so first we need an engine.
fuzzie had the right approach; it's not much use trying to create agents if you don't have anywher eto put them, so rooms and metarooms must come first.
metarooms I understand.
rooms, I don't. I really don't.

not only don't I grok them, I don't like them. they're bloody awful to make by hand, and if you make a mistake or just play around a bit much, weird things happen. there aren't any checks to see if a room creation makes sense.
also, it bugs me that norns can't climb stairs. really they just shuffle everywhere, trhey only have one 'foot' at a time; the higher one is just another part of the body, it can't be used to lift the norn up a step, even a 1-pixel step... and their heads can go out of the room, also causing trouble... but that's offtopic.

rooms, well, yeah. let's see. you create them... an agent is always in exactly one of them... if you put two exactly beside each other an agent can travel between them, and you can creat a door if you want...
hmm. they're more like caves really. whereas I tend to think in terms of walls and floors. hmmmm. I wonder if it would be easier to create space in that way than to have rooms... 

another thing that bugs me about rooms: CA's. hte size of the rooms controls how fast they spread.. really it's very primitive. true, it's a pretty good system for a game, all things considered, but I want something better :)

if I used barriers instead of rooms... how would I do CA-like stuff? room types? I'd want better control over soil n'stuff... and what about water?
first of all, something has to be done about the poor stupid norns that drown themselves, they need a chance to learn to avoid water. second... hmm. without rooms, water would be much more complicated... CA's can be a reasonable replacement for gases, agents are sort of solids, but there's nothing like a liquid in creatures...

oh well. I'll think about that later. I wanna try this idea...
but first, of course, come metarooms. I need a very basic engine that will load a metaroom and listen on some port. then I need a simple client capable of displaying a blk. then I need to find out how to do all the networking stuff to connect the two.

fuzzie, what d'you think is the best way to go about displaying a blk? it seems the blks are stored as a bunch of 128x128 sprites, so should I store hte data as a c16image and draw it on hte screen as needed, or draw the whole thing onto an sdl surface and blit parts of that to the screen?