Hey Ashley, C2 Suggestion

Hey do you think you could make a "(don't) create object at start of layout" option like Multimedia Fusion 2 has so we don't have to make needless code to destroy various objects outside of the layout in the margins? This feature might seem pretty useless, but it was actually very handy in MMF2. Hope you can do it and that you want to do it now that it's been brought to your attention.

Objects outside of the screen are not rendered and don't effect performance.

I believe you may be doing what I did for a while when I started; Placed all possible objects outside the layout that I will require.

The objects only need to exist on one layer (I have an ObjStore layout which is unreachable through the navigation)

Cheers,

James

The best way to get around this, I've found, is to have an 'object dump' layout that you never run, but has an instance of every object on it so C2 knows their initial parameters. It works great for me.

The best way to get around this, I've found, is to have an 'object dump' layout that you never run, but has an instance of every object on it so C2 knows their initial parameters. It works great for me.

I do the exact same. Works well

Same here. I have a layout called sandbox that I use for this type of stuff.

I didn't know that you could do that. I will try it out. Thanks.

Or just give the objects the 'Destroy outside layout' behavior.

Thanks for the protips. I think my friend who is the other programmer misunderstood my question when he said we couldn't do it by placing all objects in a unreachable layout. At any rate I've let him know, this is a great help and that's much better than MMF2's way of doing things.

I gotta say that it does seem amazing how we have all normalized what is, for me, the only irritating aspect of the C2 interface! Why can't C2 assume that all objects we create in the objects bar then might be included in the game at some point? I mean, I'm not putting them there for the fun of it ;) - then we can create instances of them without having to first put them into a dump layout?

Yeah forcing a default instance is kind of weird. The error when one doesn't exist mentions how it'll be fixed soon. That was..2 years ago?

It's an architectural quirk. If no objects exist anywhere in the project, C2 doesn't know what to use for its properties. E.g. if you don't have a Text object anywhere in the project and you try to create it at runtime, what font should it use? It could fall back to a default I guess, but then if no objects exist in the project, the only thing you can do is create blank default objects. If there is at least one instance in the project, C2 uses the properties from that object.

Is it also safe to assume when creating new instances that C2 uses the properties of whatever the latest instance was?

I think it uses the earliest object's properties.

Here's a neat suggestion, the ability to Right-click an object and select "Set as default object". That would be useful, I sometimes look around all layouts to find the object that "Create Object" uses the values from, would be cool to just right-click the object in the "Objects Layout" and set it as default!

I think, ideally, the "default instance" would be the object in the menu...

Create object

is added to the menu (not the layout)

set object's default properties in the menu

drag instance into layout using default properties.

Then perhaps there could be a "set to default" button in the object properties which sets them to what they originally were when it was first created.

No object bank layout, no forced layout instance, no more questions!

MadFactory has a great idea there. It would make things so much less complicated.