@OSCC Excited to be attending and exhibiting at #OSCC2022 (Expo Zone 5; Booth 29)

@Ken Not only apparently. There is such a thing as #OpenSimulator. It has been around since early 2007, and the #Hypergrid was established in 2008. It even has a small but growing community in the Fediverse. You may have caught it from hearsay from people who in turn have heard about it from hearsay, but I'm an actual user. Someone who is more famous than me is @Mal Burns who also runs several series of YouTube videos including This Week in XR, MBTV and the OpenSim-specific Inworld Review.

For starters, see this FAQ page on #HypergridBusiness which has a dedicated OpenSim section labelled #Metaverse. Seriously, #OpenSim has been using that term since long before Zuckerberg tried to make everyone believe he invented it.

OpenSim is a result from the #SecondLife viewer going #OpenSource, thereby laying open Second Life's viewer API. For one, this led to the creation of third-party viewers such as the #FirestormViewer. But beyond that, a whole new platform for #VirtualWorlds was developed around that viewer API so that it'd work with the new third-party viewers, so that little had to be developed from scratch. The project started as OpenSecondLife, but it was renamed OpenSimulator prior to its public launch.

This also explains why OpenSim is so very similar to Second Life, why it's so very close to it: It still uses viewers primarily made for Second Life, albeit sometimes in dedicated OpenSim variants. The reason for this is a lack of developing capacity. See, Second Life is entirely maintained by a profit-oriented company with hundreds of hired full-time developers. OpenSim is maintained by a small bunch of spare-time developers who get code submissions from other spare-time developers from the community. And OpenSim still doesn't even have its own dedicated viewer. What few devs take care of Firestorm barely get to do more for OpenSim than absolutely necessary because they're busy enough to keep it running in Second Life.

So since the third-party viewers have to cling to Second Life's development and implement all its new innovations to stay compatible with Second Life, OpenSim is forced to follow suit to stay compatible with the viewers. New things from Second Life take their time to trickle down to OpenSim, also because they have to be more or less reverse-engineered first, but OpenSim got things like #BakesOnMesh or EEP.

The experience of Hypergridding is semi-smooth. You do get to take your entire inventory with you, for example. This also means that you can acquire things on other grids than your home grid.

There's a thing called Hypergrid v2 which introduced the "suitcase" in which items can be taken from grid to grid, so all you actually take with you is what's inside your suitcase or worn on your avatar. This was partly established in order to keep asset servers of grids from being cluttered with all kinds of stuff from all kinds of avatars' inventories. But since it's so inconvenient and cumbersome to use, few grids have adopted it, and even fewer still use it, mostly small newbie grids whose admins don't know what it is.

People Hypergrid all the time. Go to any event on the Hypergrid, and you've got folks from all over the Hypergrid as visitors. That's also because the Hypergrid is huge. An estimation says that over 8,000 individual grids are on the Hypergrid, ranging from small home-hosted personal grids to the behemoth that's #OSgrid which, all by itself, has a larger land area than Second Life.

There are a few problems, though. Some arise from not all grids always running the same OpenSim version. Some grids run development versions to always have the latest features and get bugfixes quickly. OSgrid itself is basically still the same development platform as which it was launched in 2008, so while it's the biggest grid in land mass and user numbers, it's also one of the most bleeding-edge grids. Other grids stick with stable release versions. Then there are grid owners who simply can't be bothered to upgrade. Some may have that Windows user mindset of installing once and never upgrading as long as it works. Also, there are entire grids which seems like they've spent at least the last six years under a rock with their hopelessly outdated OpenSim version and their complete lack of years of innovations, e.g. they still don't have any mesh. Last but not least, a few grids run forks of OpenSim which have been abandoned by their creators, which are therefore very outdated, but which are difficult to migrate from to vanilla OpenSim. So although OpenSim has introduced BoM some three years ago, there are still a few grids which don't support it.

Another problem is that not all grids are hosted on powerful Linux root servers in data centres. Especially lots of smaller grids are based on DreamGrid, an OpenSim distribution with a Windows-only point-and-click control interface geared towards ease-of-use for people who have zero experience in running servers. These are very often hosted at home on whatever spare Windows machine the grid admin had lying around through whatever landline the grid admin has at home. There are also people running their OpenSim grids on Raspberry Pis.

Last but not least, just like in the Fediverse, not all grids on the Hypergrid are connected to all other grids. A few grids are blocked by especially large public grids for various reasons. In the case of #ZetaWorlds, it's the other way around: They have blocked lots of other grids for a whole number of reasons, be it grids that use dynamic DNS which may wreak havoc on a grid's database, be it grids that don't offer any way to get into contact with the admin(s) other than in-world.

If you're interested, you may want to take a look at the OpenSimulator Community Conference which will take place on December 10th and 11th. I think registration is still open, and the grid it runs on offers first-time visitors to create a new avatar (it's also on the Hypergrid for those who already have avatars, but that isn't the case with you).