I'm working on a game that uses a dark blue background and a brown "landscape" inside a thin black border. The character Sprite watches for <touching (color: black)> to know that it has hit the wall. While debugging "travel" from one screen to the next, which I implemented by leaving the right edge, changing to a new background, then moving the sprite to the left edge, I noted some odd behavior: The Sprite detects that it is "touching" the black text inside the "Variable Display" box when it tries to pass under the display. In my game, it's a spaceship that raises shields and bounces away, (knocking it back to the previous screen). It took quite a while to figure out what the issue was...
It seems like these displays should be ignored by the sprites.
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The displays are on the screen (behind the sprites) so touching them is like touching any other object. It would be more inconsistent to have them be special cases. In fact, people have been arguing that they should be less special than they are---that variable displays should be spites with movement scripts and all the rest, with the variable display being just a costume, and the different types of variable display being costume changes.
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Sure seems like a bug if you didn't expect sprites to detect collisions with the "interface". To me it seems inconsistent to interact with a "sprite" that the user didn't make and can't control the appearance of (other than to turn off); I guess it's a case of "one man's bug is another man's undocumented feature".
Controling variable displays by being able to move them might be useful, but it would seem that that could be confusing to new users, some of whom aren't quite sure what a "variable" is.
I can fix the issue in my game by using a different border color, but users should be aware that they must also avoid using "<touching (color)> , where color is any of the colors in the variable displays...
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