Enabling motion blur on a per layer basis?

Is this possible? For instance, having a background layer affected by motion blur, while the foreground is not, or vice versa.

No, our implementation of motion blur is fullscreen display only. It would be too complicated to implement it on individual layers considering the way it works (which is by forcing the runtime to advance a series of ticks and merging all the drawn screens). It would not be possible to implement on two individual layers, and even if it were, it would run half as fast!

You could always make a psuedo motion blur effect... kind of like the Johnny Cage kick from the original Mortal Kombat game, where it basically shadows an image as it moves along. You could do this with a copy of your sprite that has the fade effect applied to it, and have your main sprite "spawn" the copied fade sprite as it moves along.

I will be making something similar for my characters "dash" attack, so if you aren't sure what I am talking about, check my thread in the Creations section in the next few days... It is on my to-do list for the next few additions.

I dont know if it's what your after, but it achieves an effect similar to what SoldjahBoy mention, but by using the plasma object to leave the trails.