Nested Hierarchy?

I have a parent with a child. That child is a parent with a child.That child is a parent with a child. Etc, etc...

When I check how many children the original parent has, it tells me 1.

Is there a way to have the system count (essentially) grandchildren as children?

I have to keep them separated like this, because the player is able to separate them, and the separated child becomes the parent.

Think of it like stacking cards. The parent being the bottom card. When you cut the deck half way, the bottom of the new stack becomes the parent. I want to be able to quickly count how many cards are in each stack.

I'd have thought this would be in by default.

Currently there isn't an expression that will return that value.

To get around that you can use the Pick Children condition with the "All" option and then count the picked instances.

construct.net/en/make-games/manuals/construct-3/plugin-reference/common-features/common-conditions

Looks like you can do it by recursively picking each child and adding up all the child counts. Simpler enough if all the object types are the same from the looks of it but it would complicate things with differing types.

Function descendentCount(uid)
Sprite: Pick by uid: uid
— local number count
— set count to sprite.childCount
— Repeat count times
— sprite: pick “sprite” child loopindex
— — add descendentCount(sprite.uid) to count
— set return to count

function descendentCount(obj)
{
 let count = obj.children.length;
 for(let i=0; i<obj.children.length;i++) {
 count+=descendentCount(obj.children[i]);
 }
 return count;
}

Thanks for the help everyone :)

I was able to do it using the "pick all" event.

Hopefully we'll get something like this in the future, along with a "Is Parent of" event ;)