Hmm..then if i understand it correctly, the events I originally posted should work. I'm picking instance A via a family, then trying to pick instance C which is in a container with instance A. I'll post a cap when i'm home to see if it's a bug or not.

Ah got it, thanks deadeye. For some reason I thought it picks the sprite in the family that matches the condition.

I have 3 sprites: A, B and C all in a container. Sprites A and B are in a family called "blue." I have a condition that picks "blue" when it's private variable health=0. In a sub condition, I try to pick Sprite C when its private variable state<100, but it seems to pick every instance of Sprite C matching that condition, not just the ones where Blue=0 and C<100. I don't understand picking 100% but i think that should work...or is something wrong with that logic? I'll set up a cap if that explanation is confusing.

Thanks for any help.

I didn't even check the bone behavior because i didn't see it on the changelist...it does seem to have been fixed. Awesome!

Davio: The bullet is actually independent of the animation. It fires from the center of the character to the mouse cursor, so it can be 100% accurate. You are right though that i'm trying to hide the fact that he doesnt have 360 aiming directions so the gun can be slightly off from where the bullet is actually going.

Lucid and Madster: Thanks for the benchmarks. Madster I got your specs from the hardware thread.

Thanks guys!

Deadeye: Thanks for the heads up. I've seemed to narrow it down to spawning instant hit bullets. If I turn off all the effects, i still get the framerate drop. Maybe I'm spawning too many at the same time? Too many collision checks?

Genesys: I guess i got carried away, I'll turn down the effects on the smoke.

I've updated the first post with a new engine demo. Check it out for the download link and info.

Aeal: That may be true, but you don't need a bunch of internal text files, just use one global timeline object. Organize each cinematic, or chunk of text, into a timeline within that object and its pretty manageable. I have a lot of in game dialogue and I found it easier to use than an ini file. Maybe just preference.

Why not just use the timeline object for dialogue?

I put "trigger once" into a sub-event of "is global variable 'create slider'=1" and moved the actions into that sub-event. That seemed to work. It might also work to change 'create slider' back to 0 after its created.

Thanks for all of the replies. It's been awhile since I posted anything but I have been working hard on this game. I put up a new video on my website showing one of the enemies in the game. Here's the quickie link:

http://louisferina.com/zenphoto/indie-games/Bugs/explodervid.flv.php

Theres a "walking backwards" animation in there just for you deadeye.

It does kind of suck that you can't optimize a sprite a bit further by ignoring alpha. The biggest sprite in a game is usually the background sprite which also usually doesn't need an alpha channel. Even going further by having a 1-bit alpha option would help a lot especially for pixel art games.

But like deadeye said, it is the way it is and you just have to work around it.