Following pointers in probes

[Manor Askenazi]

Hi Ginger,

    a.) A stage-setting part of the run--let's fiddle with parameters.
    b.) Get rid of all those windows when setting them no longer does
        anything.  If editing the world size won't do anything, I 
        don't want the menu lying around.

Issues a.) and b.) do seem to have a lot do with ExperimentControl so 
they will probably be addressed in the very near future [by next month (?)]
Point b. makes it clear that whatever widget/objects we introduce will need 
a straightforward method to make them 'go away'.

    c.) The defining items in my primordial ("grandma") agents sprawl
        across several class levels.  For example, a carnivore is a 
        subclass of "Critter", whose most critical info is a pointer to 
        its Metabolism.  When setting grandma carnivore, you want to 
        set what she eats/gets taxed (defining vars of her Metabolism), 
        and suppress most working settings of Critter and Carnie.

Presumably, grandma's Metabolism is an object (not a struct). If so, one
possible way to deal with this issue is as follows:

---

Take out the 'reference probe' from the library for grandma's class.
Take out (and copy) the 'reference probes' for Critter and Carnie.
Remove the vars in your copies which you don't want displayed.
Add the copies into the reference probe.

---

This will have the effect that whenever grandma is asked to generate
a probeDisplay, she will generate a display with exactly those vars
you are actually interested in. (Note that in the very near future
grandma may be asked to generate a probeDisplay because she was 
'clicked on' while strolling around in the fields)...

---

Now, about the Metabolism: you want to look into grandma's metabolism.
One possible approach is to map some form of shift-click on all ID vars
to a request for a ProbeDisplay of the id contained in that var field.

So, you would bring up a probeDisplay of Grandma and if you wanted to 
peek'n'poke into her metabolism you would bring up a window for her 
metabolism using the var field already available on the screen.

We were planning to add this functionality in the next release :)

Would that be a reasonable solution?

Manor.