Yes that is basically what I meant.

I think this probably just comes down to a convenience vs performance decision... just like in normal programming languages.

The tools I have built on top of the C2 Array allows me to do basically the same thing you are doing except all through indexes (and arrays of UIDs pointing to more Arrays for hierarchies) instead of string / hash lookups... so I do not do any loops at all which will make it run faster than your plugin will... the con to my tools is it took me months to build them up as I was working on a game before they got to the point where they are today... with your plugin people can get the immediate usefulness of the plugin with the sacrifice of some performance.

Your tool should probably be used by people to get their game up and going quickly and only switch to something more efficient like indexing via the C2 Array if they need to squeeze out more performance after doing tests.

Yann Good lord sir...

I encourage you to at least try my plug in and offer constructive criticism on it before giving me a hard time for being symanteclly incorrect.

Your plugin looks interesting and would probably be helpful to a lot of people who do not want to dig in and learn how to use the Array.

I will check it out myself to see how it compares (pros and cons) with the tools I have built for myself on top of the C2 Array.

With my current method of using the C2 array my column names are C2 instance variables and so they show up in the C2 intellisense and when I change a variable name it goes through all the events and updates the name in all the places where I used that variable... with your plugin is that possible or not because you are referring to everything with strings of text?

++What Yann said.

Arrays are much more fundamental than "collection classes" which is what most people who just started coding in the past 10 years think of when they are talking about lists of things... collection classes provide a lot of convenience features like lookup by field name string or index...etc.

Attached is the capx from "bolosaur" on his other thread () with changes that use the three dimension array in a manner that might be useful to him... of coarse you can use the C2 Array in many different ways because it isn't a "collection class" but an array with various utility methods added on.

[attachment=0:r8aknghi][/attachment:r8aknghi]

[attachment=0:35rsixyn][/attachment:35rsixyn]

"FormatNumber"

RegexReplace(Function.Param(0) & "", "(\d)(?=(\d{3})+$)", "g", "$&,")

"FormatCurrency"

RegexReplace(Function.Param(0) & "", "\d(?=(\d{3})+\.)", "g", "$&,")

Ok so now I uploaded another capx "BrokeAgain" version...

This one just applies the "Fix" to the second physics sprite called "Box" and now the pausing has no effect again... strange.

*** I just noticed something though... in the FIXED capx I added a second physics sprite... it pauses also even though I am not settings its time scale at all? How can that happen?

I'm also curious about this. Maybe... keep everything in one family and set their timescale to 0? And then have the UI elements not be affected by that? I'm not sure, would also appreciate a solution

See this link... ( I reported a bug, that was then shown to actually work if you use the physics settings correctly)... This will allow you to pause just individual objects (and disable all the event groups for the game objects) to stop the game while in the dialog.

If you set the physics stepping mode to 'Framerate independent' then you can set the object time scale.

Awesome answer Ramones!

I have attached a new capx that uses your suggestion and it now works!

It is not working in my game for some reason, but since this sample capx works it must be due to some other logic in my game... more work to do.

Thanks for the answer to this problem!

I am not going to upload my game.

The question is basically this:

How can I freeze time for SOME of the game and not other parts?

When the UI closes and I unfreeze the game ALL of the actions that were paused (frozen) need to continue right where they left off like in any professional game.

So if the player was right in the middle of a multi jump sequence (with the physics behavior for movement) and I use this method to pause... when the player exits the inventory will the rest of that physics jump sequence continue right where it left off?

Lets say I have a game with an inventory dialog.

When the player opens the inventory the game needs to be paused.

However I also have animations and other things going on in the inventory window that requires the "time scale" to not be zero.

How do I freeze the game, but not the dialogs?

That is an interesting solution. Thanks.

However I know from my own experience that this isn't really the same thing. As the headline says I am looking for a "convenience" feature. Sure it is possible to take the time to recreate an object and ALL of its dozens of instance variables and other properties then do the object replace, but that is too time consuming to be considered "convenient".

I guess "cloning" the object would make it faster, but every time I use the clone tool the settings on my behaviors go back to default...so then I have to manually "clone" those.

Before I would do that I would just open up that XML file and do the replace there... much faster... but also not really a feature built into the tool either.

Thanks for the idea though.