Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-07-30. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
I really have given thought to fixing the art in v2. The exploration mode doesn’t work and the cinematic “watch” mode is less than idea. The interesting aspect of v2 isn’t the graphics, it’s the eventing system.
The system simulates activities on the island-with motivations, needs and memory tracked by the characters on the island. You can see work being done, and recreation. The coding tool brought together a simulation space for these characters tracked in a complex state machine that rolls like clockwork over the course of a day.
This memory setup isn’t anywhere near as advanced as the ideas that were put to work during Summer into AI 2026. They were what preceded many of those more advanced systems. Still, it’s building up to v3.
The structure of v2 holds a game engine of a sort. This can be seen in the folder structure of the main engine itself. It’s where the temptation comes from to return to v2 to do a cosmetic update originates.
As you can see by that folder list, it covers quite the range. In the code, which I promise I’ll keep brief here, you’ll see the root idea of how the island tracks memory with interactions.
As the code demonstrates, every interaction of the island is a recorded event that’s remembered for the duration of the browser being open. This has a negative consequence: performance management. Eventually the v2 island lags out. Still, a heck of an idea. What if every action on an island were simply remembered, forever? It’d lead to interesting charts and graphs, I’m sure.
Tomorrow isn’t too far away. I’ll take us into a tour of v3. It takes ideas from v1 and then from these systems in v2, but then brings together several gaming systems and visual polish.
I did a review on what it’d take to fix up the visuals for V2. Turns out, it was pretty simple so I went ahead and made the fix.
Connected work
- Island Lab Series: Day 1 of 5: Start with the map of all three island experiments and the question behind each version.
- Enter Island V2: Open the living-world experiment and inspect its characters, routines, and visible state.
- Island Lab Series: 2 of 5, Island V1: See the procedural terrain experiment that came before the simulated civilization.