The idea would be to use a final version of your background that does not contain the objects you have added to the scene. Also as Thomas mentioned you would not be able to apply effects to them such as transparency or shader effects, or parallax scrolling.

Do you mean: you want to apply a ripple effect to the sea/water image/animation? You can apply ripple effect to scene objects. However there is no effect for generating reflections. You could create another image or animation for the reflection though.The process would be something along the lines of:1. create you image or animation.2. import image or animation into a scene object.3. add the shader toolkit script to the script tab of Visionaire Studio & leave the script as a definition script.4a. create another script & add this script to it...[code]function setObjectEffect(i, eff) shaderAddEffect(eff) shaderRemoveEffect(eff) shader_effects[eff].num.strength=1 bind(eff, "time", field("shader_iTime")) shaderSetOptions({{shader = shader_effects[eff].num(), comp_dst=5, comp_src=4 }}, i)end[/code]4b. To add/replace an effect you can create an execute a script function & add something along the lines of this to it...[code]setObjectEffect(1, "ripple4") -- this would add/set ripple4 effect to index 1 of the effect table [/code]5. To add an effect to a scene object (this will affect any sprites or animations associated with the scene object) you should create an [b]at begin of scene[/b] action for the scene & then create an [b]execute a script[/b] action containing something like so...[code]Objects["object_name"].ShaderSet = 1 -- replace object_name with the name of the object you want to affect & replace 1 with the index value of the effect you want to access.[/code]I guess it will still be kind of complicated, if you have no prior understanding of programming/scripting. But it's about the best I can offer at the minute.

1. You have to copy/paste the shader toolkit script into the script section of Visionaire Studio. It is required once because the shader code is not coded internally into the engine like in the construct2 engine, which means that anyone who has a decent grasp of the C programming language or GLSL can edit, modify, improve or write their own shader script & functions, or you can just use the standard functions that have already been written into the script by SimonS. I added a few functions & modified certain functions inside of the toolkit, but Simon did all the heavy-lifting (so to speak).A large majority of the existing shader functions have been documented & can be found under the script index section of the wiki. I have provided working .ved & resource examples for most of the functions I've already documented. I haven't got round to documenting them all yet mind.2. Here's your first lesson: LUA is actually a name, not an acronym or an abbreviation. Lua is the Portuguese word for "moon". In regards to your question: how much time does it take to learn Lua script? well... I guess it depends on the person. If you have any past programming/scripting knowledge such as java, python, c# or even basic html, then it shouldn't be too difficult to learn. There are plenty of examples on the wiki & there is loads of tutorials, documentation & examples that can be found by searching on google or wherever.3. I'm afraid I can't answer this, as I'm not familiar with the AGS scripting language. Besides, you don't really need to learn to code to develop a commercial game with Visionaire Studio. I was told that one of Daedalic Ent. early award winning games "The Whispered World" was developed with virtually no scripting at all. There was a little bit needed for the config.ini file etc but that was about it.The thing with Construct2 is that it is very limited in what you can do. Sure there are loads of nice pre-made features available as action parts (or whatever they call them), but you are limited to those action parts & the parameters available for those action parts. I believe it does have support for java script extensibility but I'm not sure if that allows you to extend upon the existing actions or whether it's just for coding in a few new things or whatever (I've not really looked into it all that much). Most game engines however, do require a basic understanding of programming or programmers logic. The basic premise of Visionaire Studio involves an [b]if then [i]else[/i][/b] kind of logic, in regards to the action parts, which still falls under programmers logic.P.S: Visionaire Studio was never intended to be used for anything other than point & click adventure games. Construct2, Löve2d & Game Maker Studio etc are geared towards multiple genres of 2D games, instead of 1 or 2 specific genres. Having said that: one of the ideas/goals behind the new GUI Simon is working on is to allow the creation & development of more game genres & to increase usability & work-flow. Less floating windows, more drag & drop & more parameters as well as a more appealing visual style for the IDE in general.

To be honest there's things I don't know about Visionaire Studio, such as all the key shortcuts - actually I don't know if the devs even remember them all either as I don't remember finding anything on the old wiki documenting shortcuts. I also know very little about the particle system, nor the 3D character model support - although the particle system is documented in the wiki, but it is getting replaced/overhauled at the minute, so I don't know valid it will be after the update.I think the new video tutorials by James & Andi are a good start on how to do things in Visionaire Studio. The tutorials by Andi are a bit lengthy though as they are more like a development v-log as opposed to a strict-themed tutorial, but they are interesting none the less & quite informative.The problem with trying to explain how to do certain things with Visionaire Studio, whether it's with action parts alone, lua script or a combination of both, is that there are multiple approaches & methods for everything. I think people that follow in-depth guides will not really bother learning/trying to figure out things on their own or develop their own methods, solutions & bad habits for getting things done.Here's a quick example: buttons in a game menu could toggle active/inactive state by swapping images, toggling animations, changing the opacity, applying a shader warp effect, sliding in/out some kind of background thing or even changing the scale or rotation of the image/animation via lua. There's lot's of methods that could be utilized to achieve each of the things I just mentioned above.

Cheers for explaining that Simon. :)I did mean to mention that everyone on the team either have full time jobs elsewhere or are engaged with other things, like university in Simon's case, or the CMS/website company that Thomas (Marvel) runs, etc...I'm currently helping develop a game & I have stuff I have to do at home too, so my time is more focused on those things, instead of the engine documentation.Simon did make a good point about the writing of the documentation too... It is very time consuming, especially having to think how to phrase things in a way to make it easy enough for everyone to understand & then going over & over the content again to make sure grammar/spelling is correct & that it sounds ok. Also the diagrams & screenshots also take a little while to do; especially if they contain annotation over the top of them explaining various things. To create a screenshot I need to open the editor, print screen, open photoshop & then paste the image into photoshop, crop, edit & export, then upload which probably takes 5+ minutes per image.The most recent page I wrote which was one about recommended image formats for Visionaire Studio & along with a mini-guide to encoding/conversion/exporting your images to .webP format (with screenshots) took me over 20 minutes to write & that was only a small page.The few tutorials I have provided in the wiki, took me hours to create & write as I provided the .ved & resource files as well as a step by step tutorial for what I did.The few shader function examples that are currently on the wiki in the script index also have .ved & resource files that I created & provided as examples, all of which probably took me anything from 20 minutes to over an hour to create. There was actually more examples before but an error occurred a few months back & we lost quite a few of the wiki pages. The dev that handles the apple stuff (as Simon mentioned earlier) also helps me with wiki programming & has since added an automatic backup system to the server so we don't lose anything again. :)As I mentioned before: I mostly focus on the Lua side of the Visionaire Studio. I also recently spent a lot of spare time sorting out the new wiki themes. David changed us over from the basic theme to the bootstrap framework, which I then wrote the code for the theme changer & the style sheet code, which took me about a week or so.