Last week's post on Second Life's huge geographic size as a unique selling point brought up some interesting points. Technically SL is probably not the "largest" if we're only talking about geographic size, but I think the apples to apples comparison question is precisely this:
What is the Geographically Largest, Contiguous, Multi-User, Fully Explorable, Online Virtual World?
By "contiguous", I mean there are no load screens in between areas, and by "fully explorable" I mean just that: Some online worlds like Eve Online, MS Flight Simulator, or even single-player worlds like Starfield are extremely large, yes, if judged only by map size. But the actual user explorable part of the map size is much less than that. I.E., MSFS basically models the entire world, but you can't, say, land your plane and walk into a nearby diner.
Video (also) via @brainthink.bsky.social, who has also happened to explore Second Life, and found it technically wanting: "The SL mainland is geographically large," they explain, "but the rendering times of structures and objects is absurdly slow. As a real life sailor, I tried sailing in SL once on a rezzed sailboat and quickly gave up. It wasn’t enjoyable at all, sadly."
That has at least somewhat improved since the SL grid moved to the Amazon Cloud in 2020. And while there are thousands of private sims that are not generally accessible, or require a load screen when teleporting there, the major mainland areas, as reader Kaylee West argues, makes for some sprawling, serendipitous adventures -- notwithstanding property owner ban lines:
My experience of driving and sailing around the continents while at times frustrated by ban lines (which I totally agree are a pain in the proverbial and should not be allowed to impact on public areas and throughways) has been that I have come across serendipitously many fascinating places built by SL residents past and present. From art galleries to cute little coffee shops, camping grounds, haunted castles, office buildings, you name it, I've come across it.
Last year I did a week long cruise (roughly 1-2 hours per night) circumnavigating the Nautilus continent (starting from the airport at Santa Catalina) in my classic wooden cruiser.
My partner and I stopped at a range of marinas and mooring sites over night (paying for a berth sometimes for two or three nights) to explore the areas around the marinas. We did scuba diving, visited a maritime museum, ate in open air restaurants, danced in bars, wandered through Italian style village and listened to some residents there speaking Italian, among other activities. (You can see a travel log here.)
Don't get me wrong, it was challenging at times (I wrote about that in my travel log too), but the challenge is a part of the adventure. Many people that play AAA games are not afraid of challenges and have the skills to work things out.
While not all new SL users will be AAA game players, having this freedom to be adventurous and meet some challenges might (I say might) be attractive to them.
There are also groups like Drivers of SL who hold regular driving rallies with pre-planned routes and maps and prizes, and who are a very active community.
In terms of running into people, if you sail out from Santa Catalina airport to Blake Sea - Siren Isle at almost any time of the day you will find people dancing on the sand or their boat, or just chilling on the deck of their motor boat or yacht.
The airport itself usually always has someone taking off or landing, and the group Passengers of SL posts about flights people can join as passengers regularly.
If you want a more structured itinerary, the BBUG (BBB Users Group - Bellisserian Bureau of Bureaucracy (BBB) User Group) even has virtual passports that you can obtain for free and has lists of locations you can visit and obtain a stamp (for free) for your passport as a memento.
None of this is to say that doing these things is always smooth running, but I believe there is potential for Linden Lab to make these things easier to do and to promote them.
Highly agreed! (And hope Linden Lab is reading this too.) Also, I've seen countless YouTube videos where people exploring the geography of various large AAA games encounter various technical hiccups, so I'm not inclined to hold SL to a double standard.
But if there's another online virtual world which has as much seamless serendipity, please let us know in Comments!
Mmm... last year I've stumbled on this video about 10+ years old Minecraft server:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUwNIOolA0
Age and scale of this location (even its poorly lit with default render and there no ray tracing/Distance horizons/texture mods), brings me unexpected amount of new puzzle pieces about how true virtual world should look and feel, at least in some aspects...
Posted by: Lex4art | Friday, February 14, 2025 at 05:29 AM