Ahh, knew I was missing something! Thanks.

I'm making a nonlinear game with a very Zelda-y perspective. There are a lot of different weapons, pets, etc that the player can acquire at various points in the game. There's no screen scrolling, and my current plan is to make each screen its own layout for both maximum modularity during the design and building process (for example, if I want to rearrange the map quickly, or pinpoint exactly where some Player-NPC interaction is breaking) and ease of multiplayer integration (nobody has to sync if they're not on the same layout).

Whenever I look at proof of concept demos people upload for C2, the usual thing seems to be that various common assets (for example bullets, the sword that comes out when your player hits the 'attack' button, etc etc) are placed outside the visible portion of the layout.

However, that would swiftly become a royal pain in the arse for a game like mine; if there are 30 weapons and 20 pets the player could potentially acquire at some point or another in the game, it would be extremely annoying to have 50 of those objects sitting outside of the viewable area of the layout on every single layout (not to mention that adding a new weapon then means then going back and copy-pasting that weapon into every single layout I've previously made). I assume there's a simple solution for this or something basic that I'm missing, but looking through the C2 manual I'm not immediately seeing it.

Is there a way to set some objects as 'global' across all layouts? Thanks for any pointers you guys can provide!

Hi all,

Sorry to revive an old thread, but what ended up happening with this?

-Someone on the last page suggested getting someone to make a custom behavior for Sonic the Hedgehog-esque movement. Has that been done? If not, for someone with the relevant coding skillset, what would be the time required to program one? Could other open-source reimplementations of Sonic the Hedgehog physics save time for making that happen?

-Running the demo on a 5-year-old desktop computer today, it appears to have no slowdown at all. When people talk about it being poorly optimized, was that prior to the changes in how C2 handles collision? Or were the concerns more about performance on mobile devices? With the exception of a couple of bugs (in a lot of cases it seems like Sonic has troubles starting a roll down a curved slope) this seems like something you could reasonably build a Sonic fangame off of. MMF2's might be easier to work with, but MMF2 doesn't have multiplayer support...

Fair enough! For my part, I'm going to keep building my game; it's almost certainly a multi-year project, so if I come back a couple of years now with a game that's fully finished and ready to go except C2 is missing a feature required to make it all work, I suppose we can see where we're at then.

Hopefully some of it are things that even if we get no further additions could be kludged into the current system inartfully but effectively if there's a good reason to (like saving a given player's characters in a permanent database).

"Most of the people who come in don't end up completing a project" is simply the reality of selling a game development engine, not anything unique to multiplayer games. Most of the people who come to C2 looking to make a single player game don't finish a project, either; game development is simply an onerous task even if art and coding are handled and you're free to design your heart out.

But more importantly, if the flood only happened when the initial post went up, that's even further indicative of a marketing failure; it's not like there are any fewer people out there thinking about creating an online game, and it's not like more than a tiny fraction of them have tried out C2. There's still a high flow of enthusiastic types checking out Xtremeworlds or Eclipse or whatever other D-list solution every day. I've yet to come across a single complaint on those sorts of forums against C2's multiplayer -- the problem is simply that very few people know you exist in that space.

Thanks so much to both Nesteris and Unnatural20 for great and very informative replies! I really appreciate it.

My only concern with dropping the solid property of the wall temporarily is that if my game is multiplayer online, it might allow other players to 'walk' through the fence while the acrobatic move is active. If I have to pick one object being solid or another, the player being invulnerable might be preferable to allowing other players to 'cheat'.

Could this be solved by simply not updating the state of the 'Acrowall' object for multiplayer? So it's fully client-side, and an acrowall being 'non-solid' on my client has no impact on other players? Or are things like that forced to update/sync when using multiplayer?

Ashley , allow me to offer a contrary perspective on why uptake has been slow -- Outside of the people who already use Construct 2, nobody at all knows you offer it.

I've had a particular game concept in my head for a very long time. The concept is multiplayer by definition, you can't really make it singleplayer and it wouldn't be any fun in that environment. Every few months, I would relentlessly google to see if an engine was available yet to hobbyist non-coders that would allow me to complete the project.

It was only on a whim, after exhausting virtually all of my googling, asking in relevant forums, etc., that I hopped onto the Construct 2 forums to think about single player projects (after not having paid any attention to you guys for years) and discovered through a random blogpost of yours that you had added multiplayer support several months earlier.

If you guys want projects to make use of it, there are so many things you could do to actually get the word out. Banner ads on sites: "BUILD MULTIPLAYER GAMES WITH NO CODING -- CONSTRUCT 2!", advertising on places devoted to systems like RPG Maker and MMF that also attract hobbyists that don't attract multiplayer support, buying a clickbait-y site http://www.buildmultiplayergames.com/ and redirecting it to Scirra.com. Press releases sent to Kotaku and Escapist and MMORPG.com and all of the other major gaming news outlets.

The issue is not that people don't want to build multiplayer games with C2; it's that you built a Killer App and then haven't marketed it in the slightest to the people who might be interested, you've only looked at the people who use C2 already and their adoption of it.

This is not an attack or even a criticism really, just an explanation. I am the quintessential example of someone who has been *dying* for someone to make what you've made here, for ages now. Your target customer for a feature you spent tons of time on, someone who was relentlessly googling to try and find an engine that does what C2 now does. And I couldn't find it by searching, I only happened upon it randomly on a lark.

> Hmm... if the player temporarily turns non-solid, would that prevent the player from being hit by bullets/projectiles during that stretch of time? That would be a major problem...

>

That could be a bonus side-effect of doing an acrobatic move.

Could be, but would be less than ideal.

Is there a way to 'override' the player's movement and position, including collision with walls, without changing his ability to interact with bullets/projectiles?

I'm a little shocked we can't do that currently -- it seems like such a basic, easy-to-implement feature that is important on so many levels.

Hmm... if the player temporarily turns non-solid, would that prevent the player from being hit by bullets/projectiles during that stretch of time? That would be a major problem...

What's been accomplished already is quite impressive, and as far as I can tell is far and away the best multiplayer support available to non-coder hobbyists like myself.

Are additional features planned in 2015 to flesh out multiplayer support, particularly for people aiming to create multiplayer games that take place in worlds with a degree of permanence?

What's already done seems like the hardest part; things like querying databases on a dedicated server for player character information, or allowing people to use AWS for dedicated game hosting, are significantly easier than what Ashley's already done.

And as much as many of us might like to ridicule those who attempt such grandiose projects without knowing what they're getting into, features that allow C2 to pitch itself as a "build your own MMO" option would likely result in a serious influx of cash from people rushing to get into the engine, both for Scirra itself and for the plugin and asset sellers who would rise up to serve that audience via the C2 marketplace.

So, I'm wondering -- what's the road map for C2 multiplayer going forward into 2015?

Newt, why would any of the features in question be 'not doable' in C2? How does the GUI Lib issue relate to this?