Yes Nums, as you certainly can notice thier approach is very close to what I proposed at first. They introduce a number of chemicals with known properties and known effects of conversion of one molecule into another. Then it's all about optimization of an existing system.
It's funny, looking at their system right now I can see just how far away I was from the system that DB really needs. That system was definately not satisfactory for our purposes.
But for the purposes of a computer game it is perfectly fine, because the main goal of computer games is to entertain player, not to create some sort of of perfect imitation of life. Perhaps the best explanation of this concept comes from Gabe Newell, creator of "Half-Life", who said someting along the lines of: "we tried to create AI that would look convincing to the player." And their approach certainly succeded - the opponents felt quite human, even though their programming was very basic. On the other side of the spectrum is "Black and White", which attempted to build AI from bottom up. The aatempt was impressive, but resulted in a very poor gameplay.
Just different goals. I suspect the new system will introduce so much complexity that newbies are just going to be blown away. Just like real life, life in DB will suddenly become very fragile. It is exciting and troubling at the same time. Well, we can only tell ourselves that we are atetmpting something that's never been attempted before and enjoy that as much as we can...
