Is SL a Flat World or a Round World?

I read a thread about the size of sl but here is a question for all to ponder - is SL a flat world or a round world? I imagine it a bit like Riverworld in the Jose Philip Farmer series of novel, a type of endless round world. Or are we a 3D Flat World? Well?

I'm pretty sure it's a hexagon

If you can't fly around it, it must be flat. I've never tried though.

Actually I think it's neither. It is dimensionless, like a dream.

A serious question - can it actually be dimensionless? Is the world in "Tron" dimensionless? Please remember I haven't got a clue about math. But look up at the stars so I understand something about space and size.

Shhh! People lost their heads for once suggesting the world was round.

A few random thoughts:

SL is flat. When viewed from a low altitude, it appears flat. There is no visible curvature.

Having said that, I will concede that I could be wrong. It is not possible to realistically see the "horizon" in SL at ground level or from the air because our maximum draw distance is 512 meters, or about .3 miles. .3 miles isn't very far, and even if there is a horizon present, its too far away for anyone to see. Also, if a horizon was visible at .3 miles, SL would have to exist on a very small sphere, not even big enough to be considered a dwarf planet.

I have also noticed that in the regular, non-Windlight client, during sunrise, you can see "corners" in the sky. One could assume that "corners" are proof that SL isn't a round world, but is actually a flat, cube based world.

A cube world. Yes I can see that is possible. I own a sculptural representation of sl that depicts it as square. But there has to be a surface, right? Coz we have a map. And we have hills and valleys.

It's a plane. We all live in Flatland.

It's rounded. By that I mean it's not completely round and certainly is not flat.......more like a bowl with ever steepening sides. Think about it. We only have 512 meters draw distance........that's because the sides block the horizon with the upward curvature of the bowl shaped metaverse we all live in.

That also explains why we slip backwards every time we get close to the edges. Like cockroaches in a fish bowl.

Is there any indication that it is anything but flat, with the regions placed like squares on a giant chessboard?

Pick any compass direction then and fly straight and true, never veering. If you eventually come back to your starting point, SL is curved.

On Help Island/Orientation Island the SL world is shown as a sphere (in the map room thingy place). That said, SL is described as "your world, your imagination" - so it can be anything you want it to be! It could just be a pile of green sludge, a dream (or a nightmare), or a cube shaped social experiment.

I personally believe that SL exists in two places.....

1. As a truly massive array of micro-transistor devices with varying levels of potential that operate in concert according to logical rules.
2. As an even bigger array of potential voltages and chemical reactions in the brains of the people who use SL, broadly operating to illogical rules.

~Snowman~

It's flat, like Discworld. You can't see the four elephants and Great A'Tuin, but they're there.

...except they are hippopotamuses.

Exactly!

Neither; It's really kind of bumpy and uneven.

The land masses of SL, as stated in the size thread, amount to less than the area of New York, while the grid area including the oceans between is about the size of a large county. So curvature would be very, very slight across the grid anyway, assuming the imaginary SL 'planet' were the size of Earth.

It's not a world.

It's system of non-round planets and moons separated by a void.

The grid is flat and at the centre of the Sluniverse. The Sun, Moon, and all other heavenly objects orbit the almighty flat grid. It's heresy to suggest otherwise! You have been warned: Do not sail too close to the edge!

I always thought it would be pretty cool if sims did 'wrap around' at the edges of the continents, with each continent being a new 'planetary body'.

I read somewhere that it was a flat two dimensional grid but danged if I can remember where I read that. The world grid though is represented with two dimensions, I don't know if it is a finite size or not but the amount of it that is available for land to be placed is finite.

On the global grid, there is a 0,0 but it's way off to the south west. The land store shows the 'available' grid from 601,901 to 1099,1239 and the first three continents are inside that area. The new continents are outside that to the east, and there are some sims outside it to the north.

I read somewhere that the Da Boom region is at 1000,1000 and that this is the middle of SL, which would make the overall size 2000 x 2000 which is only 512kms by 512kms, and that would be about 'country-sized' I think.

They could always add more 'grids' though...

-Atashi

Well, since the light from the sun is cast uniformly everywhere it's not over-ridden, it must be flat?

And yes, the sun orbits the world, or moves faster at night, while the moon does the reverse, always being directly opposite: http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=LlGetSunDirection

Then again, maybe it's all just fabricated? Maybe the rays of the sun aren't true, but everything is shaded as if it's lit? Maybe the sun and moon are really drawn up above and, and, maybe they could even be changed to look like different things for holidays?

(Hmm, I wonder if Windlight will do away with that?)

"There" is a globe, Second Life is flat. Variety is good.

SL is a hypercube.

Actually, I have no idea what a hypercube is; it just sounds cool.

Is it a quantity constant in the case considered but varying in different cases?

I like to think of it as a huge holodeck on a even 'huger' spaceship traveling at warp speeds. At times, the lights flicker (going through a wormhole?) and I'm logged off - back to reality. So I guess it all depends on what I program my holodeck to be for me. At the moment, it's flat on my screen and round in my head...