The Mating Dance of 0×10201401&gridlouse
While the complex artificial ecosystem of the »Svarga« sim in the virtual world of Second Life has gotten a lot of notice (and rightly so) as a robust simulation running in the virtual world, you may not have heard as much about the Terminus sim, where SL resident Luciftias Neurocam, a neuroscientist with an interest in self-organizing systems, has created a virtual ecosystem which, while not yet as complex as Svarga’s, comes complete with an open API that other residents may use to add their own species to the mix. So far, according to the project’s Web page, there are only 11 species roaming around (or standing still, in the case of the plants), but the project wiki’s developer resources pages seem to give fairly clear if basic instructions on how to create more, and there is even a bit of open-source code to check out. (Though the gridlouse is currently being “rebuilt from the ground up.”)
Species-to-species interaction seems limited at the moment, though in a short visit I spotted gridlice bopping around (they’re the dark tadpole-like creatures to the right of the palm tree in the pic above), and the conical cannon plants, which decay into fall colors as they die and emit small round spores to reproduce, as seen below:
There’s also some excellent underwater life that’s imbued with fancy animations:
Located in »the Terminus sim«, the project is hosted by the Foundation for Rich Content, which has funded a number of interesting events and projects over the last year or so. Though coding a new species into Terminus seems like more than a trivial task, it would be great to see more residents get involved and check out what they come up with. In the meantime, watch out for that Wobblefish!
Feeds
weird…
As one of the developers with the project(Cannon Plants/Palms) I appreciate you taking the time to do an article about our work. However I would like to give credit where it is due. The Foundation For Rich Content has given us some funding, but SL resident Kerunix Flan hosts the Terminus sim entirely at her own expense.
[…] Mom was baffled. “What? WHAT? That doesn’t make sense!” It really bothered her that people would devote so much time and energy to creating a simulated world when the real world is so little known and appreciated. We agreed that it might be more interesting if the game’s creators had attempted to set up some kind of rudimentary ecosystem, with real ecological costs to any major disruption or development - a kind of Biosphere 3. Right now, apparently, the “place” has few non-human inhabitants, and ecosystem creation is left up to the owner-gods of autonomous parcels of Second Life real estate, such as Svarga, or the new Terminous. […]