“Or just keep them in a lake.”

That only works until they go amphib on us.

>Server was down for maintainence or some other silliness. I’ll go, like… later. =P

Um, doesn’t your favourite World for Warcraft go down every week at the same time? Don’t most games have maintenance days? Yes, SL was down for a few hours this week and last with a new patch, but that’s not a weekly occurrence more like 1ce in 6 weeks.

>they were able to run 4:1 on one additional server which, of course, is much less expensive $$-wise.

This was a special deal the Lindens started recently to squeeze more sales and solve the problem of voids around private islands which made your avatar bump up against an invisible wall like Truman leaving Trumanville. By putting these void sims around, you can mitigate that feeling.

But it comes at a cost, of course. These four-in-one-packs look gorgeous because it means you get a lot of space and you have great waterways. But they only have one-quarter the prims. So a half sim of 32,000 plus square meters only has 937 prims (building blocks for objects) in it. Normally on the rest of the grid, you get the 937 per 4096 m2 — so you’re sacrificing your building capacity for the sake of the wide open spaces. We’re also being cautioned both by official messages from LL and by players who have bought what I call these “skim sims” that the CPU capacity is lower on them, too, that you just can’t put a lot of scripted objects on them in the same way as you can elsewhere.

It’s interesting how this experiment of Lauk’s has brought people back in — I saw a rush of them last night.

I wonder whether these growing and replicating things will go off world. In the experiment with the artificial fish, which I bought to populate Free Tibet’s waters, they were neat at first. They “learned” a pattern to swim in based on these fish sticks you put down to feed them. They would then swarm to you if you sprinkled the fish food in the water. They swam around looking natural and cool. But then you’d log on the next day and they’d all be gone. Then like a day or two after that, they’d be coming back to you in Lost & Found folder, having swum all the way from Wakeley to Winyah, which is like 20 sims or something. Not sure how they do that.

Billiard balls do the same thing. They spawn out and knock around in interesting realistic ways. You play with them and try to shoot them into the pockets. Then you might get distracted and leave…next think you know they’re gone, then swimming back to you days later from all over SL.

And the million dollar questions are: How far and how fast would civilization develop? What percentage of the player base would remain in a primative state? …

Or, more simply, how would things like crafting be affected? What if, suddenly, a dramatic shift in the climate required different equipment for your char — if clothing/armor is no longer “all-weather-wear”? Or, even more extreme, the atmosphere suddenly becomes unbreathable and thus an increased demand for different protective gear.

I’ll have to settle for toying with horticulture hybridization in ATitD.

I’d settle for not having to run all the way to a certain school in order to learn that I don’t have enough of a specific resource to learn horticultural hybridization

So iterating further, lets say for instance you could impliment a rule set for Guns Germs and Steel, into a virtual eco system. Also perhaps make the system somewhat AI, meaning a ruleset that identifies overpopulation, or underutilization, or non optimization of plants, animals, and resources and corrects accordingly.

In a system such as this, perhaps a MMORPG setting the players would actually effect not only the development and propagation of technology/civilization, but the overall enviornment as well….

And the million dollar questions are: How far and how fast would civilization develop? What percentage of the player base would remain in a primative state? What kind of political organizations would develop? Authoritarian? Democratic? Militaristic? Would migratory patterns in this space tend toward certain areas and resources? What would be the fate of these “contested” areas?

You could make players start in “tribes” of perhaps no more than 50 people in one “spawn” point separated by a significant amount of geography…..

Talk about a fun experiment..

I remember way back at the beginning of the dev cycle for Halo Bungie was talking about implementing a working ecosystem into the game. In retrospect that’s not a great idea for that type of game, but at the time it sure had me stoked.

This actually has me thinking about dusting off SL and going for a visit.