Hey Dop,
I could not embed the screenshot of my code on the forum for some reason, you'll have to go to the link. It must have something to do with the major forum upgrade because I initially could not do a lot of things that I wanted to show you and I only just got my avatar back. What a mess. Sorry if my initial request was confusing in any way. I could not edit it after I posted it.
My understanding of families here are that if you add an object to a family and you add instance variables for that family, then those objects in that family will be impacted by those instance variables that the family has.
In this case, I set an instance variable to the family, and like the screenshot showed you, it should be toggling all objects in that family to visible or not visible.
This is fine initially but later on when helper sprites are created (for example, I wanted to toggle the visibility of my pathfinding_destintion_helper sprite for each of my people), but people are spawned later rather than at the start of the layout, and if I have the toggle off some people spawn with it's visibility off and some people spawn with it on. This seems to occur mainly if a person is created in the middle of toggling it so some sprites in the family have their visibility on when the boolean is off, and I can't seem to match the sprite's visibility with the family's visibility later for some reason. I just don't understand what I am doing wrong here.
If I use a global variable, that means I have to toggle the visibility specific for each sprite instead, and I know I can do that, I just thought it would be easier to do this with families since later on, I will likely add other objects for debugging and my outlook of this would be a simply matter of just adding the object to the family so I don't have to go adding it to the code.