I'm not about to quote all of that....
So the "picking" as you put it automatically cancels out non relevant instances. So if I am within a collision condition, any sprite instance of bullet that wasn't collided will not be affected by whatever I do with "bullet" within the actions under said collision condition event??
About the splash damage thing, it makes perfect sense. Now lets make an extreme case. For some reason, when a bullet hits an enemy, I want all bullets to be destroyed. If I simply do the destroy action, it will only destroy itself, because of the above paragraph I wrote, about excluding other non-relevant instances. How would I go about destroying all other bullets as well. I would think let's set a variable, and then for all bullets the condition for said variable could make them destroy themselves, but it creates the same problem of how to access those private variables of all bullets not relevant to the collision. The only solution I can think of is to have a global variable, with a condition event, that does it globally, but that is ugly.
Basically, I would like for example to "target" a given instance of an object. In game maker, you can loop easily through all instances of an object, and choose one based on whatever you want(for example the value of a variable). You could then store that object id into a private variable of whatever was doing the choosing, and then you could do something later using said id, without doing the choosing again. In GM, every object instance has its own id, and you could access objects with it using the '.' operator. Or, you could use the name of the object, and it would loop through all of the instances of said object regardless of whether they were "relevant" in the current condition. Of course, I'm not looking for this exact method of doing things, or I would just continue using Game Maker, but, is something similar to this available?
The other thing I did not see anywhere was controlling the view/s. I know how to make the view follow a certain object, but that assumes there is only one instance of that object. If I check that for example for "bullets" because I want you to control bullets when the shoot(a new weapon prototype ) I would need the view to follow that. But if the view is following the player, how would I switch? Also, how would I directly control the view my self(which would solve the bullet problem assuming I could choose which bullet to follow)?? I would like to make the "camera" pretty smooth. The generic view following is actually pretty smooth, but for example, if I use it where a ship is pretty fast, I would like the view to "scout ahead" if you will, and if I can control the view directly, it will work.
Also, using the internal mouse/keyboard, I saw multiple sets of actions/controls, for multiple players. This is good. But, is it possible to have more than one view, each with it's own HUD. I saw the layout information, where you can specify that some parts not to scroll, and some to scroll, even for parallax effects. But, I would want it to be used for that, and for multiplayer. Is that functionality present yet??
One more, last thing. Is it possible to use "tiles?" I saw that you can tile a single background all over a layout, which is good. But, for example with a platformer, I saw you can create objects as "solid" which will make the platformer behavior work good. But, behind all of those solid platforms(likely invisible) I would like to be able to create pretty graphics, likely using a tile set, which of course isn't the same thing as simply tiling a background.
See, my issue is that I'm coming from Game Maker, where lots of these features exist, but the performance and eye candy is next to crap. But, for me to invest the time and make the switch, I would need these "features" or ways to achieve them. I don't think it would be worth my time coding my own plugins for these, as they are pretty complicated. I would probably code my own 3d sound plugin(and release it GPL) without any of the limits of the current XAudio2 thing, but I'd rather not have to code plugins for multiple views, etc... assuming it would even work with the current state of construct. But, I really like the performance and effects, which is the reason I'm taking a serious look.