Since this will probably never be fixed, this is what I ended up doing...

((((displayheight - 114 - (displayheight /2)) - 114) * (1 - (LayerScrollRateY(bk.Layer) / 100) ))-(((global('oldyres') - 114 - (global('oldyres') /2)) - 114) * (1 - (LayerScrollRatey(bk.Layer) / 100) ))) + bk.y

Replace 114 with whatever half of your default vertical resolution is. Use oldres as a 'detector' for resolution changes (if oldres != display res, run the above math on all the 'bk' objects.

Anyways basically you put this family on any object that is ever on a parallaxing layer. If an object already has a family, just apply the above math to that whole family. If the object is on a gameplay layer, it'll know and won't move anything. It also doesn't require any variables or anything like that either.

Obviously this isn't an ideal solution and might not be appropriate for a lot of projects who might require certain backround objects not to move, but it's what ended up working for me.

Obviously this is an incomplete solution too, so you'll need to figure out the details of your implementation. If anyone really cares, maybe I'll make an example file to show how I'm handling things.

Just use the file plugin. It has a condition just for that. I use it too for the same reason!

Kicks is helping me out by the way.

We're trying to change how parallax works so it's calculated from screen center rather than the top left corner, which would make things like scaling the the window easier while still having everything behave. So any help on this would be MEGA APPRECIATED.

Also some other things too, but thats te big one. :O

The file disappeared when the forum software changed. I think the old files are archived somewhere but I have no idea how to get to them. Honestly that's super old code that probably isn't worth using anymore. It doesn't even run right on the current version of construct in case I recall.

I'd say Custom Movement is my go-to for customized movement stuff now.

Sadly I don't have a great way to explain to you how to do things like vertical platforms effectively but there should be some better examples somewhere for that sort of thing

Personally I'd be thrilled with an update that was a one liner that was either

"Layer Offsets work"

or

"Option to calculate parallax from screen center"

(in fact, if any of you can actually build construct and just hack in center based scrolling with no options or anything, i'd love you forever even if it wasn't an official, tested release. This sh*t is driving me up the walls.)

Workflow is definitely important. If you're basically drawing your levels and filling them with unique assets, you obviously HAVE To prototype. If you're working with tiles? Of course the disadvantage there is an area someone prototypes might not work as well as expected when 'arted' over. If your workflow involves tiles, you can make good looking places and make sure the composition works out while testing other things. Ultimately everyone needs to find their own workflow that works for their project, but I'd say as a rule, try and prototype in a way that both assures you a level will be cool both gameplay wise and visually. Some people can predict what all the collision rectangles will look like when painted over, some can't. Do what makes the most sense for you.

Boxy can be fine. You can do a lot with a box. U shape and C and C shaped levels, Spirals, circles, Vs and ^s, Each screen of IWBTG and VVVVVVV are boxy. It's what you do with the box that is the question! And yeah IWBTG can be fun to learn some of this too because I think a lot of the graphical stuff is hilariously weak (I was just sorta finding my feet with that sort of thing) and the tiles I made my self are kinda awful, but the aesthetic SHAPE of the screens and world are still pretty good. The only thing it has going for it is screen composition, since the elements within those compositions look like they were made in MS Paint. If you're careful about where you put things, even if you're doing it in a boxy manner, you can get surprisingly good results!

I build as I go. Full on. Generally I start with a thematic idea in my head and have some idea what 'shape' I want a section of game to be. A sine wave of rooms going both up and down? A 'stepped' progression? Just going straight up? I try and vary these shapes because that maximizes the effects of spatial memory in the player. Flow, pacing and aesthetics are also almost 'fractal'. So while the whole stage might have a shape, each seciton has a shape and each interaction has it's own pacing curve and blahblahblahblah, you don't actually explicitly DESIGN all this, but you FEEL it to make sure the level feels good and is varied. Since I tend to do rather long 'levels', I find it best to not plan too far ahead. I need to have a good feel for how one section of a level feels to make the next. Things rarely come out how I plan anyways.

Priorities for each game vary but you want to have uniqueness of movement and uniqueness of aesthetic. Aesthetics doesn't mean you have to have new assets in each section, but it means you should try and use the assets you have differently. I find that what I'm ultimately doing a lot is adjusting ratios. If I have a foresty level with some ruins/bricks, some part of the level will be all forest, some of it some brick and one more ruins heavy. Mix that up with things like the direction the player is traveling and a few set peieces, and you can have very memorable stages.

If you're doing longer stages, go look at Castlevania 1 and Castlevania 3 on the NES and look at how much they do with so little. You can head over to vgmaps.com to look at some of the techniques old level designers use.

If you're working smaller, go look at Super Meat Boy, which is surprisingly varied for many of the reasons I describe, despite rarely having unique per-stage assets. If you wanna go per screen, look at my game (I Wanna Be the Guy) or VVVVVVV.

Gameplay is obviously a top concern, but there is no good standard advice I can think of. Conversely, most amatuer games I play suffer from horridly bland level design, even on a movement and visual level. Everything is just samey and bland. Don't be one of those guys.

Yeah I'm pretty much ready to put Spritefont to the chopping block too. I wish I could just get normal pixel fonts to display without any subpixel induced sh*ttiness. Anyone got some code sittng around they'd like to share about doing this manually? I pretty much know how I'd go about it, but reinventing the wheel seems less than ideal if someone else has done it better and smarter.

It'd at least be nice if parallax was calculated from screen center instead of screen of the screen corner, so that parallax behavior would then at least be consistent. But yeah, this is a big issue I think for several of us are trying to finish up large projects. :(

I'm going to bump this again and be annoying because I think this is really important and solves a lot of aspect ratio/parallax issues that are really gross to hack around and seems like it should be very basic functionality.

I dunno if C1 will get another update ever but it sorta feels worth being a pain in the ass about this.

Continuity only matters in fluid motion. Lets say you're making a game where you shoot when moving and when you shoot you hold your gun out. If you have two different animations for this and the run cycle resets when you start shooting, people will notice and will be bothered by that. There is an illusion of fluidness that is being broken.

In general people are okay when breaks when they hit buttons, as long as the transition is jarring enough. 2d fighting games with chain combos have no in-between between comboed moves. This is surprisingly not weird, because each hit sorta causes a key point where one animation can end and go into another one. There is no lingering transitional weirdness -- that's just removed. If you ATTEMPT to transition, you gotta do it right.

So like, if your character had a turn around animation but when it finished, the girl was reversed, people might notice that. It's a sudden shift in weight that betrays the animation that's just going on. If you just have the animation flip right away, it's too sudden to even notice. The whole composition is changing at ones. The leg example above only happens because you have an expectation of where the legs should be due to implied motion.

Now if you did do a turn-around animation, you could do it simply by having him turn away from the camera, hiding the subject and removing the mental expectations, or have him turn toward the camera in like 3 frames and having her switch sides during it. Even if it seems nonsensical, you're doing it that way more so the shapes of the woman and the colors the eys are tracking don't suddenly jump from one place to another. In fact the reason a sudden flip is okay is because all the shapes are in the right place. Physical logic has been defied, but that's not as important as compositional logic.

This is an extra long answer just to say you're totally okay.