so, dna.
when creating a child... will it be created instantly? or slowly? hte problem
with slow is that you don't want it to have any body until it's born, you want
it isolated inside the mother - but, with the new arrangements, parts are
connected only to bodies. so they'd be all jumbled up without one. I was
thinking maybe build up a structure inside the mother but you can't really do
that without a body. maybe if you created an object with the main body being
an egg... you could have all the parts start on there, but would they be
protected? and, how long does it tak for a creatures insides to wire
themselves up? in RL it takes time for the mother to gather up all the
nutrients, lay an egg... then the stuff inside the egg has to turn into a
chick or whatever. building stuff from proteins takes time. we could do it
instantly but we want them to grow slowly... plus they only have the energy to
get to the newborn stage, then the mother has to feed them.
I'm mainly wondering if stuff with a brain needs time to let the brain wire
itself up before being exposed to the outside world.

as for how the dna would deal with slowly growig, I'm really not sure. it
looks like it might be a good idea to let each part/body have its own copy of
the dna, in organics, as it'll be needing to consult it regularly.

hrrm. idea: combine the 'grab' action with muscles, and interesting things
could happen. if creatures are complex enough to have that much control over
their limbs, and each hand can grab separately, and grabbing locks things
together... well, if you pull, either the grabbed branch comes down or you go
up. :)I just hope it's easily possible to rotate things... urgh, but the
physics involved could get icky.

anyways, let's think about gadget dna. generally you want some parts, bodies
and wires. so, let's start at the base. our first body will be the base of the
lamp, a basic round thing with a plain sprite and white colour. it egts
placed... wherever the injector puts it. then, let's add hte powersupply part
to that. it magically gets power from somewhere, don't need to think about
that right now. next, we want a switch. so in the middle of the body we put
another body with a small switch on it. this one needs to animate when
pushed/pulled, and also needs to send the event to hte next part: the switch
part. said part then gets wired up to the previous part. last we have the
lightbulb sitting on top - the sprite might show a pretty shade too - and we
add a lightbulb part to it, wiring it up to the switch. it needs to animate
when the energy level changes - I think the easiest way would be for the part
to be able to animate its parent body.

now how on earth do we express all that in dna? *plus* various properties of
the bodies. and I'm thinkign it would need some mass too.
well, I don't really know how, yet. probably just about any arbitrary format
would work at first.