Noob Geography 101: Continents

I've been scrolling through the metaverse at the fast and static world map at mappanovus.com Mostly I want to find out if there are other viable mainland continents for land purchase. Meanwhile:

a. What is the name of the default mainland continent? (e.g. Ahern)

b. In terms of living viability, what's the status of Northern Continent, Southern Continent, and Intercontinent?

c. I see thousands of squares. They could be separate (islands) or contiguous (theme or SIM such as AoA and Corsica), or small or large continents. Is each square always the same as a region or ~62000 sqm??

d. Is each region run by one server? If there's 29,000 islands, does that mean SL is running 29,000 servers?? Plus servers for continents, sub-continents, etc. ??

Linden Lab Mainland Continents - 15th July 2009
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielvoyager/3733558246/in/set-72157612023608587/

Heterocera Atoll, Jeogeot, Satori, Nautilus, Corsica, Gaeta, and Zindra - 15th July 2009
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielvoyager/3732758225/in/set-72157612023608587/

Regions: A named 256m x 256m (65,536 m²) area hosted by a single simulator process (sim)
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sim
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Region

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 28, 902
23358 private estates & 5544 Linden owned
/354/22/296275/18.html#post2536582

I hope this helps!

Sansara. The other continents are Heterocera Atoll, Jeogeot, Satori, Nautilus, Corsica, Gaeta, and Zindra.



All are equally "viable," but I believe that Sansara and Heterocera Atoll (the oldest two continents) remain the most established and popular. I'm also biased.



Yes



Correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that each full sim is a server, and each homestead is a 1/4 server?

mmm, lets assume that of the 28902 regions each gets 295usd tier a month. thats a total of ...$8,526,090.00 a month.

multiply that times 12 and its ... $102,313,080.00 per year. Of course theres power equipment,legal services and position salaries but, all in all its a sweet income maker no doubt. It's not a mega corp. but still nothing to sneeze at.

if im wrong in my numbers please correct me if its major. (i know some regions are $195 some are opens Spaces etc, but this is just ball park idea of LLs income, and we havent even figured in all the extras yet, income from island sales etc.)

There is information about SL servers here I think at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

Worth checking out!

Kurt,

The basic unit of SL virtual land (and water too, I use "land" in an inclusive sense) is the region, or simulator, or sim, or grid square. Each one has a name (e.g., Ahern).

Those regions run by Linden Lab directly are mostly glommed together into "continents" and are referred to as "the mainland". To own mainland, you must have a Premium membership. You can buy a parcel of mainland from another resident, or from LL at auction. Once purchased, you owe LL a monthly "tier" payment, which varies by steps depending on how much land you own. You get a break on tier with your Premium membership...the first 512 square meters is free of monthly charges.

Mainland has no zoning restrictions or covenants, except for its maturity rating (PG or Mature in most places, Adult on the newly-opened Zindra continent). Terraforming is generally limited to +/- 4 meters from the original elevation set by LL.

Mainland makes up about 15 - 20% of the land area in SL. The rest consists of private estates.

A private estate is a region (or multiple regions) that someone has purchased from LL. The purchase cost is $1,000 US, and the monthly service fee is $295 US. Plus VAT, if that applies to you.

Estates have broader limits on terraforming, and the owner has more tools at her disposal to monitor performance and manage her estate.

Many estate owners divide up their regions into smaller parcels and rent them out to other residents. This may be portrayed as a "sale", with an up-front purchase cost. However, you are really renting from the estate owner...and are subject to the terms of the covenant (if any). You are also subject to the whims of the estate owner, and may be left homeless should they suddenly leave SL, or if they should simply decide they don't like you. So pick a reputable owner.

[EDIT: You can rent a parcel on the mainland from another resident as well. Again, no Premium membership is required to simply rent.]

You do not need a Premium membership to either buy an entire region from LL, or to rent a parcel on a private estate owned by someone else.

Because of the ability to teleport, the actual physical location of a region has less significance than in the real world, and so the names of the continents have taken on secondary importance. With some of them, there is even ongoing debate on what the name IS. [EDIT: See Osprey's post below this one for an example of that. ]

You can find land for sale using Search, or opening the Map and checking "Show: For Sale". Available parcels will appear in yellow.

I don't accept that name for the old mainland. There's only one way it can be singled out as the starting point of the SL world, and that's to keep it nameless.

each full sim has a dedicated CPU. There could easily be up to 8 sims or more on a server depending on the hardware involved.

LL collects no tier on abandoned land or the first 512M parcel one owns, but as far as I know, no one knows how much land that accounts for.

Chicken feed.
100M a year gross? If that covers the hardware costs alone I would be amazed.

This thread announces the latest NCI maps of SL:

/327/49/330672/1.html

They may help you get a feel for the layout of the continents.

Class 5 servers have a Quad Core CPU. Each full sim is run on a single core, so there are 4 full sims per server.
Homesteads and Openspaces were last stated publicly that they ran 4 per core, so that of course would be 16 per server.

1 user agrees emphatically.

No one called it Sansara until after the Atoll continent was added.

Before that it was simply known as "the World"

For me, it'll always be "the Old Continent", and as almost all the land I've owned has been there, "Home".

It was 1 processor core running 1 simulator process, which runs 1 full map region. Most of the servers last I heard were Dual-core dual processor Opteron boxes, which means 4 cores per server box, and therefore 4 map regions per server.

Homesteads and Openspaces are crammed in more than one per core.

A recent map is posted here:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/w/images/7/70/World_Map_18Aug09.jpg
https://wiki.secondlife.com/w/images/7/70/World_Map_18Aug09.jpg

And the live map is here:

http://slurl.com/
http://slurl.com/

What's in a name? That which we call "The Old Continent" by any other name would smell as sweet. There have been many names for the lands that we call home. Some places have changed names numerous times in just the past few years. Some names predate the Lindens' Grid and some places will undoubtedly change names again as the years go by. The Lindens will name a place when it's first gridded and then, sometimes, the residents come to know it by a wholly different name (sometimes of their own making). I don't mind referring to the first "continent" as Sansara if only for clarity's sake. The NCI maps are so well distributed now that it becomes a handy form of shorthand and mutual point of reference to refer to it as such. I was here before that name became associated with the land where the Forest of Kahruvel is located, when it was simply "The Mainland (and then the Northern Continent for a spell when "The Southern Continent" first appeared (which became known as Jeogeot), and then "The Old Mainland" when the more northern continent, the Heterocera Atoll, appeared.)

My grandpa always has a good chuckle when he hears folks refer to these places as "continents." He says that the space represented by the gridded Mainland is nothing more than a few islands of a small archipelago in an isolated corner of this world. That's all the Lindens have been able to grid so far. There are much larger land masses out in the Void that us regular folks don't even know about yet. "Wonders and dangers alike," he says.

I bet that Magellan Linden is trekking through some far off pristine tahra right now, cursing at the thought of it going up on the Lindens' auctions and being overrun with activity soon after. I sent him an IM about a week ago and haven't heard back. Either he's out-of-range or he doesn't want to be bothered.

I'm pretty sure the Atoll came before what we used to call the Southern or Korean continent.

You may be right. I'm not the sharpest prim in the pack.

p.s. I stand corrected! Here is the old thread that documents an expedition I was involved with to the Southern Continent, that was revealed later to be a much larger landmass now known as Jeogeot:

/108/6d/80326/1.html

And here are a few links to earlier threads (approx. one year or so earlier) that talk about the newly gridded Atoll to the north:

/3/b0/35433/1.html
/120/91/39565/1.html
/120/a4/39769/1.html

Interesting because the discovery started with some small islands that increased the size of Sansara (where Mount G'al is located in Mahulu) and then lead to the channel that eventually connected to the Atoll where the village on stilts and the Moth Temple (Iris region) are.

That's pretty sad, given the sloppy collision envelope in SL that makes even the sharpest prim have the bluntest of edges.

I've been sad, sloppy and blunt. But never all at the same time!

You need to turn on flexi, that's where you are going wrong

I've always referred to it as "Old Mainland".
It's full of dramatic terraforming and great Linden infrastructure builds - the sort of thing that the later continent terraformers and Moles never equalled. I suppose a combination of a more consumerist 'flat green' and the human resources required for the builds made the newer continents very bland by comparison.
I get a very strong sense of 'place' in the Old Mainland.


I started on Skegemog Sim roadside and after a flirtation with the Korean continent and Corsica, all the land is now in Sanswotzit and Hetwotzit, beside Linden water, road and rail. - Well all apart from the Zindra-Upon-Sea place.