For me it's a pure arcade game - if done well it's both a test of skill that's fair, there's non-stop action and spectacle, and it's paced quite nicely for a quick go. This reminds me that recently I have really enjoyed Skyforce 2014 on Android - it's a more western approach to shmups cross-bred with the necessities of the modern age, like opening for IAP use, etc. Yet it's still a decent shmup at heart as well - with pattern memorization, ever improving firepower and nice difficulty curve.

Speaking of the problem - perhaps try to reinstall cc?

I wouldn't be too surprised if it has to do with one or two bugs (?) that seem to exist within C2's rendering engine:

I have submitted a bug report and, hopefully, something will come of it.

Well, you have to cover it up with something - this might as well be black rectangles on another layer that's above the layer where your sprite is.

Sounds very doable, since you don't have enough reputation to send private messages, feel free to contact me on some9000 gmail.com with your contact info and an offer, if available. I can guarantee quality presentation and serious approach in general.

Ah, tilemap - yeah, a loop with a check sounds like the way to go.

Here's a little example to get you going

Interesting read, Ashley - made me wonder - would it be practical to have, for example, eye-candy layers - within which objects have no impact on anything else - no collisions, no bounding boxes, no physics, either limited or no behaviours - the system just knows it needs to draw this layer. For stuff like particles and such perhaps the positions of the objects there could be calculated in parallel and then it all gets rendered when we get to that layer in zOrder.

(Do)DonPachi series - I think it has one of the best "feels" of a Shmup ever - when your pulse weapon switches to a laser that just razes weaker enemies - it's awesome. Classic arcade fare, you pick up power-ups, use bombs and there's no health bar as western Shmups tend to have. There's also plenty of challenge with cool bosses and lots of bullets.

Edit: Not to mention best boss warning ever:

Well, I managed to do a little something - edit the inline Shader so it acts very much like what you would expect a "proper" selection to look like in an application:

It can also work with the thicker line we have had so far:

Feel free to comment on which one you would prefer.

That loss of opacity between objects with straight edges is a side effect of a C2 bug (I guess) that hopefully can get fixed.

More progress to come soon, hopefully.

That is quite weird - a plain animated sprite shouldn't bring your fps down - especially if it is off screen.

Would you mind placing a separate one in a capx and sharing it to see what it's like then? Is it still slow without any events? If so, could you share that capx? For science

Well, obviously it's what's different between the first two and the last one - is it Shaders, more objects, more complex events, wrong events (like something firing every tick) something else? You can use the debug mode to check your object counts and cpu usage to try and find the culprit.