Looking for Old--But Not Too Old--SL Maps

I'm putting together a display of historical Second Life maps at the new NCI in Nova Civis Caledon. I've discovered I've got a huge date gap in maps I've been able to find. I've got nothing between January 2005 and June 2006. If anyone can help me fill out that gap--or has other intersting historic maps of SL to share, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

BTW--if you want to send me a texture, feel free to drop it on me in world, or email it to [email]jch@carlhenderson.net[/email]

Have you tried www.slmaps.com?

Incredibly slow loading but they seem to have 2005 in there.

This is from mid-April 2006 (I know when Dyne made it):

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f329/Torley_Linden/second-map-20-preview.jpg

I could piece together a massive, 4000x3000-ish pixel version of it if necessary (it graces the upper floor of the Academy in Caledon Highlands, now run by NCI).

Come to think of it I have a 29 Sept 2005 map somewhere - I'd made a globe out of it. I'll pass it along if I can find it...

Just tried that. It was useful for some older maps, but I crashed everytime I tried to load maps by date. Thanks, though.

I could really use that. It would fill in a missing hole quite nicely. I downloaded the Dyne map you mentioned, too. Thanks!

Yadni's Junk yard has a nice collection of old Second Life maps for free.

I have the Yadni's maps. They are mostly from the beta period. What I'm looking for are maps from 2005 and early 2006. I've searched in SL, and on the web with the major image search engines and have only found one, a January 2005 map. The next map I have is one I made for the 3rd Birthday party event in June 2006. I've got an 18 month gap where SL experienced rapid growth I'd like to fill, if possible.

Carl, I've emailed the 13mb original Dyne Talamasca map in .jpg format - I have an even higher resolution, lossless (I think) 44mb version of it but the differences are minimal.

Also - I've located a 1024 x 1024 texture of the complete SL grid as it was known on 29 Sept 2005. No annotations, and made from a composite of all visible sims at the time. I was desperate to find the sourcefiles; they may still be on that computer.

But that computer is like a dying world orbiting a sun in the throes of death - beautiful and full of history, but I've got about 2-3 minutes before I've got to get out of there before the Radeon 9800 with the crisped hole where it's fan was melts down *again*. As it just did. So eventually I'll fix that machine, and if I can I'll get the file off of it and onto a USB stick - and if I'm really lucky, find and pull the sourcefile map for it.

In September 05, one of the biggest themed areas was a 4 or 5 sim 'Gor' continent with names like "Glorious Ar" (I'd never been there but it figured prominently).

Anshe's Dreamland was exploding outward with tentacles, Azure Islands and the Alliez areas were far smaller harbingers of things to come.

Neualtenburg was a private sim in its own right, prior to the Troubles - Nautilus, Corisca and that other continent over there simply did not exist. "The Mainland" was an entirely contiguous area.

If you got a sim back then, you would be placed by the Company in the far West, roughly in order of purchase on what was then the edge of the Western Sea. Of course, if you wanted to, you could stealth your sim entirely, and *poof* - gone. Just gone. Nobody could see it on the map (after an update), or see you - it was just... Not There, even though it was there.

This was a solid year before the 'big boom' - if anyone mentioned the grid would have 10 million members within a few seasons everyone would have said you were nuts.

A young Desmond, desperate to somehow make his 25 USD/mo tier on his newly acquired 4096m in the PG Alice sim was busily making things. As best he knew how. One of these things would happen to be an antique globe of the entire grid as it was on 29 September 05 (no longer offered - it was a bit of a lag monster).

Little did he realise he'd pay tier for almost 2 million meters of land just two years later.

At the time, mainland telehubs were in full force, and Alice was a good few sims flight away from the nearest hub - you didn't go out there unless you really meant to.

I remember making the rounds, and putting my simple West Trade ad into all the telehub ad consoles (about twenty of them) every couple of weeks - it was free!

I was agonising over the decision to get more PG land in Alice - I was wavering. $L 3 per meter - that's a fair bit of cash, regardless of how nice the land is! Eventually, about a month later, I saved up and got it. Gotta spend some good money to make some, I figured...

Carl - I'm not sure if these things will help, but I thought I'd mention it just in case. I think the renders on my web site for my old Cartifex project date from 2005:

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/Cartifex.htm

They're not labeled and it's only the mainland, but maybe they'd be interesting. Also, as far as I can tell I made my Grid Chart app available around Sep/Oct 2005.

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/GridChart/

If you were to download this app and get it working, you would have an interactive 2d map of the mainland sims with terrain data. Here's an example of the kind of map you can make with it:

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/GridChart/pics/GridChartMap1.jpg

Partial good news: this is the state of the grid from EXACTLY 29 Sept 2005, approximately 6pm SLT.

The bad news is that I can't find the sourcefiles I used to piece it together. It was intentionally smoothed a bit for a 'globe' look; I made sure that the 'shadowy squares effect' of shallow-water sims was eliminated to get rid of the vaguely 'blocky 8 bit graphic' look of the overall worldmap. Remember, this was for a globe where detail was less important than the whole scope of things.

This map was made 4 months prior to Caledon existing - no Otherland, no... a lot of things. Scary in a way. There's only about 1/3 of Heterocetera and about 1/2 of Sansara too.

http://westtrade.250free.com/29sept2005-1024x1024lowres.jpg

Good news - originals for 29 Sept 2005 have been found; raw data was actually from 1:00 AM not 6 PM - I thought I had done it in the evening, but apparently I'd collected data from the early morning and put it together later.

Perhaps Carl will post the map here if he likes, but honestly it looks like the prior one I'd mentioned but with far greater clarity. Map is now part of the public domain as far as I am concerned.

A map of Internet Address Space - the universe!

http://www.isi.edu/ant/address/

Look familiar?