Visual Guides for Construct?

We can activate and align to a grid in Construct, which is great.

However, one limitation I keep hitting while working on screens, GUIs, and level designs, is a very simple visual method to assist in aligning objects: guides.

Every design application I am aware of, both for traditional print as well as for (mobile) screen design, offers some simple method to add visual guides to the layout view. Guides are almost essential for GUI work, and Construct does not offer these. This has been quite frustrating so far in my work done with Construct, and I cannot believe no-one would have thought of adding visual guides to Construct before.

So, opinions, thoughts? Ashley, have guides ever made it to the to-do list, or even entered your thoughts while developing a visual tool for game development? It seems like such a basic fundamental requirement.

Guides would be super helpful! I actually use sprites (shaped as thin lines) on a dedicated layer to build guide systems. Other times I import a full screen picture with the guides already drawn in it and use it as reference.

I need guides to estimate and keep right proportions in my projects. You know, golden ratios, rule of thirds, fifths etc...

Guides would be super helpful! I actually use sprites (shaped as thin lines) on a dedicated layer to build guide systems. Other times I import a full screen picture with the guides already drawn in it and use it as reference.

I need guides to estimate and keep right proportions in my projects. You know, golden ratios, rule of thirds, fifths etc...

You could try Cranberry's SquareBoard plugin if you just want visual guides. I assume Rayek you mean 'active' guides that snap sprites to them, like the existing grid does. That would be very helpful. Along with many many features that I can think of, including some that I've requested

codah you mean the Grid plugin. While it's useful, it's not providing any visual help on irregular and/or non squared shaped setups. A snapping guide system would be ideal for all intents and purposes, but if pixel perfect alignments are not required then a simple drug & drop guideline system will do just fine.

Hi guys,

The Grid plugin or the C2 original Grid cannot be used like the visual guide lines, I also had to create my own transparent background guide lines as images and add them to the layout view, other times I place an image reference for the correct positions, and put the sprites on top of it with a lower opacity, once all the sprites are in place I just delete the image reference.

But all of this is frustrating because it's additional unproductive work, a basic guide lines without snapping could already be a huge update, I would really appreciate something like that, also would be great if it's available inside the animation /sprite image editing mode.

codah you mean the Grid plugin. While it's useful, it's not providing any visual help on irregular and/or non squared shaped setups. A snapping guide system would be ideal for all intents and purposes, but if pixel perfect alignments are not required then a simple drug & drop guideline system will do just fine.

oh ok that was the old name. Yeah I know it's minimal but some forum reader might find it useful

But sure alignment guides would be nice but I'm hanging out for other features before that. All our needs are different but for me, I get by with the existing align by edges (top, left, bottom, right) and spacing horizontal/vertical, etc. (@Ashley please add align by centres.. take you 5 min )

Well, it would be a relatively marginal effort to implement a basic visual guide system in Construct - and potentially simplify our lives tremendously for all sorts of work.

I have had real issues aligning objects in levels and for GUI work in Construct. It took unnecessarily lost minutes of effort to get ground object to align exactly, GUI elements to be aligned, and so on.

Expanding on this, Construct is also missing basic object alignment commands, and object snapping (snapping an object to other objects).

There is definitely room for improvement in the general workflow in the editor which would benefit every Construct user.

Construct is also missing basic object alignment commands

There are basic alignment facilities, similar to Dev studio, Eclipse etc.