After reading 11 pages of this my mind is a bit tweaked, let's see if I can make a coherent statement.
I noticed a bit of talk here and there about defining rules, senses, environments, etc. I think such statements are misguided. Defining rules is entirely and utterly useless.
There is no magic formula for creating a reality that fosters life. Life is separate from reality. Life is a process; it is not defined with elements of reality. This means that it, the process, can be applied to any reality; and that makes the reality entirely arbitrary.
Things like food, energy, speed, movement, etc are just words based on thoughts, where are based on patterns, which are based on the reality that the living creature grew up in.
Light hits our retina, turns into electrical signals, travels to various sections of our brain, is processed based on learned patterns, travels to more sections of the brain, combines with memory, logic, other senses, enters conscious thought, and so on and so forth. One rule of this universe was extrapolated into a million things by our mind which was developed specifically for this world.
But noticed that it could very well have been developed for an entirely separate world. What's stopping you from replacing the eyes with something else? Interpreting a different rule of a different universe.
There's a fine line between our senses anyway. A newborn baby mixes its senses up and only time does it slowly separate them. They can "see" sound, for example.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that you don't have to explicitly define things like food, color, smell, etc in any universe you create. The living creatures in that universe will define it and give them meaning.
Consider
my project. Those creatures have sense for at least two things. They can sense what comes out of the gettimeofday function and they can feel the filesystem. Likely they later evolved a pseudosense for how crowded the environment is, and certainly they were aware of each other once they gained the ability to delete each other.
Keep things simple, define the environment that you can, and don't worry about whether it will foster life or not. "Life will find a way"
If you want a virtual environment right now like that of Darwinia then you've got one. Modify the progranism source code to use an exploit like the ancient RPC exploit on Windows and you're done. The internet then becomes Darwinia. ***I in no way condone the use of the progranism source code for malicious purposes with or without real harm, intentional or not. By using the progranism source code you accept all responsibilities for the result of using said source code without any warrenty of any kind***