Sorry this took so long. I had a vacation coming up shortly after the other post. I hoped I could get in there in time, but ran out of time to test this properly. I'm back now and have spent the morning exploring this. This is what I have so far.
http://part12studios.com/temp/FredExTest3/
here you can see I have the "Grip" object attached to the physical object.. this is working great. i'm very close i think to having this working i just need to figure out how to compare both of these (or more in future cases) but only drag the closer of the two rather than grabbing both when they overlap as you see in the link above.
In short, see how you can grab both boxes if they overlap? I don't want this to happen, I only want it to grab the box that is closest to the Touch x,y position.. this way you could have say. a dozen tiny boxes overlapping, but you only grab the one closest to the touch event.
I tried what was suggested regarding the family instance variable and it just didn't seem to be working the way I expected. I've researched the "pick nearest" and the manual doesn't go deep enough for me to follow what it's actually doing. Since a family variable is for the whole family it seems that it would just apply the variable to everyone in it, not the nearest. So that's the part i'm confused by.
I setup the variable as advised to the best of my understanding.. but what I'm seeing is that change to both of the boxes so it negates the point what i would think is the point of the variable. to distinguish which one to touch. You will notice that when you click either of them the number goes from 0 to 1 and back to 0. this is the family variable. what I would imagine is the right result is that only the nearest one would become 1 and thus only that one would drag.
I must be doing something wrong because i would have though that the pick nearest condition would only effect the nearest object be effected, but a familiar variable seems to apply to all of the boxes in the family.. but then i don't know how i could distiguish boxA from boxB..
I disabled the distance because it made things act a little strange. by that i mean i could drag things sometimes, but not always. there did seem to be some distance behavior involved, but it didn't exactly make sense.
Thanks!
Caleb