You sorta knew SL was big, but have you SEEN how big?

I noticed a bot visiting one of may parcels.
It collects data for http://gridaverse.com/

So -- how could I resist a look?

Click on the 'Maps' link and then zoom way way out as far as you can.
Drag the map sideways so you can see all of the mainland continents on the Eastern side of the Grid.
Then drag so that you see the expanse of PIs to the (East ----- EDIT: Duh! WEST! WEST!!!).
Drag N and S as well.

That's BIG!

First))

Yes I know completely childish but I've always wanted to do that.

I'll give that a go if you promise that the vastness won't make me want to wear a Tin Foil Hat!

No wonder I rattle in this place it's bloody huge.

Um weird... a number of estates are on non-buildable portions of the grid. For example, go to the SL land store and search for "serena sorrento." It is impossible to purchase any islands in that part of the grid- they have it entirely to themselves. As someone who has had to fight encroachers and start up a second estate area because I was crowded out, this pisses me off a bit.

If I am not mistaken, the "red" area was once open for building but has been reserved by LL until some future set date.

So they did not get any special treatment, they just got there when it was open.

It looks a lot bigger than it is though. Take the Heterocera 'continent'... it's the one shaped like a crater roughly in the centre of the map. Counting up sims around it's edge and allowing a generous 300m of travel for each sim, it's coastline is about 15 miles around. I could hike that in an afternoon. From North to South it's 25 sims, at 255m each giving just under 4 miles. The other continents are bigger, but none is more than twice the size. From the northern-most tip of Heterocera to the Southerly edge of Jeogot (the most southerly 'official' continent) is only about 23 miles.

Not that I'm criticising... just putting it in perspective. All the mainland continents put together are about half the size of the Isle of Man, or for USAnians, around the size of Santa Cruz... the island, not the county.

The grid itself is pretty big, but still not the world we often think it is. It currently contains a whole load of nothing, liberally sprinkled with private estates. I can't remember the recent figures for the total number of sims in SL, but to make something the size of Texas, for example, you'd need 10 MILLION sims.

I've found that travelling about on the roads has made my perception of sim and continent size shrink.

I went driving in a big Arcadia Asylum truck today.
I started in Hooper and drove through 9 sim crossings to pick up a friend in Shelter.
We than drove through about 50 sim crossings to the East.
It's quite surprising how far through the map one can travel in a short time.
The sim crossings were all smooth, so sims flashed by without calling attention to their boundaries.

I haven't done a long journey on the roads like that in a while. There was some spectacular scenery, and I have to say that there were huge stretches without an ad farm to be seen.

Not to hijack the thread, but I find driving tedious at best on mainland roads. I think I'll hop over to Hooper later and try that drive myself.

wow, that map is SO much better than SLURL.com

You can rezz on my parcel beside the bridge at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hooper/52/74/32

Ignore the robots. They are mostly harmless

Yes its hugeous. Something like 23k private islands now. That's a heck of a lot.

To give a sense of scope in real terms, LL owns about two server facilities at this point (in everything but name).

I suspect if you calculated the power draw, you'd end up with enough electricity to power a small third world nation. Or Rhode Island.

I've heard Philip talk about it in the past.. I think they actually do track power consumption at the data centers.. I don't remember what the numbers were, but it's got to be absolutely ridiculous.

Big. I knew it was something like that big but easier to see the full extent than on the in-world map. Do the empty areas around some of the mainland continents indicate that some new mainland islands might appear there in the future?

I also notices one or outlying two single regions way, way away from anything else.

I found the northern and western edges of the blue background, not far from the existing grid, but empty blue seemed to stretch infinitely to the south and east. Is it infinite or is there an edge in each of these directions?

I suspect it's limited by (0,0) to whatever sized variable they use to store sim location.


Since the (0,0) limit is suggestive of an unsigned variable, you're probably looking at a limit of anywhere from 2^32 (32-bit integer) to 2^128 (64-bit long) on X and Y. I haven't checked the LLSD spec on grid linking, but it's most likely an integer.


To offer a rough comparison, the IP protocol that runs the internet right now (IPv4) has a limit of 2^32 in only one direction, and is only *now* running out of address space (with predictions ranging in the next decade for exhaustion).

As for IPv6 (the next standard) -- well, the scope is just insane.


Long story short: there's a whole lot of space left, with a VERY unlikely chance of exhaustion. I'd worry more about the asset servers scaling to meet demand.