Thanks for the information. It looks like your method Linkman2004 is the best way to handle simple XML using events. With a little more code, it might even be able to handle more complicated XML, and so I may end up using a solution like that.

That said, I'm curios as to whether I could use a third party python library for XML manipulation in Construct. I'm not overly familiar with the capabilities of Construct's python scripting system.

As an alternative I'm still considering building an XML plugin, as it might be the easiest way to get standards compliant XML manipulation, and I would just like to start building plugins in general. My current thinking is that if there is an open source XML library that is suitably simple to work with, I might be able to drop that into a plugin, and then add some simple action/condition/expression code to make its features accessible from Construct.

Granted, I've never built a plugin for Construct before, so if anyone has a recommendation for an XML library that might work, or an estimation as to how difficult the process of making it a plugin will be, I would appreciate the advice. Thanks again for the feedback.

Is there a way to write and read XML files from a Construct application, and if so, what is the best way to go about this?

To my knowledge there is no XML plugin, but it seems like python script might provide a roundabout means of handling XML files.

I'm also considering building an XML add-on, as I believe I have all the necessary tools, although I'm not sure as of yet how much work would be involved.

Any advice is welcome.

Firstly, thanks Davioware and Newt, I appreciate the info and suggestions. I may end up using comments to store partial lines of code with shortcuts as per your suggestion Newt. That is, if that's what you meant by shortcuts. I think that would certainly help, though some of the modular projects I've built would still require considerable work to copy over.

The reason I am interested in copying code blocks from various projects is because I would like to build and test several game engine components in their own project files, so that when I start building a game, I can incorporate only the components that I need. For example, if I have a level editor, a camera system, a path finding system, a function driven effects system, and a custom function driven particle system, all as separate projects, I may only need the particle system and the effects system for a breakout-style game.

At present, I have built a level editor with which I can build levels at runtime, and write and read formatted level files. I also have a project that contains a camera system that has several tracking modes, and quite a bit of code to make complex camera behaviors easy to manage at runtime via the function object. It seems like there must be some way to copy such modules into a new game project, without having to rebuild all that code, and without alternatively having to build all the modules in one single bloated project file that precludes the saving of successive module versions as their own independent files.

I may be wrong, but I thought at some point I had read something about reusable code in Construct that was similar to the mechanism that MMF uses to support reusable code. Wherein if you copy code from a source project to a target project, any object referenced in the code that is not found in the target project will appear as a "placeholder" object, until you right click on it and specify an object from the target project that is to take its place. Construct is a pretty amazing tool, so I figure, it either already has something like this, or that it is coming soon.

In any case, I appreciate the feedback thus far, That said, if anyone has any ideas that would allow the modules to remain as separate files, that would be preferable. I'm looking into and experimenting with this as well, and so I'll post what I find out.

Is there any way to reuse code from multiple separate prior projects without recreating all that code from scratch for each new project?

I think I may be doing something wrong here, but sometimes when I copy events from one project into another, all the events and conditions are pasted, but all the actions are missing. As near as I can tell, this occurs even when both the source and target layouts contain matching objects. Is there a particular way I should set things up to get the actions to copy along with events?

I'm not sure if this is a bug, so I figured I would mention it here first. It seems that if I apply a family to any object in the layout editor, the event editor's object browser will permanently switch from displaying normal icons (32x32) to displaying small icons (16x16). Further more, it appears that opening any .cap file that makes use of families will also elicit this behavior. If multiple projects are open in Construct, the shrunken icons effect is isolated to only the projects in which families were used. Within an affected project, all layouts will exhibit the shrunken icons effect, even if only one layout includes a family assigned object. I don't know of an option to set the size of the icons in the event editor's object browser, so to my knowledge there is no way to get large icons back after using families. That said, I'm still relatively new to Construct, so I may just be overlooking something.

At any rate, does anyone have any recommendations for how to get large icons and families to work together, and or what I should do with the above information, if anything?

I am considering building a level editor, and I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to what objects or methods might be worth looking into. To be a bit more precise, I am looking to build a level editor that has the following characteristics.

1: Supposing that I built a game that included this hypothetical level editor, an end user should be able to build a level from within the game application, rather than Construct. (This may be obvious, but I just wanted to clarify what I meant by "Custom Level Editor".)

2: From the game application, I would like to be able to save and load level files.

3: A level file should be able to store object instance xyz positions, as well as private variable values.

As far as I can tell, the main options I have for storing level data are the Text object, the Array object, the Hash Table object, the INI object, and possibly some strange usage of the save /load game actions. Of those, I'm leaning towards the Hash Table object at the moment, being that it's far faster to read from and write to than an INI, and will likely be significantly more flexible than an Array or the save/load actions, in terms of what I can store and how I can store it. Obviously there are drawbacks as well, and so before spending a lot of time on it, I figured I'd see if anyone has any advice or suggestions.

Thanks for the info Manontherun and Newt. Private variables and families sound like good workarounds for the time being. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't simply making some obvious mistake while copying. Thanks again.

Is there a way to copy and paste a set of overlapping objects such that they retain their original relative z-order? That is, if you have objects "A", "B", and "C" with the z-order sequence of A:1 B:2 and C:3, then is there a way to perform a copy-paste such that the newly pasted objects are ordered A:4, B:5, C:6 ?

It seems that whenever I copy and paste a set of overlapping objects, the z-order of the pasted set of objects is scrambled. The nature of the scramble seems partly dependant on the number of objects copied, and possibly the order in which the objects were first created. I may just be doing something wrong, as I'm still a bit new to Construct.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Thanks Lucid, that's exactly what I was looking for. I can't believe I missed the completed add-ons section the first time I looked through that area. Sorry about that.

At any rate thanks for the replies Rich and Lucid, and keep up the good work on your respective projects.

Take care.

Sounds good.

I just checked and I don't seem to have any object called fontsprite. I expect it can be found on the forums with a little searching.

With respect to plugins in general, is there any single repository of downloadable objects, similar to the sites that index extensions for Multimedia Fusion? Alternatively is there any place, or set of places, that you would recommend looking to find such add-on objects.

I know there is a section on the forum for plugins, but I am curious if there is any organized list or forum post that provide a simple way to see what plugins are out there.

Can an Edit Box be moved or resized at runtime?

I had planned to make an edit box part of a user drag-able panel, but I can't find a means of changing its size or position at runtime.

One method I tried was to place the edit box in a second layout (layout 2), and then use the layout object in the first layout (layout 1). The result is that the edit box appears on layout 1 at the same coordinates that it was placed on layout 2, irrespective of the size or position of the layout object on layer 1.