UID TO ANYTHING - Utilities Tools (Construct 3 Addon Plugin)

UID TO ANYTHING adds a bunch of quality of life features to Construct 3 and solve the most annoying issues of the engine.
With this tool, you can act on your objects, and to get/set their properties, expressions and variables without picking them first  !

For example, if you want to get the X coordinate of an Instance from its UID*, you can just use the expressions UIDTo.X(InstanceUID) anywhere in your eventsheet, even in event blocks where you didn't pick this instance or didn't even reference its Object Type !!

*UID are the Unique Identifiers of your object instances. It means that this number is guaranteed to be unique and associated to only one instance in your game. (even objects from different Types or Categories can't share the same UID)

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One of the best aspect of the Construct Engine is without a doubt its no-code features allowing us to make game without programming. It is relying on a picking system that is great in many situations, but which can also terrible and tedious to use in common situations. We end up doing extremely puzzling tricks to do simple stuff such as picking the right instance we want to act on.

Let's keep no-code gamedev as fun as it should be :

• no more picking trouble !
• additional ways to avoid code duplication ! (This point is detailed below)
  

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UID TO ANYTHING allows you to act on your instances only thanks to their UID (Unique Identifiers), it comes with Actions, Conditions and Expressions supporting a bunch of features such as :

• Position
• Size 
• Angle
• Opacity
• Visibility
• ImagePoint X/Y/Z
  
• BoundingBox 
• ObjectTypeName
• TemplateName
• Hierarchy 
• Instance Variables
• Checking if a UID Exists

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Moreover, it also allows you to work around the most annoying limitations of Construct such as :

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1. No need to create big Families for everything :

❌In Construct, the only way to share logic between objects is to create a dedicated Family and put all those objects inside this Family. The issue is that you end up creating gigantic Families such as "Everything" or "AllSprites" just to create common logic you'd like to reuse. You need to manually add every single objects you'll ever create in those families because of this. (Which is error-prone, easy to forget and a bit stressing to work with to be honest)
✅UIDToAnything allow you to get and set the properties (and even instance variables !!), or to act on any instance only thanks to their UID (unique identifier). You'll be able to get rid of this extra Family set-up and the associated quirks in a lot of situations.

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2. Share same logic between objects from different categories (such as Sprite and Text or Spritefonts) :

❌As we already said, the only way to share logic is using Families... but Construct 3 doesn't support Family containing multiple categories of Objects (such as Sprite/Text/SpriteFont/9Patch or TiledBackground). There is not a single way to achieve that in Construct. This is why this is so hard to create effective UI System. You can't use the same code to act on your Texts and on your Sprites , and even worse : the duplication gets exponential if you want to support more than 2 categories of Objects for your system.
✅UIDToAnything let you use the same Actions, Conditions and Expressions events for all your objects whatever their Object Category is. No need to duplicate your code anymore, which is useful in many cases, including when building your UI.

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3. Act on 2 object from the same ObjectType or Family within the same eventblock.

❌C3 Actions, Conditions and Expressions apply all the currently picked instances of the same ObjectType or Family. But it is pretty common that you want to act differently on 2 instances of the same kind within the same event block. Doing so usually implies weird tricks like duplicating your Families and resetting/redoing the picking within your block for each instance !
✅ UIDToAnyting allows you to act differently on several instances of the same ObjectType within the same eventblock. 

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I use this Plugin in almost all my systems in the SECRET ROGUELIKE™ i'm working on :
- From the AI system to my Inventory & Item system
- It also allowed me to create my own UI System only using no-code (The Construct Team acknowledge they don't plan to create UI system in C3 for now and they recommend using a combination of Eventsheet + Javascript + HTML + CSS instead but i don't want to use 4 different programming paradigms to create my Interface, only no-code is better)

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GOOD LUCK ON YOUR PROJECTS ! 💪

Feedbacks, Questions & Contact in my Community Discord
I'm also doing Construct 3 consulting, feel free to DM me if you're interested