TiAm
IMO, the tendency of most C2 users is to adopt a WET approach by merely copy/pasting events to replicate logic in different contexts. It's a lot faster than modularizing into a function, and it's acceptable for a prototype, but breaks down for projects exceeding a few hundred events.
And that makes it hard to maintain. If I change 1 little thing from something, I would have to find every many other lines that has something to do with that 1 little change which can take up to hundreds, and that is a pain to manage. It works, but to me isn't practical.
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However, you can often fend off this kind of design with a good use of families and functions.
Yes, the family and functions. The function is fine, but the family I can't say for sure as I can't play around with this. Reading some guides about the Family and how it works, I think it's still limited. I'm not suppose to say that it should cover everything, but the thing is that there are still simple things that the Family feature should be doing but isn't.
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One of the places where I still run into trouble, though, is in cases where I want to pick objects of different types in one go. For example: we can't go "pick all objects where X > foo" if some of those objects are sprites, some are spritefonts, some are TiledBG, etc. Even if we just want to pick all sprites where X > foo, we still have to add every sprite in the game to a family, then refer to that.
It would be great to be able to have a pick function that could cross object type lines and pick thru every object that shared the same kind of parameter (X, Y, Opacity, etc).
The first time I played with how the event pick its objects had me down. The picking system is a huge role and needs to be smarter. It's a pain to deal with.
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BTW, that example you link to: what, exactly, is the advantage of such an approach to multiple objects added to a family? The problem I see, in a real world scenario, is that every animation frame for every troop would be loaded with that object, which would take up a lot of unnecessary memory on layouts where you would only be spawning certain types.
This isn't the general idea of what I'm trying to show there. It's still all in the Event Sheet, how it should be easily managed.
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And...what if you had multiple animations for a given troop?
Can get around with Animation's folders and tabs but gets complex. But like I said, this isn't the general idea of what I'm trying to show there.
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Here's a version implemented with families; if anything, I think this approach is more elegant, as adding new enemy types only requires adding a couple new actions, and all stats can be set in one go thru the enemies family:
I can't test that as I don't have a C2 License; Family feature requires C2 License. And this is why I demonstrated my logic using the Animation. But if what you say is what it is, then great. But I know that you know that the Family needs more work.
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Jayjay
there are many cases I've run into where copying and pasting events was the only bug-free way to make things happen (else statements, or statements, and for loops all seem to get buggy in sub-events and sub-groups, etc).
So, it's a lose-lose situation where relying on things that *should* work but *don't* is bad, and you also do still get bit by the copy paste method later on. It's hard to isolate individual examples of this though, as our game was already a huge number of events (many types of enemies, different playable characters with different movement types, etc). The general experience is that anything deeper than one layer of subevents breaks.
Speaks for itself. The C2 Event system wants to be easy to understand but done in an unproductive way. And that's pretty much about it, C2 wants you to work like a factory, it works but is a pain to manage. All in all, it all boils down to user preference; Well of course, this is completely fine to users who are cool with that. And I think isn't much of a big deal to those who make small mobile games like a Flappy Bird rip-off.
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Can you please answer my question:
Does having the C2 License will force you to have the badge at the side of your avatar that says, "[user] owns a Construct 2 License! Hats off!", or is it something just optional to have when you got your C2 License?