(thanks to Georg Janick for the images)

on february 26th 2008, the first species of creatures that i introduced to caerleon isle hit some sort of critical mass and, as far as i can tell, in combination with the severe time dilation their (physics based) ‘food’ was causing, had a population explosion. unfortunately i was offline for two days and this allowed the creatures to replicate out of control swallowing up the entire islands resources.

here is my proposal for what happened:

a. the flyers have several ‘hard coded’ behaviors. the behaviours that i think are relevant here include that they will be attracted to, and consume spores when they detect one in their vicinity. they will continue consuming spores until they are full and the they become lazy and sleep off their meal. also if they notice an oversupply of spores they will self replicate. (i don’t intend to explicitly outline all behaviours as this will detract from the experiential nature of an encounter with them)

b. spores are created by the landscape at regular yet random intervals. they are controlled by the second life physics engine, their behaviuor can then be seen as being a result of the second life laws of nature.

c. i believe after a point the flyers all came into sync and became lazy and rested at the same time. this created an oversupply of food, which meant that self replication took advantage of this window of opportunity.

then

d. the laws of nature in second life (physics engine and script run time allocation and simulator frames per second etc.) all became overtaxed. depending on the state a particular object was in, it had more or less operations to fulfill, in an ever decreasing amount of time ie: the time allocated to running scripts per frame was becoming shared over many more scripts.

e. eventually the creatures just were not eating any more.. but instead they were replicating.. their scripts ran up until the replication call but failed to make the eat call.. the result…