We present Devo-II, an improved cell-based developmental model for wind farm layout optimization. To address the shortcomings of discretization, Devo-II's gene regulatory networks control cells that act in a continuous rather than discretized grid space. We find that Devo-II is competitive, and in some cases, superior with respect to state- of-the-art global, stochastic search approaches when a suite of algorithms is evaluated on different wind scenarios. The modularity of the genetic regulatory network computational paradigm in terms of isolating its search algorithm, the regulatory network simulation and the cell simulation, allowed this improvement to largely focus upon cell simulation. This indicates a robustness property of the paradigm's design. As well, wind farm layout optimization highlights how developmental models can be considered more efficient than other optimization methods because of their "optimize once, use-many" adaptability.