Newb here! Can I work around copying my engine code and objects into every frame?

You could finish the engine and then clone the frame, so it wouldn't be that much of copying.

And for level editor: There are a lot of level editor examples out there.... look at nivrams page or create-games.com

A level editor is the best choice, you'll get dual experience from it and it makes your game much more modular. Then, if your community requests a level editor, you just have to modify some things and you're good to go. You also only have one level frame and any changes you make to the code apply to all levels. This can also set it up to make it easier to download and load maps from multiplayer if your game would support that.

Setting up a game engine in the Global Event Editor works, just very poorly. You can't use qualifiers, and you still have lots and lots of frames.

You could have the main engine in the global events part, and then have level-specific stuff on the specific frames.

That's still a bad idea because you can't use qualifiers. It's also a bad idea to make level-specific things; players often wish to see one-time-used things more than once.

Making your own level editor in MMF is the way to go.

You can't use qualifiers in global events? I thought that only applied to behaviors?

It applies to behaviors and global events.

using load level would be wiser, i crossed a node in my path where only a certain amount of active objects are able to run at runtime so more frames will be needed

Quote from path

using load level would be wiser, i crossed a node in my path where only a certain amount of active objects are able to run at runtime so more frames will be needed

Uou can change the maximum number of objects in a frame through the frame properties. By default it is set to 500, but you can change it to any number up to 20000.

I would suggest making a level editor, which can be pretty easy depending on the method you use to make it. I think there's a limit of around 2,000 unique active objects per frame but that limit is really hard to reach unless you get really really sloppy. As LB stated, it's quite easy to change the number of active objects per frame to 20,000 in limit.

I could be wrong, but if you really want to use multiple frames, rather than making a level editor, build your engine into the behaviors of global objects like the player object and such and make sure "same name and type" is selected for the global object syncing.

If you don't want to mess with making a level editor, you can always program the events into objects, and make them global. Though like already stated here you can't use qualifiers within behaviors in general. But through object naming glitch (apparently as they call it. But I consider it a feature. :)) you can set it up for objects behaviors to use qualifiers. That's basically what I'm doing. As I don't have any clue on how to do level editors besides building the stage map in the frame itself.

N64Mario, have fun abusing a glitch as a workaround to use code that could crash for no apparent reason

Well..... If MMF3 will have the option to use qualifiers within object behaviors, I'd make use of it. Or an update to MMF2 that allows qualifiers within behaviors, I'm willing to give it a shot.

So far I haven't had any glitches happen for no reason. Whatever the glitch was probably happened because of something else. I imagine the glitches for no reason would happen if I went to do extensions or something. Otherwise I am not sure which glitches to look for.

You can code your entire engine in the global event editor, yes you can't use qualifiers and, depending on your game, that means you can get around that just by adding some extra lines of code which is less work than making a level editor (which isn't as quick or easy as you may think). For certain kind of games having no qualifiers could be a spoiler, so try it before on a single frame and if it works then copy the frame events to the global events if qualifiers are totally needed I would still go for the code copying/pasting method over the level editor (personal preference).

Also level-specific stuff is not uncommon, is the equivalent of level scripts, things that happen only in one frame no need to have them on your global code.

I've tried the level editor route it didn't work for me, by the time I was done making the editor I had spent a lot of time and energy that could've been better used on making the actual game. So think about it, some may find it a good choice, we are all different, to me it was pointless and counterproductive. Just sharing my experience.

There are plenty of ways to load levels without having to make your own level editor. You could store the levels in image files, where the RGB of each pixel corresponds to values given to a tile. You could do an ASCII map (Nifflas does this for his games now) and write your levels in notepad. You could also use an external level editor program, such as Tiled or Ogmo Editor and then parse the level files.