Well, after four hours of leafing through the manual, reading the bits that catch my eye (I'll go back though it more thoroughly later :p ), I can safely say that Infinite has added a lot of options. There are a lot of functions listed in the python reference relating to ecosystems, including locating instances by position, moving them, adding and removing them. Looks very flexable. An example script on the CD shows how with just a few lines of code you can have the ecosystem objects on a procedural terrain bob up and down with animated changes in terrain height (waves). There's also a short (1.5 page) tutorial on how to have an ecosystem populated with spheres and then edit the material function to place one of two image maps on the spheres at random. A bit of quick fiddling and rather than randomly assigning the imagemaps, I was able to put one map went on spheres under a threshhold size and the other map onto the larger sphere.

Mark