I can make some significant performance improvements to the system if we restrict what veggies are allowed to do. For example, if we say veggies can't see, that would be huge. I can save the cycles used for vision (which are quite expensive and highly influenced by clumping) and populatuing the refvars for all veggies. I know most veggies don't have genes to see, but it doens't matter, the program doesn't know this. The way it's architected, things like eye values and refvars get calculated whether the bot uses them or not. If I could assume - rather, if I could enforce that veggies can't see, I could avoid this almsot always unessessary work and speed up the whole program. Sims with lots of veggies would see a marked perfromance improvement since whole sections of the code would not need to execute for a significant percentage of the bots.
There are other possibilites. We might decide that veggies can't move on their own, or can't initiate tie formation, or can't shoot anything but waste and poison or are immune to virus and venom. The more we restrict, the more I can speed things up.
Now, before we get crazy, we should think about how much we want to allow/enable complex evolved or designed veggies. I can imagine large vine forests of tie connected veggies. I can imagine venus fly traps. I can image veggies wanting to move into position to form complex structures like leaves and branches (though perhaps we coudl decide to restrict them to doing so only via tie length and torque operations and not via .up, .dn. etc.).
We should also not forget about viruses, etc. Do we want veggies to be able to catch animal viruses? If so, and we restrict some things like vision or movement, then certain viruses won't work even if veggies can catch them....
Anyway, I'm interested in input. At one end of the spectrum, if we really restrict veggies, then sims with many many thousands of veggies might start to become very feasable and fast since veggiess would be so cheap w.r.t. cycles. I can imagine lady bug bots eating their way and burrowing through a sim jammed packed with tens of thousands of tiny veggies... But it might also make veggies pretty simplisitc and unable to evolve or be designed to do much of interest. We are at the other end of the spectrum currently - veggies can do everything other bots can do and more (more because they can get nrg direct from the sun and get magically repopulated by the system).
So, what do people want? Let me know.