SL Map Questions

When I look at the SL map, I see separate dots and clusters of dots – or probably they are squares. Of the individual squares, I see thousands.

(1)What is the area of each dot (square) in meters squared??
(2) I cannot find any wiki or explanation of the SL map/world. I've heard about “mainland” and islands and estates, etc. but I don't know what's what.

What's a good source to understand how the SL world is arranged?

Pull up your map, hold you mouse over it and use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. The Squares are sims -- mainland or private islands. There are something like 5-8 continents of mainland now and you can tell the mainland usually by size. There will be some clusters fo joined islands, but they will still be tiny compared to the joined Mainland masses.

Each sim, whether mainland or island, is 64 sq m of land.

Watch Torley Linden's tutorial about the World Map:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpOYwHT7Xag

is wrong sorry

256 x 256 meter

65536 square meters

Aren't those dots people? Little green dots are people and if you aim carefully you can tp right in front of them or scare them silly by coming up behind them. I enjoy that game.

Oops - was suppose to say 64m sq meters (I think in kb and mb terms a lot).

If you have you map zoomed in enough to tell that the land is divided into squares for sim, then yes the dots are people. However, if you zoom way out on the map, you will see that the islands become dots.

Before I joined there used to be a neat map that could be accesed on web. I wonder what hapened to it. SL should publish an atlas.

http://slurl.com/ ?

(And STILL trying to figure out how to post links here, lol)

Here is your map:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ocraco+Island/18/143/22

Zoom out and you see all sims in SL
you can even see the sims that aren't online yet at the east side of the map. A few hundreds of sims waiting to be acivated from the landstore.
A block of 5 x 50(?) sims

Unless its bots then that spoils it

These links should help you get started:

Map tutorial videos:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map

Glossary of terms:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Glossary
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Glossary

To give you a direct answer of your question, map regions are all 256x256 meters in size horizontally by 4096 meters vertical (the build limit, you can fly higher, but not place objects up there). There are about 29,000 regions in total currently. Each one has to be hosted on a server running copies of the Simulator program (one simulator per region, 4 or more sims per server, 8000 or so servers). Map region is the data, Simulator is the program that runs it, server is the hardware that holds both and talks to you. Often people call regions "Sims", after the program that runs them.

"The Main Grid", whose proper name is Agni (Hindu god of fire), lays out all the map regions on one big map, so that regions that are side by side you can walk or fly or whatever between, and you can look into one to the next.

About 5000 of the regions are directly managed by Linden Lab, Those are referred to as the "Mainland", and are grouped mostly into 7 large continents, and two small ones. The rest are managed by "Estate Owners" who bought them. An estate can be any number of regions - 1 to hundreds. When it's one island thats separated by itself, its also known as a private island.

You cannot travel through the void regions in between actual map regions. There is no server hosting that part of the map, so no way to show you whats there (which is nothing). The only way to reach private islands is by teleport. That's not a great challenge, since most people travel everywhere by teleport anyway.

On the World Map that opens with the map button in the viewer, you can select what things to see: terrain only, or terrain plus buildings, and then markers for people, events, land for sale, etc. Green dots are people (avatars actually, the computer generated representations of a logged in person). When you are zoomed way out and looking at the whole map, the dots are not much use, there are just too many of them, so turn them off.

When you are logged in, the top center of the screen will tell you your current map region (they all have unique names), and the X (east), Y (north), and Z (height) location within the region, in meters.

If you use the Help menu > About Second Life, part of it will say something like:

You are at 256032.5, 262002.9, 21.9 in Cerura located at sim8062.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.37.129:13002)
Second Life Server 1.27.2.129782

The big numbers are your global map location, Cerura is the region name.
sim8062 is the server box hosting the region, and to which your computer is connected with via the internet, followed by its numerical internet address.
1.27.2 is the current version of the server software. 1.23 is the current version of the Viewer software (what you download and run at home).

If you are where you can see more than one map region in the 3D view, you are getting info delivered by more than one server. I don't know the full details, but I *think* you only talk to one server at a time, and the data is just collected on the one you are connected to so it appears to be a seamless 3D environment.

This is an incredibly good post, one that deserves to be in the wiki or elsewhere in the documentation.

The one point I'd disagree with is that the term "private island" frequently gets used without regard to whether it's just one island or a group of regions in an estate. That's especially true within the forums, where we often see questions such as "should I buy on mainland or private island?", and the concern is the ownership, not the geography.

Also, I'm not really sure whether an estate has to be contiguous, or simply refers to a collection of private islands, regardless of location, all belonging to the same Estate Owner.

You can't, because LL has lobotomized the forum software. Read the sticky post about BBcode and GreaseMonkey. Other people will describe a way to do it with img tags.

Personally, I don't bother with either. Just use Firefox with the Linkification add-on and you're all set. It's the simplest solution.

There are also a couple of really nice sets of inworld maps showing the mainland continents. One is made by Carl Metropolitan and is available at NCI. The other is by Yevad Doobie and you can get it from one of the Greenlaners info centres. They're great for planning road trips.

Thank you, I'm actually working on the User's Manual:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Getting_started_with_Second_Life
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Getting_started_with_Second_Life

And I had saved that post text to put in a wiki page someplace

I defer to an estate owner about whether it needs to be continuous or not, and you are right about common useage of the terms.

Update:

This answer is now posted to the wiki:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Map

Not if you submit ARs about the bots... check out the Incident Report page of Second Life lately - traffic bots are being ousted out on a daily basis, but LL need help with this by the look of it. There are still too many traffic bots cluttering the grid up.

If you really only joined Second Life this month WELCOME, and well done on asking such a great question. It seems pretty amazing that there aren't full atlases of SL somewhere.

If you go to Clementina 179,104,51, there are some great World Maps circa 2002... just look how big Second Life has grown in just these 7 years.

As you explore more and more you do get more familiar with the layouts of the world maps, and if you really want a hard copy , I suppose you can screenprint (or take photo inworld with interface on) section by section the World Map.

The Linden Roadways stand out for me on the World Map, and there are often small area maps to be found dotted along these roadways. Suggest you look for an example of this along Route 8, Morestello, Peraut SIMs.

Enjoy your explorations, kurt!

P.S. to earlier post... as Linden Labs remove and add SIMs on a regular basis, you might find the website SL surveyor interesting. It tells you which SIMs are active or removed currently.

Thank you, thank you Daniel for such a detailed and comprehensive response. Thanks to others too. My expectations are exceeded!