Multiple Overlapping Objects

Hey guys, just need a little bit of help on a game I've been working on.

The whole point of my game is to take pictures of a night sky, and you're basically rewarded for a picture that has the largest amount of things in it.

So I have randomly spawning meteors, stars, and a moon that follows a path. It's up to the player to try and time their photo correctly, and score the most points on it.

The screen is divided into 9 sections, and the arrow keys navigate around these sections. When spacebar is pressed, a photo is taken, and this is where I would want the score to be calculated.

The problem I am having is figuring how many meteors and stars are within the currently selected section.

I've looked at this thread, but there's one issue. My overlapping object is not circular. If I were to use this, I'd get a lot of false positives on if the selected screen is actually overlapping a meteor or star.

So basically, what is the easiest way to count up how many objects are overlapped by a rectangular object?

Here's the game if anyone is interested.

Thanks in advance.

It's actually pretty easy if you stop to think about it.

The guy is checking the distance from each object to a master object, therefore he gets a circle, since they're 300 pixels away from a point in every direction.

Your case is even more straightforward: instead of checking for distance, check whether objects are within a set of X and Y coordinates.

for instance, object's X position is greater than 0, less than 640, and it's Y position is greater than 0 and less than 480, you just covered a 640x480 rectangle in the top-left corner.

Easy isn't it? Rectangles and circles are the easy part, it gets a lot more complex once your area is some weird concave irregular polygon, but it appears you won't be needing that.

You can check if the lens object is overlapping an object and then object.PickedCount will tell you how many it's overlapping.

moonStarMeteorOverlapping.capx (r99)

That's even better than my method.

Well thanks for the help, I figured there would be some expression or something simple I was missing.

Thanks Ramones and Fimbul, I really appreciate it.