You shouldn't need to go to every instance of grass in the game and paint a listener or what have you if you were using a shader, not like for every blade of grass is querying the client every tenth a second "is someone there? should I move today?".
Couldn't tell you the exact solution since i'm not a master programmer but it'd be easy enough (for me) on a 2d plane at least haha. I mean to have no hitboxes or constant query and still warp objects based on speed/vicinity. I'm certain 3d makes it 100x than that but I believe the basic concept would still apply, but with more complicated math (still not adding a query for every plant, painted zones, or (many) unique animations though).
But really what I wanted to say is I don't think we should be playing programmers for SE lol (not really directed at one person :3), if enough people want it I'm sure they'll have one of their masters look into and come back to Yoshida with a money cost and Yoshida will be like "LOL NOPE" or "Please look forward to it".
