so, wiring will need to be expanded on. also, does animation take energy? does
sending a message to another part take energy? say you have some machine where
you want the top to do a pretty animation, does that mean you have to send
energy to it?

as for bodies... should default properties be inherited from the parent body?
might be convenient so you don't have to set a bunch of stuff the same. I'm
generally unsure of how bodies should be structured, though - if one wants to
be positioned relative to some other part, should its part be considered a
child of that part? should it be allowed for it to change parents? we'd have
to watch out for loops - you can't have something depending on something that
already depends on it, everything would vanish in a puff of logic (or an
infinite code loop). so, if it is possible to adopt, there should be a check
to stop parts from adopting their ancestors. also, what if the parent part has
no body? do we go relative to the next-up? or maybe only bodies can have
chilren... oh whatamess. maybe the bodies should be in a separate tree, and
have pointers connecting them to their related parts. hmm, how do bodiless
parts work at all?

also, if a part is torn off or disowned, should its children go too? obviously
yes - if you break off a branch the leaves come with it. when it comes to
tearing off, that really only applies to bodies, doesn't it? they'd want to
take their parts along of course... as for what would happen to bodiless parts
I'm not quite sure.
but, what if a part has no parent? is that legal at all? different parts of
the object being independent of each other... kinda sounds like they should be
different objects then, doesn't it? :P normally they'd all be children of the
main body... but... what if there is no main body? hmm. yuck. you really need
one root body for stuff ike pickup...
another example: some norn pulls the switch off a lamp. now, the lamp is
broken, yes. it's either stuck where it was, or it won't turn on at all. most
of this centres on the question: did the part get pulled out with the body?
should it be possible for the body to be separated from the part? well, here's
another example: the norn yanks out the lightbulb. does the light-emitting
part stay there? obviously not. so, parts and their bodies should be firmly
stuck together.

interesting thought- can things be stuck back *in*? a kit would have the power
to do so... heck, a kit would have the power to assemble gadgets in-game, it
wouldn't need to write blueprints first.

now, what exactly happens when a part is detached? it and all its childrean
are dumped into a new object. does it become hte main... or... no, that's
silly. hte parts would still be there and the body would be on that part. so,
there would be no root body. all this flexibility sounded nice at first, but
now I think organisation is needed.

what if the object itself cannot have any body, but must create a part and put
the body on that? would be slightly inconvenient for simple things like rocks,
but not a huge deal. still, we need one definite root body...
what if we flip it around? instead of parts having bodies, bodies have parts.
I need to draw this...

okay, so what about bodiless parts? the question no longer makes sense. :) if
we want more parts than bodies, we can probably add them either straight to
the object, or have more parts on a body. if we don't allow parts right on the
object, then a bodiless object can't do anythign at all. we'll see whether
bodiless objects make sense later.

at this point, the body almost *is* the part. but, I want to keep the
part-stuff in a separate class still, I think the distinction will turn out to
be important. hmm, and what if a body has more than one part? which one gets
the input, or do they both? why would you want more parts than bodies? maybe
for a machine's internals, maybe for critter senses... do you really want
separate for each eye, ear, touch-sensor etc? maybe for eyes and ears, but not
for touch. in fact a creature may want a touch sensor on every body. so, hmm.
maybe different parts react to different signals. so, you can have more than
one, but they can't overlap in what they sense. that actually makes a lot of,
well, sense. :) I'm just not sure how the dna will handle it... also, can
parts without an associated body actually do anything? well, yes, I guess they
just can't interact with the outide world.

I'm still not sure what should go in the object base vs. what should go in a
body. each body should have its own colour, size, etc- but should it have its
own mass? chems? anything like that? density? ...and then there'll always be a
few vars that the engine wants, maybe flags on whether to treat it like a
creature (history, events, etc) or whether it's a clone or something...

this does make the concept of damage a little more complicated though. if a
body is beat up, do its parts randomly get damaged? yeah, prolly easiest to
just roll the dice there. 

but, can an object even have a mass without a body? can it have
chems? something to think on there... also need some conditions for
automatically destroying things. like, zero mass -> no more object.