Shvarz,
in fact it may be a whole new project. I've been thinking for a long time to an alife sim working along these lines - but never had the time to start coding. But some of the ideas could maybe work in DB too.
As for the two problems:
1) Yes, veggies are artificially determined, and that's no good. But, it's maybe better to have such a hard and artificial division than introducing complicated rules which can result in adding no more than the complexity of the rule itself.
There is a fact, on the other hand. It don't seems to me that there are in the macroscopic world many examples of a continuum between vegetables (autotrophs) and non vegetables. But maybe in the microscopic world things are much different, I don't know.
So, if we want robots to move gradually between auto and heterotrophy, we should accept the existence of robots which, at the same time, feed through photosynthesis AND hunt for food; otherwise, why should we introduce a model allowing such continuum, and at the same time put in it a number of deterrences to make practical to be only in the extreme positions of the continuum?
2) the energy problem. Here again you're right. There's no methabolism, and the energy parameter is extremely simplistic (by the way, never found irritating that a dying robot with, say, 300 energy, has all the speed and reaction capability of a fully healthy bot?). Maybe a "multiple container" system would be interesting. You may have a few different parameters, with different characteristics, and let the robot transform one type into the other at slow rates (say, no more than a fixed token per cycle). Anyway, my advice is to try to keep that system the more simple and abstract as possible, purging it from the "organic" nomenclature (fats, carbs, etc) so to make clear what exactly the system is and what it does (otherwise, you'll always be tempted to add features which are "name driven": for example, that fats _should_ make you slow or, being "greasy", _must_ have something to do with slime, etc - hope you get what I mean). Parallelism with real systems may come after, just as a convenient metaphore of the system.
Ok. I'm going away for holidays tomorrow (to Irkutsk!) and I'll be away till the beginning of August. So, goodbye for now, have a nice time. Don't change too much in DB while I'm away ! :lol: