Wagner James Au / New World Notes

I haven’t heard much in the way of innovation in OpenSim virtual worlds lately (though maybe I haven’t been asking in the right places), and somewhat assumed the open source version of Second Life had reached a sunset point. But someone I trust recently told me about the Wolf Grid, and my jaw steadily dropped.

For one thing, it’s already larger than Second Life in terms of virtual land mass, but that’s just the start. 

“We have a lot of features other grids don’t have,” founder Lone Wolf tells me. “Text to speech/speech to text. We can stream our computer screen in-world and share it with others including audio.” (Very handy for group movie nights.) “Our assets are stored on 10.2 petabytes of cloud storage with Cloudflare rather than standard server storage, so we have our own custom asset servers.” (More on its “hyperconverged infrastructure” below.)

But Wolf Grid is even more notable for the latest implementations of generative AI in virtual worlds:

“We have our own AI terrain generator that can randomly generate terrains for your region – so if someone buys a region, within 5 minutes they can have it terraformed with mountains, valleys etc.”

Speaking of which, landowners get a copy of Bobby, a bubbly bot integrated with ChatGPT. (Watch above, hosted by Wolf.)

“You can come and meet him on the Wolf mountain region,” says Lone, but warns: “He has been getting a bit full of himself lately.”

How did all this happen over the course of its 3 year history? Mr. Wolf told me the story, which inevitably begins 8 years ago in Second Life, with a desire to expand into a new frontier:

“I had 3 low prim sims in SL, called wolf territories, and i wanted to build a massive virtual world where people could get lost.

“Second Life didn't cut the mustard because of the cost. So I started on other OpenSim grids.

But they all had issues and being that I've been a programmer all my life, I decided it was time to build our own and we went on from there.”

The original wolf sims originally hosted Wild West roleplay, but as it transitioned to its own grid, so did the world: 

“We're much bigger than that now, with our massive space areas, cities, towns, countryside, sailing. It’s just huge and all joined together, so you can fly or sail anywhere.” Two universities  are on the grid, as is the Crystal Frost SL to Unity project (much more on that here).

The speech-to-text (and vice versa) technology isn’t simply intended as cool tech, but to benefit the entire user community:

“I have autism,” Lone explains, “and i find it easier to communicate in a virtual world than real because there are no facial expressions to get wrong. We have quite a few autistic people here and one of the goals of this grid is to be as inclusive as possible. So that’s why we built the voice recognition and text to speech.”

One unique holdover from the Wolf Grid’s history as a West Wild West roleplay world is the grid’s community managers are called “Peacekeepers”.

“Peacekeepers are not the police – we have a security team for that,” as Lone puts it. “Peacekeepers bring peace! so if someone is looking for an item, needs help doing something, that's where they come in our whole ethos is to facilitate whatever anyone desires to do with their region.

“We recognized that giving people ‘power' and making masses of rules just made it uncomfortable. So having a grid driven by its community means that the grid is shaped by the people in it… a lot of these grids seemed to be run by people who enjoy making rules for the sake of it.”

With nearly 1200 registered users and 6000 visitors across the OpenSim hypergrid, it’s small in relation to Second Life in terms of users, but then again, not in size. That’s partly due to the economics of the Wolf Grid’s lent rentals.

“Basically we make our money from renting land. We have merchants who sell stuff on grid but otherwise that's it. All our regions are four by fours – sixteen Second Life [sim] equivalents in size. Prices range from $25.40 for [land with] 20,000 prims to $76.20 for 1.2 million prims.”

I have to make sure I read his Discord texts right. 

“Wow $76.20 per month for what would be 16 sims in SL?”

“Yes. With 1.2 million prims.”

With just 95 landowners, Lone Wolf tells me the project is already profitable.

Although, he adds, “I'm not ordering a Lamborghini.”

Much thanks to Professor Tom Boellstorff for telling me about the Wolf Grid, where his next metaverse project is in development — but more on that soon!

Lone Wolf on getting started on the Wolf Grid

Firestorm is required for access. 

“Create an avatar on our main website at Wolf-Grid.com. When they have created an avatar it gives full instructions on what to do [for logging in[.”

“Choose an outfit from your inventory (we supply quite a few) — they are already in your inventory when you join, in a folder. So you can just right click the folder and click ‘replace current outfit’. And then explore and explore!”

Lone Wolf on Wolf Grid’s hyperconverged infrastructure:

“So traditionally, you would have a bunch of servers and a bunch of storage. [Lone Wolf Grid] basically combines all the resources of all the servers. It means that half our servers can go down and the grid will still run. Rather than having one server for one task and one for another, the tasks are in a high availability state where they can be run anywhere on the cluster.

So if we need to take a server down for maintenance, for instance, we just migrate stuff that’s running on it live, and then do the maintenance, and then migrate it back.”

“But this can happen automatically as well. Plus we have two networks in the data center as well. This is very unusual. So for instance our database server cluster (which is running on the Hyperconverged Infrastructure) is running on a private network, so its not exposed to the external Internet. Most grid servers are very insecure in that way.”

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