I think I have figured out a way to do this without changing layouts. Thus avoiding a bunch of other problems I wasnt sure I could do with a multilayout design. Most importantly persistant levels. I made an inventory system which moves all of the objects off screen so I can have multiple backpacks, it took some doing but it works like a charm, I am thinking I can apply this same technique to levels. When you switch levels all of the level objects will be moved off screen and all ai disabled, then the player will be moved to a different layer and all of the objects will be recalled to their position in their corrisponding level. It's cumbersome but at least I'll be able to modify it and control it my own way. Hopefully the ton of sprites off screen won't cause any problems.

Does anyone know of any reason in particular my game may crash when going back and forth between layouts. The games getting pretty huge but I went back and tried this on earlier, smaller versions of my game and I am having the same problem there.

Basically I have 2 layouts, I load into one of them and I can switch to the other one once and then back again, the second shift to the second layout crashes me everytime, when I debug it says it may be a bug in construct, any suggestions?

If you have a specific object for the background to be considered the "aggro zone" all you have to do is use RTS movement on the baddies and have them move towards player if he overlaps that specific object. If you don't have a specific object for the background just make a small white tiledbg and set the opacity to 0. Shooting is just spawning a sprite with the bullet behaviour.

An the wasd thing has to be set under properties which can be found by clicking outside of the layout.

67 Events in three separate groups but game now supports an infinite number of Inventory containers that are Super easy to create, and best of all it never destroys or spawns a sprite. I'm going to test it for couple more hours but so far I can't find any big problems. I feel so much better now.

Actually I figured it out in a way that let's me keep all of my item data in the sprite itself, so each item is it's own entity that can exist in any box, I did it all with local variables, So far I can't find any bugs. Fingers crossed as I continue to add functionality. Basically I had a system that was about 40 events handling all of the differents items and whether or not they were in the inventory, I had to completely delete the entire group of events and start fresh, it was terrifying, that was about 12 hours ago, I feel way better now.

Okay this is getting pretty complicated. Currently my inventory is a layer with "emptyslot" sprites on it. If you drop an item on the inventory layer it moves to the nearest emptyslot. I wanted to create a separate inventory for my car too so I made another layer with empty slots and added several events to basically duplicate the actions of the Inventory layer. If you are adjacent to the car you can see the car inventory but if you are not the car inventory moves off screen.

This works just fine for 2 inventories but what I really want to do is make many different backpacks, cars and npc's that can all have there own inventory. Obviously this will become unsustainable quickly with my current system. It took me a day to works the kinks out of a second inventory layer. There has to be a better way to do this, I would love to keep the basic principles of the visual drag and drop inventory the same, but I would understand if that is impossible or extremely complicated.

Basically, It needs to be like the Bethesda games but instead of 1000's of containers I would only want to make around 30-50, you do not find items in containers, just on the floor. Also the containers would have to keep track of a couple of variables for each item, ie. health. The way I am doing this now is with private variable on the sprites themselves which are never destroyed when moving between ground and inventories.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to tackle this I would really appreciate it.

I gotta say Mr. Tulamide you have been a real help to me getting this project going. I think you have solved or at least explained every problem I have had so far. I really appreciate it, If I ever finish this game I will give you a credit as programming consultant, lol. Unless it ends up horrible and you don't want your name on it, which may be the case, but again thank you very much. Oh and yeah that worked.

No that works fine but it doesnt help if you add another sprite to the layer. If it spawns a sprite for example or you drag and drop it on there, it won't stay when you switch to the next layout. I can get it to do what you did, in the second layout it's as if the layer rebooted.

Sorry it took me a while to try this out because I thought I had decided on a different way of doing things. Now I want to have multiple layouts again but I cannot get this to work. The objects will not carry over to the next layout. The layer pops up in its original form but not with any of the sprites that have been added to the layer.

I have a very basic inventory that basically just looks to see whether an object is overlapping an inventory, on it's own layer. Is there a way to have my inventory carry over to the next layout?

Is there a way to create a separate doc to handle my items list or can I just make an event group for it?

Thanks alot, what I ended up doing is using the every x milliseconds. I set a private variable to 5 and every 10th of second the variable decreases by 1, you can only hit when the variable is 0, therefore, 2 hits per second. Works like a charm.