Camp Menu a la J-RPG

Right. So I'm getting ready to start to work on my game seeing as I have enough resources to do so. Though, there's something I cannot get my head around completely, and that is the camp menu. If any of you have ever played a Final Fantasy game, you'll know what I am talking about. The camp menu is where you manage everything you have, from characters to the items you equip to game settings. Now, I am not sure how to go about this in C2. In other makers, like MMF and CC, you have an object that you show a layout inside of a layout, which makes this pretty straight forward if you know what you are doing. C2 does not have this option, and I don't know how to go about doing this really. The thing is, that when a camp menu shows, all game kind of pauses and only the camp menu is active, this is not my problem really, the problem comes when you get out of the camp menu. See, when you exit the menu, the game goes right back to where you were, nothing changed, everything is the exact same way as when accessed the camp menu. This is my main problem with this. The best way and effective ti make a menu like this would be to break it into different layouts, but the problem is, going back to the game without anything changed or altered. How would I achieve such a thing in C2?

I've never been a fan of switching layouts for stuff like that. All the menus I use in my game are invisible layers that switch in and out as needed. If you wanted to switch layouts, and then switch BACK and have everything the same as it was before, you'd have to waste so much time saving all the data and resetting positions and variables... it just isn't worth the trouble. Using layers is much easier.

The simplest method would be to use the pin behavior, and have the menu items, either created/ destroyed, or made visible/ invisible.

That with toggling variables to Boolean comparisons, and using timescale for individual items should be pretty straight forward.

Thanks a bunch for the answers. :)

Yeah... I thought about that, that it was gonna have to be in the layout itself instead. I thought maybe it could get messy that way, but seeing as I would have to save all values temporarily each time I access the menu, this way seems much more effective. Also, you think a "Sub-Layout" object will ever come to C2?

Hard to say given the one in CC was, well... pretty bad.

newt: Oh it was? Heh, I didn't know that.

This also rises the question... the battle system. I guess that too has to be all in a different layer? I think that sounds insane, but I might of course be wrong.

That depends on if you have a bunch of scrolling going on.

If so I would go to different layout. Plus you have to optimize for the number of objects in a layout. Terrain, menu, etc can add up.

newt: I don't think there will be much scrolling, since this is a turn based like battle system. Maybe some parallax in the background, but very few actually. Between all together, I do not think it will reach the 500 objects at one time on screen. Also, I can leave the parallax idea out if it will complicate things. Also the idea of a different layout for the battle screen sounds attractive... I was thinking in this case, I should save the player's XY to some global variable? May even the NPCs as well? Also, the layout they were last before accessing the menu?

Global variables should work nicely, I'd stay away from global objects however.

newt: What's wrong with global objects? Doesn't the player need to be a global object?

It just complicates things imo. No reason to have the player sprite in a menu layout, etc.

newt: Ah, no no. I don't play to use the players sprites on the menus. Only artwork.

Thanks for yer help. It helped clear my mind on this.