Free SL land?

As a formerly frequent second life user, I wanted to have my own piece of virtual land. So I got myself a premium account and bought a piece of 512 sqm. Soon however, those 512 sqm weren’t enough any more, so I bought some more and started paying monthly tier. But the longer I played second life, the more land I needed and at a certain point my tier fee was over 40 dollars a month and I still needed more. So I started looking into owning whole regions. You should know that I’m not in any way rich, those 40 dollars a month were already more than I could spare, so you can understand that the prices of whole regions shocked me. The set up costs are insanely high (1000(!!!) dollars) and then I’m not even mentioning the monthly costs… It’s a little cheaper when buying from an estate manager, because of the wholesale prices, but cheap still isn’t the right word.

Second life is a fun game, but linden labs only goal is clearly to make as much money as possible. You can’t tell me that setting up a new server really costs them 1000 dollars. The highest set up fee any company asks is about 50 dollars. And 295 dollars a month for server costs? I don’t know what kind of server they put in for a region, but it has to be a monster machine if you look at that rate. It should certainly be able to have more than 40 users online at the time…

It became clear to me that owning sl land was not an option for me, if only sl allowed people to host and connect their own regions… Then I found a page on that subject in the sl wiki saying that linden labs was planning to make second life opensource and would probably allow users to connect their own regions in the future, but that a major redesign of the grid was needed for that. Yeah… Of course…And why exactly would linden labs give up their money tree?

So I continued my search and I found the open source equivalent of second life: opensimulator, or opensim. This software is still in alpha stage, but already very much like second life. It makes use of the same viewers, looks the same, feels the same and on some areas can do even more than second life. And best of all: opensim is designed to let users connect their own regions, completely free!

I discovered there are many opensim grids up and running, of which the biggest is osgrid (osgrid.org). So I installed opensim on my server and connected it. I now have 20 regions running on a server that costs less than 70 dollars a month.

Of course there is a downside, osgrid, or any opensim grid for that matter isn’t nearly as crowded as second life. And that’s where I come in. I’d very much like for second life users to come and take a look in osgrid, try it out for yourself. And for that reason I’m giving away land for free. No whole regions of course, nice little pieces of land for you to experiment on.

Interested? Here’s how it works:

  • Go to osgrid.org and create an account.
  • Install Imprudence viewer
  • Login to osgrid with your username and password
  • Open the search menu, choose people
  • Search for “Nihlaeth”
  • IM Nihlaeth Melody that you want a piece of land
  • Wait for me to respond

If you want to see what I’ve been doing, open the map menu and search for Phoenix Rising Isles.

Have fun exploring!

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