Interesting.

I think it's because "Pick by Evaluate" picks individual instances and doesn't include any instances even in a container that evaluate to zero.

Try using Mouse: Cursor is over "Sprite" to see the difference.

To use a container, click an object to view it's properties. You will see Container below Effects.

Now click Create.

A window will pop up asking you to add other objects to the Container. You can add/remove objects at any time.

When ever you create any object in a Container, Construct will create all the other objects in the Container automatically.

When any object in a Container is "picked", all other objects in the Container are also picked.

Strangely, that's a product of WebGL. Try turning it off for a moment to see the difference.

The "Text" plugin is included with Construct 2.

"he automatically rotates towards the center of the screen" I think something else must be causing this because 8-direction doesn't automatically rotate the object.

Tiles won't help you in this case because you only get a performance boost from tiles if you're using them to repeat more than once.

If you're using CocoonJS 1.3, the latest build of Construct 2, and physics objects, you need to turn accelerated physics off in the CocoonJS properties. It's defaulted to on but only works in CocoonJS 1.4.

When you say "program the custom behaviour", do you mean using the Javascript SDK? or staying withing the confines of the Construct 2 IDE.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the biggest problem would be the inability to control the number of draw calls. Which doesn't matter for any game type except this one.

Let's say for example; You have a map with 100,000 tiles. Since you're at the very top of the map, only 50 tiles are showing. No problem, Construct only draws the 50 tiles that are showing but doesn't draw the remaining 99,950 tiles that are outside the visible screen.

The problem is, Construct has to loop through all 100,000 tiles to determine if they're in the visible screen and looping through 100,000 tiles each tick is expensive.

Being able to control the draw calls mean you can limit the check loop to only loop through the maximum number of instances visibly possible on the screen at any given time.

Is my thinking correct here?

You can use the Fade behavior or you can simply use the "Set Visible" action.

Every object that can be displayed on the screen will have this action available to it.

Let's say I'm building a square room (top view).

This room has a floor and 4 walls.

The sprite version of this room is 256x256 (65536 pixels).

The tiled version of this room could use 2 tiles (each 32x32)

1 for the floor texture and 1 for the wall texture.

It would take a total of 5 tiles to build the room by drawing 4 walls and a floor with the tiles.

Is tiling "free" and would the tiled version be roughly the equivalent of displaying a sprite containing 5120 pixels? (5 32x32 tiles).

Thanks.

I don't believe you can alter the Layout size in real time. It would be best to create a Layout of maximum size in the editor and limit how far you can scroll.