[wtx]

Thanks for taking the time to respond to the way it's currently done.

The diagrams can give a slightly wrong impression and it looks like I've communicated the actual behaviour poorly because it works very much like you've described; there are not several objects occupying separate tiles that move in a synchronised way (so the troubles described by zenojevski are not applicable here). The constituents have no self-awareness and store nothing but their own appearance. They come in and out of existence as the object moves and are mere "markers"; they can't be interacted with but instead refer interaction to the object itself.

In that sense, it very much does consist of an 'avatar' ai object with several plotable entities except that the avatar object itself acts as one of the entities while the rest are kinda 'hollow'.

The objects are stored in their locations so this method of spreading them across tiles makes the most sense and you're probably right to be critical of this approach however it reflects reality and part of my objective is to make a program that my friends can contribute to as they learn code themselves and the easiest concepts to grasp are those that reflect reality rather than more abstract ones.

Also it hasn't presented any problems so far so I'd rather work with it than around it.

I hope I've understood and addressed what you're saying. Thanks for checking it out.