What about the Map???

Whilst I appreciate that new sims pop up all the time, what is the best way to obtain a JPG of the current world map in its entirety that shows the names of sims?

In order to make my grid map, I used the webapi to create a full-browser map without icons, took screenshots of as much as possible, then lined it up in a paint program. I wasn't interested in individual sim names, though, except to do research on the various landmasses. For that, I just set the web map up (once they added the feature) so that double clicking on a sim returned its name.

SLmaps.com has some generated maps with all the sim names. I'm not sure how they got that information ... possibly a script in-world that sends that data to an external server. I suppose if you were clever you could write a script that takes that information and uses it to write labels over a screenshot map with something like image magick or some webserver graphics library, but you'd have to make sure the scaling on the labels matched up the names properly.

Cadroe Murphy had programs that generate a grid map and render the grid in 3D from SL, but I don't know their current status.

Alternately, you could just take a LOT of screenshots of the world map and stitch them together, if that works for you. It wouldn't for me.

Edit: Also, I note that any image with enough resolution to make the sim names legible would have a ridiculously huge resolution. My grid map was multiple thousands of pixels on a side, only included a fraction of the full scale of the grid, and STILL couldn't have done that.

If you want to get a sense of Second Life's explosive growth, look at Dyne's map from 21 April 2006.

Then look at the live grid map.

Wow.