I don't have anything super helpful here since it's a personal decision, I only ask that you please, for the love of god, stay away from the words "Monkey" and "Pixel". I can't take it any more! There's probably even a Monkey Pixel out there... (googling...) Yup. There's a game called Monkey Pixels and a company called Pixel Monkeys. Please help put a stop to this! </mostly joking></not really>

I'm pretty sure some Android devices, some iOS devices and WebGL have issues with images bigger than 2048. I've seen a 4096 sprite sheet work on newer iOS devices, but I think older devices have limitations. I don't know enough about Construct yet to know what it can output, but it might be worth the trouble to break your big images up into smaller ones to save yourself the trouble later if you decide to port it to other platforms.

OK, got it working. I'm indebted to you on two problems now, Ramones! I have to say that the community on these forums is super helpful and fast to react! They should have a badge for "props for helping" that users could give to their benefactors. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I got it working this time because I had an instance variable called "playerChatter" and just used Levels.playerChatter instead of Levels.Get("playerChatter").

The thing I was missing was that I mistook instance variables for keys in the case of a dictionary for some reason. Dictionaries seemed like a good solution to store static data like an in-engine version of a JSON file. Now that I'm looking at it, it seems that you can only set keys using in-game actions, so I can't set them up offline. And they must be in memory the whole time? Is that right? If that's the case, maybe I'd be better off using JSON or XML and loading them as I need them. Instance variables are easier, but it's a lame way to store dialog, and a waste of memory.

Thanks, Ramones! That makes sense. Although it seems like accessing the name would be basically the same thing (grumble).

For some reason, I can't seem to find the expression to make that work though. I see how to check the key on the family, but not "some generic object". After reading the Families section, this seems like it should work... but it doesn't.

<img src="http://www.gabemiller.com/images/c2function.jpg" border="0" />

Sorry this thread won't die. I think it's just down to syntax at this point though.

Thanks, newt. I get what you're saying about minification and the need to cut out the name... I'm not sure I understand your variable example though. Here's exactly what I'm trying to do for more clarity:

<img src="http://www.gabemiller.com/images/chart.jpg" border="0" />

I know the Family, I need to get the Dictionary Object so I can set the dialog to the instance variable value. I have been trying to store the Dictionary name to the global variable, which isn't working...obviously. I'd store its UID if I knew what it was...

How are you suggesting I use a variable to solve this? Am I missing a key ingredient? Thanks again for your help!

Thanks for the reply, vee41!

What is levelNumber in your example? It seems like that would still have to be a label of some sort. That's what I'm getting stuck on. If it's the IID, I have no idea what that is since it's created at run time.

I ran into the need for a getObjectByName() a couple of days ago trying to store spawn point names with doors. I was able to work around it by approximating a point and then using "Pick nearest to" to get the UID. Breakable if I change my layout in any meaningful way, but workable.

But now I'm in a spot where that won't work. I'm storing state data for my game in Dictionaries. 1 for each state/level (dialog lines, object positions, etc) with a naming convention. Since the dictionaries aren't physically in the layout, I can't think of anyway to detect them. Even if I could, I know the exact name of what I want and it seems like I should be able to just get that Dictionary by name.

something like: getObjectByName("Level_010").spawnX

I'm figuring that if there isn't a getObjectByName() function out there, that there must be an easy alternative to do this simple procedure. When I scraped the forums/manual/tutorials, all I could find was "no, you have to use the UID or IID". I'm not seeing how to do that in this particular case.

How do I?! <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Ramones! Thanks! UID was what I was looking for!

I just got my license and was excited about implementing families. Seems good for a lot of things, but I was kind of thinking about them like a class. I might be wrong about that though...

I have a character that can pick up objects, so I put all the pickup objects in an "objects" family. Then instead of having a separate function for each object I created a generic function for "pickupObject". Woot! The problem I'm having is that it doesn't seem like you can reference your particular instance once you discover it. I want to pickup when I'm overlapping an object, but I don't want to pin all the objects in the layout to the player at the same time.

Is there a way to get Objects.name or this.Object or something so I can pin just the object I'm overlapping with? I can't find anything like this...

What is pinning doing under the hood? I assume it is also some sort of every tick, set position sort of thing. Is it really less taxing?

I tried the pinning. Pretty sweet, but it's curious that it doesn't let you choose the preferred registration point. It just kinda gloms on wherever it happens to be. May have to rethink implementation...

Thanks for the quick reply, Rory! I was suspecting it was something about C2 that I wasn't realizing. The else did the trick. I mistakenly figured that once it found a true set of conditions that it would break out of the event after it ran the action. Wrong!

Also, great advice RE: the pin. I wasn't aware of that functionality yet, but I'll give it a try!