[Suggestion] Updates to objects

Form objects

On focus - When a form control gets focus this will trigger true.

On focus lost - When a form control looses focus this will trigger true.

Has focus - When a form control has focus this will trigger true.

This is inspired by a 3rd party plugin capable of doing this, so thought it would be good to add so its part of the standard form controls, since its possible.

Collision object

This is not a functionality in C2, so its more of a suggestion.

The idea is to be able to add an empty invisible collision object instead of having to use sprites, which is the normal way of doing it now as far as I know. But doing this uses a lot of memory for no good reason. So what this object would do, is to make it possible to specify an area kind of the same way you would set up a collision mesh on a sprite, but this would be done in the layout, instead of in the graphic editor. The object would work in the same way as a sprite would when it comes to collision detection, but wouldn't be able to hold any form of graphical information, thereby making it possible to use more complicated collision solutions that wouldn't eat up memory for storing empty sprites.

So basically the object simply keep track of a collision mesh, maybe with the ability to manipulate it at runtime and whatever other functionality could be found useful.

Rotate objects

The general idea is to extend the rotation of objects. As it is now they rotate around there origin. So adding two new options could be very useful, I think.

Rotate around imagepoint - Instead of rotating around origin, you can choose whatever imagepoint on the object you like and it will rotate around that point. (Could maybe just replace the normal one, as it does exactly the same. And the origin could just be set by default.)

Rotate around position - Same as above except you can specify a X,Y position and the rotation will happen around this point.

Screen resolution

A way to get more control over the resolution when the "Fullscreen in browser" settings doesn't cut it.

Get screen resolution - The ability to get the screen resolution set in windows/OSX.

Set screen resolution - The functionality to change screen resolution to suit what you need. Like you can in pretty much any modern computer game today.

On screen resolution change fail - Will trigger if the change fails.

On screen resolution change done - Opposite of when it fails, will trigger when the resolution have changed successful.

Form controls

Disable tab - Will exclude a form control from appearing in the tab index list so it can't get focus.

Delete object warning

This is an improvement or extension to the warning that you get when you want to remove an object from your project. Normally when you do this you get a warning telling you that it will remove all actions, conditions and expressions related to the object. Which is really nice, however when you are working on big projects and you might not recall all the places where this object might have been used etc. The removal can cause some serious problems if you are not careful and normally, at least for me I keep an eye on the number of event in the status bar to see if it changes when I remove an object and if it does I can undo and then check through the project to make sure that it wont cause problems before I do it.

What would be nice and since C2 already have to go through the project deleting the actions, conditions etc. when you press yes. Would be if it in the warning message wrote how many actions, conditions, expressions it would delete, so you would know what impact it would have.

I can't imagine that being a difficult thing as it already "scan" the program when removing it. So it could just "scan" and count the elements without deleting them before pressing yes.

Just a small extension that I think would be handy.

Support for multiple aspect ratios

The fullscreen in browser settings are really nice when you want your game to support several resolutions. However a huge limitation occur when you want to support multiple aspect ratios.

For instant the most common used ratios are 16:9 (1680x1050) and 16:10 (1920x1080), however there are no way, as far as I can see that you can make your program support both of these correctly when using "Request fullscreen in browser". And regardless of which method you use (Scale outer or letterbox scale) you are left with black bars either in the top and bottom using letterbox scale or only bottom using Scale outer. Since C2 can already support a single aspect ratio, extending this to be able to support multiple ratios would be a huge improvement I think.

As an extension to the former suggestions regarding "Screen resolution", it would be nice with the following.

Get system aspect ratio - Would return the aspect ratio of the system.

Extend the fullscreen browser methods - The ability to tell C2 to target specific aspect ratios, so instead of just "letterbox scale" it would be "letterbox scale - (16:10)", "letterbox scale - (16:9)" and so forth. These methods should also be available in the browser object when requesting fullscreen mode.

Bound to layout behaviour update

The bound to layout is a quick way to keep objects within boundary limits. However this behaviour runs into problems if objects that fits the layout are suddenly rotated. In this case the object will start flickering as it tries to stay within the layout. So a minor update to this behaviour could fix it.

Fit to layout - When this is turned on, an object will automatically scale to fit the layout in case it becomes to big.

Collision object

This is not a functionality in C2, so its more of a suggestion.

The idea is to be able to add an empty invisible collision object instead of having to use sprites, which is the normal way of doing it now as far as I know. But doing this uses a lot of memory for no good reason. So what this object would do, is to make it possible to specify an area kind of the same way you would set up a collision mesh on a sprite, but this would be done in the layout, instead of in the graphic editor. The object would work in the same way as a sprite would when it comes to collision detection, but wouldn't be able to hold any form of graphical information, thereby making it possible to use more complicated collision solutions that wouldn't eat up memory for storing empty sprites.

So basically the object simply keep track of a collision mesh, maybe with the ability to manipulate it at runtime and whatever other functionality could be found useful.

I like this idea and I agree.

Timer behaviour

Adding a few extensions to this behaviour would make it more complete and easier to work with.

Stop all - Would allow you to stop all timers running for an object, regardless of the tag.

Pause timer - Would allow you to pause a timer using its tag.

Pause all - Same as above but would just pause all timers regardless of tag.

Resume timer - Would allow you to resume a paused timer using its tag.

Resume all - Would resume all paused timers for the object.

Textbox form control

Some of the 3rd party textbox plugins have a select all functionality, so thought it would be handy to integrate that as a standard functionality to the textbox object together with a deselect all.

Select all - Select all text in a textbox

Deselect all - Deselect all text in a textbox

NW.js dialog tags

When using NW.js "Show folder dialog", "Show open dialog", "Show save dialog" and afterwards the triggers "On folder dialog OK", "On open dialog OK", "On save dialog OK" it would be very useful I think if it were possible to set a tag for these as you can with audio.

As it is now there are no build in functionality to specify which "On ... Ok" will trigger if you use several of them. You can and have to do this using manual variables, but would be handy to simply make it a standard option in the NW.js functionality, I think.

Quick navigating functions

This was an old suggestion made, that I still believe would be one of the most useful features in C2. So ill add it here for that reason.

The ability to Ctrl + Click (or whatever hotkey is useful) a function call to quickly jump to the where the function is declared.

Reset object variables

The ability to reset an object variables to their default values. Would be very helpful when working with for instant sprites that contain a lot of temporary variables for tracking things, state machines and so forth. Rather than having to do this per variable.

Reset variables - Will reset all variables added to an object to the value they were by default.

Smart family

This is not a feature in C2 so should be considered a feature suggestion maybe for C3.

This is basically a normal family, except that it will allow any combination of object to be part of it. An issue with the normal families is if you have features in your program that need to be the same for varies types of object then there are no other way than to duplicate code for each type.

How the smart family would work is to check for similarities between the objects added to the family and only those which are shared by family members would be available. Since for instant UID is available for all objects, it could be used, whereas something like "Angle" might not be, and therefore it won't be available.

Delete several local object variables at the same time

Currently you are only able to delete one variable added to an object at the time, would be handy if you could select several of them and delete them in one go.

Move several objects

I know this have been suggested a lot of times before, but ill add here as well.

The ability to select and move several objects at once in the projects window.