continuing on from grendel disappearing... couple of paragraphs copied from putty...

should body vars be hardcoded or should it be possible to add more? obviously
every body would want a size, location, sprite, colour, etc - but if new
senses are added in hte future, might they want new attributes to sense?
should it just be done like name vars? or should there still be a limited,
predefined set of vars in the body? I'm not sure... a body is really just a
chunk of data and an indication that something has a presence in the world,
and probably an indication that it can send/receive physical events... it's
not a part, because parts can have a body, and no part can have more than one.
...heck, should the root object even have a body? or should it have to define
a part and give that a body? for simple objects like rocks it might be
annoying to define a part, but if you don't define a part then how can you
receive events? I guess you can't... which is fine for rocks and other dead
things, really. or should be. if you wanted a rock that can break like in the
ettin desert, then you would want parts. up to the designer really :)

hmm. should all parts have a copy of the dna? I guess it depends on how the
dna is implemented and whether it can mutate during life. certainly when the
object disowns a part, it should get dna - hey look, forensics. bet I could
make a dna "fingerprint" somehow by interpreting the dna graphically. that'd
be a neat way for the user to compare stuff.

on saving worlds - it'd be nice to do it sanely, not however CL did it... you
have to save not only the state of every object, but also where it was in
scripts, and engine state... and you'd need to make an attempt to let clients
clean up - data for transient client-interface objects (if such things will
exist) would not be stored.
perhaps this would be a valid use of xml.

and then I'd need the ability to load a world back in from xml. oh what fun. :P
but it'd allow people to extract data from existing world files, and they might
find that useful. heck, even a world switcher would find it useful - you could
display a bit of info about the world, maybe even save a screenshot of it...
well, no, for a server/client that wouldn't really be feasible unless the client
telling it to close also sent a screeny... but still. neat stuff like that would
be much easier.

as for internal structure... hmm. probably start with a body struct, and an
object struct... object may have a body, and may have 0-* parts.

going back to grendel now, can probably delete this file...