Planet Samuro is world that looks like SL, except land is free

[Samuro]

https://planet-samuro.com/

Planet Samuro is a virtual world that was opened in 2018 to an audience with no 3D experience originating from a former chat site.
Until 2024, it evolved, and now it looks like the 3D worlds you know. But there are also quite a few differences:


Software & Architecture

- Planet Samuro is not based on Opensim and is not Hypergrid-compatible. It's a new 64-bit Windows software, written in Safe-C, running under DirectX, and optimized for Windows 7/10/11.

- Planet Samuro costs absolutely nothing to reserve land and build. This will never change, and is made possible by a new software architecture that generates server costs 100 times lower than other comparable systems. We still got 200 km2 free land on our servers.

- Planet servers are available without interruption for months on end.
Unlike comparable systems :
- Planet has no performance degradation requiring a weekly reboot.
- Planet has no database degradation over time that requires maintenance.

- You can build on our main server, or you can open your own public server on the host of your choice and join it to the list of public planets via a system similar to Hypergrid.

- your inventory is stored on your PC, not on the Planet servers. Your inventory (and your avatar's clothes) are always available on any Planet server, even on a private server with no Internet connection or disconnected from the main grid.

- Planet has enough space for a large number of visitors to build and play creatively - up to 1000 avatars per server.


Construction

- there are no prims, no sculpties, no terraforming of terrain. It's all mesh. When you reserve a plot of land, you must first place a mesh plate on the ground to avoid falling into a void.

- Ruth/Roth v3 open-source avatars are used as standard avatars.

- you can create mesh objects and mesh rigged garments directly in Planet with an integrated mesh editor. You don't need external tools like Blender.

- Importing meshes or textures costs nothing. You can import and export your mesh creations in .dae or .obj format, and your textures in .png, .jpg, .gif or .bmp format.

- modern PBR textures are supported: roughness, metal, ambient occlusion, normal. Color values beyond 255 are supported for oversaturation.

- vehicles (cars, helicopters, drones, boats, submarines) work on all terrains and all seas, so you can travel easily from one island to another. There's no sim-crossing, all movements are seamless.

- the integrated animation editor lets you create your own BVH animations.


Various

- Planet Samuro features webcams, microphone and mp4 videos.

- RLV is integrated and always active, with no need to wear a relay.

- raycasting is available for scripting autonomously-moving animals.


Visit us sometimes

https://planet-samuro.com/

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

- RLV is integrated and always active, with no need to wear a relay.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Sounds like the servers don't execute anything, it's all handled on your PC and the server is just a message switch.

 

[Casey Pelous]

- there are no prims, no sculpties, no terraforming of terrain. It's all mesh. When you reserve a plot of land, you must first place a mesh plate on the ground to avoid falling into a void.

So I have to learn Blender or I fall into an infinite ...

- you can create mesh objects and mesh rigged garments directly in Planet with an integrated mesh editor. You don't need external tools like Blender.

Well, well, well. I hope the Lindens are paying attention.

 

[Samuro]

Are You a Second Life creator who can build his/her own stuff without Marketplace ?

Do You have, like Kiri (see picture), big plans that require lots of land you could not possibly afford on Second Life ?

try https://planet-samuro.com/

We still got 200 km2 free land available for your crazy projects !

And you might meet more interesting creative people like you

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Do you have ferrets?

 

[WeFlossDaily]

I visited a while back. Performance wise, it felt pretty good. The viewer for it was pretty basic, not bad, but I'd be interested in seeing it slowly evolve over time to include a few more settings and options. I became hugely frustrated with the signage being in German and French, though. I could translate much of what was written in text into English. But the textured signage was difficult for me. This made setting up an avatar sort of hard. I gave up and uninstalled.

I may visit igen, though. I think English has too much dominance on the internet and in virtual worlds. Ironically, this was one of those cases where I stumbled into exactly what I wanted and found it to be a little frustrating. I still liked what I saw and experienced of it all, though. I don't think I encountered anybody else. But that's fine. I believe this world has a lot of potential to grow. The scripting documentation and forums also looked pretty decent. I also think SL is in it's final years and will eventually collapse in on itself and send users spiraling outward into different virtual worlds.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Until one of these virtual worlds has the avatar variety of SL, I could care less.

Also, the SL open source client is kind of huge since I don't do Windows.

Especially the snotty "use a Windows emulator" crap on the Project Samuro site. No. Fuck off.

 

[Samuro]

Planet Samuro, the first metaverse to offer Raytracing graphics !

Our users are currently upgrading all textures from PBR to ray tracing.


What hardware is required to use raytracing on Planet Samuro?

- 32 GB RAM


a) An Nvidia RTX graphics card (RT stands for ray tracing) with at least 16 GB VRAM


b) or an Intel Panther Lake processor from 2026 with an “X” in its name (X stands for integrated B390 GPU):

Intel Core Ultra X9 388H
Intel Core Ultra X9 387H
Intel Core Ultra X7 368H
Intel Core Ultra X7 358H

c) or, at half the speed, one of these processors from 2024 (with integrated Arc 130/140V GPU):

Intel Core Ultra 5 338H
Intel Core Ultra 9 288V
Intel Core Ultra 7 268V
Intel Core Ultra 7 266V
Intel Core Ultra 7 258V
Intel Core Ultra 7 256V
Intel Core Ultra 5 238V
Intel Core Ultra 5 236V
Intel Core Ultra 5 228V
Intel Core Ultra 5 226V

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

BOLD26 POINT IS THE NEW CAPSLOCK

Do you have ferrets yet?

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

BOLD26 POINT IS THE NEW CAPSLOCK

Do you have ferrets yet?

 

[Veritable Quandry]

16gb vram cuts out a lot of cards. Games use raytracing with a much lower overhead.

 

[Samuro]

16 GB VRAM is needed if you want a 1024 meter view distance. If you got only 8 GB VRAM you can survive with a 256 meter view distance.
16 GB VRAM is not too much, as games and virtual worlds are two very different kind of applications. In games the meshes and textures are optimised to take as little space as possible. Typical games compress textures in the BC7 format (compression 4X). That format is unfortunately not widespread in virtual worlds. User content in virtual worlds is awfully bad optimized and usually takes many large textures for each mesh. On a typical scene of a virtual world, with 1024 meter view distance, there are over 65,000 textures visible. When i asked some AI how to make an engine with 65,000 textures it said it's impossible. Planet Samuro has its own custom made graphics engine, specially tailored for virtual worlds. You can't simply use unreal or unity.

 

[Soen Eber]

Second Life isn't a game people spec out new PC's for. Understand your customer. SL is mostly casual gamers or people keeping up with friends. If this is a hobby, great! If it's a business that's going to cover the house payment, make it enjoyable for low spec machines and a total blast for those with the hardware that matters. But mostly it's about community. SL lost a lot of customers when they screwed academia and the elvish roleplayers, see if you can pick them up. Set up discord channels as a backdoor so people can keep in touch people in SL, and make it easy to teleport between SL and your setup if it's technically and legally possible.

 

[Samuro]

Just to be clear : the raytracing graphics on Planet Samuro are totally optional.
If you got a PC that supports it, you can enable it in the graphics options. If you don't, well Planet runs even on lower PC specs than SL.
We're not forcing anyone to upgrade. This is for power users who have the money and want the best.
One day SL will probably offer raytracing too.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

- Planet Samuro costs absolutely nothing to reserve land and build. This will never change, and is made possible by a new software architecture that generates server costs 100 times lower than other comparable systems. We still got 200 km2 free land on our servers.

I see on your FAQ it says

Planet Samuro is run by volunteers who are not interested in making money but rather in having a good time. Therefore, Planet is free and offers nothing to buy or sell. Reserving land and building is free, the only thing we ask is that you extend the reservation of your land at least every 3 months otherwise it will be deleted if you don't come anymore.

That's pretty cool, that's how a lot of OS-based virtual worlds are run. But there's still some kind of overhead, right? Even 100x lower server costs isn't zero server cost. So if accounts are free to make, and land is free to reserve, and importing assets costs nothing, you're not recouping any funds whatsoever from users...I gotta ask, how are you keeping the lights on?

 

[Samuro]

i keep the lights on easily. Currently i rent a single unbutu server for 30 euro a month in France. It runs 10 planets for a total of 330 km2 (+ 2470 km2 if you count the oceans where you can fly and navigate with ships). It has a 100 Mb/s connection so should support approximately 5,000 to 10,000 users (like some Wow servers). Contrarily to SL, network is very optimized and makes this possible with many cache levels. [you ever noticed how inefficient the SL network is ? even when you do nothing, there is nonstop network traffic. On planet Samuro, when users do nothing, there is no traffic. Planet Samuro has custom-made network protocol with priority channels]
In addition, i have friends who also host their own servers, a german one, and a french one. Each has just one planet.
Everyone is free to open one too, either single standalone or connected to ours.
As explained, we're not a company, we do it for fun in the evening or on week end, after our regular work.

ah i forgot to explain some : inventory is stored on the PC of the users, so contrarily to opengrid and SL, we don't need storage for it on our servers. I think that's an important point because i saw many opengrid costs explode for this reason, especially after 10 years, it grows and grows. Ours does not.
we just need to maintain storage for the world objects, that's about 15 GB per planet, not much. If you want further details : we don't use any databases. The whole software is inside a single exe of 8 MB that does everything to run the whole planet, and a single data file (of 15 GB currently) per planet. There is no maintenance (only daily incremental backup), it's all easy and cheap.

Another reason why SL is so expensive is its script language : it's very inefficient and needs basically one server per sim. Planet Samuro has its own highly optimized script langage. Memory is based on how microcomputer worked in the 80's, so a whole program can run with very little memory. Instead of one server per sim, we can run all scripts from all 10 planets using a single server, and using only 5% of cpu. That works with job scheduling (that's how the IBM computers worked in the 70's). The script language makes sure no script wastes time in useless loops (something i saw so often on SL).

So you see, the whole system was designed from the start, within all tiny details, for efficiency and to save costs. Imagine if you can host 5000 people for 30 euro a month, then the 50,000 people of SL could theoretically be hosted on 10 servers, for a total cost of 300 euro a month, just by using better software.

Last year, I talked with an opengrid user who had 3 databases, less land than me, i think more than 80 TB of data, exploding server costs, weekly downtime maintenance and who really had trouble operating the system safely without data loss. I showed him the advantages of planet samuro, but in the end, considering the work it would be to start again from scratch with a new system, not to mention bringing users over, he prefered to continue and die with opengrid.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Ferrets?