uses ktris whether you can see it or not)

So using the miracle of "large prims", a new sim can be created using just a few prims. Each level can look completely different. Only problem is you can't really rent things out like that because there is no vertical parceling or prim allocation division. If there was you could get 5 sims of land area to one sim easy.

Lalo Telling

Bumping this back up to ask a potentially silly question:

Is there any easy way to estimate the edge-to-edge dimensions of the Grid as whole, as displayed on the Map?

(I'm more interested in east-west overall length, as if the Map were a projection of a spherical surface and its width defined the diameter.)

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Tyche Shepherd

Your answer is in my first paragraph in the OP

If this 476.4km was the circumference of a sphere then SL would be about the same size as Amalthea, the 3rd moon of Jupiter (which is really very mishaped)

Lalo Telling

~ Thank you, Tyche ~

(wish I'd read that OP a little more carefully...) *facepaws*

Nibb Tardis

Actually, using your numbers, I come up with:
(29411 + 23806 + 5605) x 65536 sqm = 3276750000 sqm = 3276.75 sqkm

But you can't use this number as a comparison, because SL meters are smaller that RL meters.

SL avatars are much taller than the average 1.70m person in RL. Look at a 1m long object in RL and compare with a 1x1x1 cube in SL, you'll clearly see the difference. My house in RL is on a 500sqm parcel in RL, and it looks much bigger that a 512sqm parcel in SL. Try rezzing a cube the size of a standard European bed (140x180cm) or a standard door (204x73cm), and you'll see. You couldn't live in a 100sqm house in SL or have a 3x4m bedroom in SL, whereas those are both common in RL.

Because of this, 1m in SL is closer to 0.75m in RL.
A sim is equivalent to 256x256m in SL = 192x192m in RL = 36864sqm

(29411 + 23806 + 5605) x 36864 sqm = 2168451072 sqm = 2168.45 sqkm

Tyche Shepherd

Well your figures are very wrong - Firstly (29411+23806+5605) x 65536=3854.49sqkm not 3276.75sqkm . Secondly there are were a total of 29411 regions at the time of the OP (of which 23806 were private estates and 5605 were Linden owned) - which comes to 1927.47sqkm as I said.

All official documentation says a SL metre is the same as a real life one - LL use this as a conversion to square miles in all their published press releases etc, so until I hear otherwise I'll just have to assume most people in SL are much taller than in RL - Not that the metre is any different .

Red Popstar

What I'd really like to know is how many servers does it all run on. But that's a trade secret we may never know. Or is it one server per sim?

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Red Popstar

Tyche Shepherd

5900 servers - according to Lil Linden (SL Forums) This is just the h/w to host regions and excludes asset server clusters and other central servers.

Ariane

A map I did last January comparing the size of SL, There, WoW, and Oahu. All are on the same scale.



Large version at 14 pixels=1 mile

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katiem1066

How did you capture that image of SL? Did you stitch a bunch of map screenshots together, or is there a better way?

EDIT: nevermind. Of course after I asked the dumb question I found the map portal on SL's website

DanielRavenNest

http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/images/...ap_18Aug09.jpg

That one is more recent, and yes, the SLurl page, screen capture, and photoshop were how I assembled it

Sveid Heidenstam

This is one of the reasons why some feel so strongly about Linden Lab's decision to withhold information about avatar height from residents.

With avatars commonly being between 193 to 270cm, sim area is that much smaller in comparison. This is a significant amount. At the extreme, which is not uncommon, avatars are nearly 1/3 larger than the average real-world human. It is far more common to see avatars this tall, than it is to see an avatar under 180cm.

Applying this to building in SL reveals how it greatly reduces our ability to spare prims for detail, as we waste many prims making structures far larger than their real-world counterparts.

Of course, in that, the camera placement is also partly to blame.

It is astounding that Linden Lab does not see the issue, and continues to allow such easily corrected issues remain as they are.

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Kyllie Wylie

did you include teen grid ?

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Tyche Shepherd

I didn't - Though with only around 220 regions it only adds another 14.42 sqkm . Nor did I include the 500 landstore pool regions - Both of these appear on the web map but not in world on the main grid.