2 Newb Questions

Well.. 2 compound questions.

1. Project > Object Types.. say I have George as a type. But in the scene there are 555 Georges. How do I find and select these 555 George objects individually? Only visually, in the editor? Is there a list of them somewhere? [Can I hide or make some unselectable btw?]

2. Can we create prefabs? Like a collection of objects, and an interface for them, so I can tweak their values easily by accessing just one tab?.. And can we have a parent-children inheritance? Are complex hierarchies possible? Like GeorgeRedFast being a variation of GeorgeRed, which is a var of George, so you can give them defaults, but also individual values..

Thank you!

Not sure about the first one. I know you can click on an object in the project panel and it'll highlight all instances in a layout, but usually it only selects one of those.

As for the second, it sounds like you're describing families. Each family can have their own instance variables, and anything can be added to a family and they inherit all those variables. Adding a single object to multiple families gives that object all the variables from each.

So your object George could be in both the Fast family and the Red family, and gain attributes from both.

Dunno if that's exactly what you're looking for though.

Containers might also be useful since they can be used with Dictonaries and Arrays, but I've personally never used one in my projects yet.

V_M - each sprite has a UID which makes each one unique. You can also assign instance variables to them, then pick which ones meat a criteria. For example you can do...

on clicked object "George" -> Set George.selected to 1

so now only the George you clicked on has a "selected" variable set to 1 so you can do whatever you want with it separately.

1. In editor - Z order bar

2. Container/Family or if you like it hard, you can create prefabs without any of them but you need to create all objects in right orders so Engine process them in right order, but you need to handle all objects as they are same. Containers etc just make that handling easier for you.

Thx guys. I was looking for a more traditional and easy to use method of working with files, like a folder system, or a list. Something like Unreal or Unity or Godot have, or Windows.. or the Maya Outliner. And configurable assets with inheritance options, like Unity Prefabs, or Unreal Blueprints.

After chatting with people on the Discord channel and trying the free edition a bit, it became pretty clear that C3 is not what I'm looking for. I guess it's a bit like Unity Playmaker? You can do lots of things, all made simple, easy to use, but the engine is not designed to handle complexity.

Btw, I think the free edition is too limited, which doesn't allow people to properly try-before-buying. Some of the engine's functionality is off limits. Like the Z depth layers editor, which someone suggested I could use.. [And then I saw a video of what that is, and it's clearly not for grouping and selecting files.]

Having worked a lot with Unity over the years I can definitely say that C3 is not Unity. You are not going to put together a game like Rust in the C3 environment. And like any IDE, it has it quirks and peculiarities. But, C3 has it's benefits. To put together a game and get it to market you're not going to spend 2 years just learning the interface, nevermind C#. C3 fills a niche market primarily focusing on games that can easily be run on the limited resources of a cell phone or inside a browser. The other engines you referred to like Unity and Unreal, while they may do it, would struggle to trim themselves down to run on some of the hardware that C3 would do with ease.

They all have their benefits and downsides. You just need to figure out if any engine can create the game in your head in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of effort and support the widest variety of platforms.

Good luck.

Thx Fengist. Ideally I would love to use a streamlined engine like C3, but robust, and with access to in depth features, in case I need them. Depth and simplicity can exist in one package.

The problem is so many devs who decide to work on simple, streamlined apps, don't expect users to want to do serious production using them. Which is a pity, cuz.. sometimes a simple, streamlined, but solid, robust app, can be the perfect fit. Like Weta designed Mudbox for a specific task. Maybe game design is a lot broader.. but look, Unity is pretty simple on the surface too, it's really easy to create and manage content [what's not easy for me is visualizing a project in C#..].

Anyway, there's no good reason for not having a solid/robust way to group and list in-game assets. And prefabs / configurable assets at the core of the software.. I found C3's layouts and event sheets to be kinda like doing 2D animation in the old days, before animation timelines were invented. I mean, there are so many excellent examples of how other engines do things nowadays. C3 devs decided to reinvent and be original.. so the engine looks simple yet difficult to use. :D

I think maybe you're not looking outside the box. For example. Yesterday I downloaded a piece of software that was supposed to help me in crafting for another game. It was a Windows application. Now what I expected was something written in a 'normal' language with a 'normal' interface. To my surprise, this person created a desktop app designed for calculation in Unity? To take this in another direction, the reason I purchased C2 years ago was to augment another piece of software I had written in Delphi. I was able to take C2 and make an Android based teleprompter. So I'm not sure what your definition of 'serious' is but both engines have the ability to get just as serious as you wish. You can delve into C# or JS in Unity to make things work exactly as you wish and you can use JS in C3. If I can get the server tech working right, I'm in the process of building a game that, in theory, could host thousands of players... in C3. To me, that's pretty serious.

When I look at Unity I see an utter mess. For example, I read a tutorial on how to do something specific with Unity. What this skilled programmer did was attach 15 odd scripts to a whole host of objects creating 15 different places where something could go wrong. Debugging that was a nightmare. Was it structured? Oh yes. Was it a nightmare to follow... Oh yes. I rewrote the entire thing into one C# script so that I didn't have to play hop-scotch trying to get it to work. Now if this is how the magic of grouping assets works then I'm not impressed.

Furthermore, every single time Unity comes out with a new version, half the games that use it break. Read some of the dev blogs for games that use Unity. They consider it a major accomplishment to upgrade their code to the latest Unity version and those that don't succeed end up reverting back to a previous version. And that's damn near every version that Unity releases.

No one game engine is going to create every conceivable game. And even when you do find an engine you like, it's going to take some creativity in order bend and shape it into what you need. Many times, you'll be working with the limitations of the engine itself. Finding ways around those limitations and still accomplish your goals is what creating any software is all about.

Finding ways around those limitations and still accomplish your goals is what creating any software is all about.

Tru dat : >