This release introduces the much anticipated Families system! If you're not familiar with Families from Construct Classic, they allow you to make events for groups of objects. For example, if you have three objects for enemies: "TrollEnemy", "MonsterEnemy" and "OgreEnemy", you can add all three objects to the family "Enemies". Then you can make events for "Enemies", and this saves you having to copy-paste the same events for each object. See 'Families.capx' in the examples folder for a demo. Families can be created and edited in the new Families folder in the Project Bar, shown below.
We have decided to make Families unavailable in the Free edition. We feel this is fair for our paying customers, since they deserve the most powerful features. We also think this is justified since Families are most useful when making large projects, and the Free edition has the 100 event limit which effectively prevents you from making large projects. So hopefully it won't be missed too much in the Free edition anyway. If you're a Free edition user, don't forget you still have until January 19th to get an early-adopter license at less than half price!
The Families system has involved one of the biggest overhauls of the Construct 2 codebase since the project started. It is also missing some further features we hope to be adding in the next few releases: Family Variables and Family Behaviors. We also expect it to take another few releases after that for all the issues to be ironed out and have everything working robustly and smoothly. So if you have important projects, you may want to hold off using Families until the feature has matured. We hope it won't be long! On the other hand, if you can't wait, give them a spin and let us know if you have any problems!