Scene and Details

The scene is your game's world. It is built with pieces: blocks with a shape, size, position and material. A scene holds up to 2000 pieces; the Outline panel shows how many you have.

This page names the controls of Full mode. Simple mode has the same Place pieces and Details panels and a shorter viewport toolbar: see Simple mode and Full mode.

Place pieces#

The Place pieces panel (Alt+1) has a search box and four parts: shapes, project models, prefabs and material.

Basic shapes#

Five single pieces: Box, Ramp, Wedge, Sphere and Cylinder.

Project models#

Below the shapes are the project's 3D models, the ones you made in the workshop or brought in with the importer. They are placed like a prefab and come in at their natural size. If there are none yet, the category says so and offers Import…. How they are used: Models in the scene.

Prefabs#

They are ready-built pieces. The editor comes with twenty, in four groups.

The prefabs you save yourself appear in one more group, My pieces: see Content browser.

A prefab that needs a rule to work brings it along. When you place the first Coin, for example, the editor adds the rule that collects it and tells you: "A rule was added to make it work. See it under Rules." Which ones bring a rule is in No-code rules.

In the other two kinds of project something else happens:

How to place#

The panel itself sums it up: "Click: pick and place in the scene. Double click: drop at the center. You can also drag it onto the viewport."

1. Click a shape or a prefab.
2. Click the scene. The piece rests where you clicked, snapped to the grid.

While you place, the viewport shows "Click to place · Shift + click to place several · Esc or right click to finish".

Material#

Below the prefabs is Material. It applies to the selected pieces and to the next ones you place.

A piece's Details › Material also has Texture (project image), with Repeat and Pixelated: an image from the project that covers the piece. Draw opens that image in the pixel editor. A model brings its own materials and does not use these.

A ready-made material is a combination already made: Wood sets the madera color, the mate finish and the franjas pattern.

Selecting pieces#

You can also select from the Outline.

Move, rotate and resize#

The viewport toolbar has four tools. The last three draw a handle over the selection.

The colors are always the same: red for X (left and right), green for Y (height) and blue for Z (forward and back).

Axes and snaps#

To the right of the tools are the handle settings.

The arrow keys, PgUp and PgDn nudge the selection one grid step.

For an exact value, type it in Details.

Duplicate, copy and delete#

Duplicate, group and delete also have their button on the viewport toolbar.

Grouping#

Grouping joins several pieces so you can select and move them as one.

1. Select the first piece.
2. Holding Shift, click the others.
3. Press Ctrl+G. To separate them, Ctrl+Shift+G.

A click on a grouped piece selects the group; a double click, only that piece. In Details, a grouped piece shows the name of its group next to its own.

The viewport views#

Over the viewport, top left, there are two dropdowns.

The first is the camera view:

The Top, Front and Side views show the scene with no vanishing point: they are for aligning pieces.

The second is the shading: Lit, Unlit or Wireframe. Wireframe draws only the edges and lets you see what is behind each piece.

At the top right of the viewport are the other controls:

How to move the camera is in A tour of the editor.

Editing and Game#

The Editing | Game switch on the viewport toolbar changes which camera you look through.

• Editing is the editor's free camera.
• Game is the real camera the scene is played with: "This is what the start of the game looks like". It lets you check the framing without having to play. In first person it follows the player's eyes and does not draw the spawn point mark. In an open world, both cameras start above the terrain, looking at where the player appears.

Next to it, the view type menu picks which camera the game is played with: Third person, First person, Isometric, Top-down (from above, tilted), Side (2D platformer) or Flat (2D from above). The last entry, More parameters in Details…, takes you to the Details panel.

What each view is and which controls the player uses in each one is in Kinds of game.

The Outline#

The Outline panel (Alt+4) is the scene tree: the groups with their number of pieces, each piece with its shape, the zones, the spawn points and the lights. It has a search box by name, shape or tag and, at the foot, the piece counter.

A click on a row selects that thing; a double click also frames it.

Each row has two toggles:

Ctrl+Shift+H shows everything hidden. When something is hidden, the foot of the Outline also offers a Show button with the count.

Details of a piece#

With a piece selected, the Details panel (Alt+5) shows everything that defines it, in categories that fold. At the top it has a search box: type "bounce" and only that property is left.

In a blocks project, a loose piece also shows, above Transform, the Program with blocks button: see Blocks mode.

Physics#

Automatic movement#

A piece can move by itself, with no rules.

A selected piece that has automatic movement is shown moving in the viewport, so you can check the path without playing. The Moving platform prefab is a piece with Back and forth already set.

Tags#

A tag is a word you put on one or more pieces so that a rule can talk about all of them at once: "when the player touches anything tagged moneda". The five coins of the tutorial share a single rule thanks to their tag.

Difficulties per piece#

The Easy, Normal and Hard boxes decide which difficulties the piece exists on. It lets an obstacle be there only on Hard or a helper only on Easy.

To see the scene as it is on one difficulty, use the All dropdown over the viewport.

Several pieces at once#

With several things selected, Details says "N things selected" and offers Group, Ungroup, Duplicate and Delete, the difficulties they appear on and Tag for all. The handles move, rotate or resize them all together, and the material in Place pieces applies to all of them.

Details of the scene#

With nothing selected, Details shows the settings of the whole scene: it says "scene · nothing selected".

Game view#

"Which camera this scene is played with. The "Game" button on the viewport bar shows it as is; "Play" uses it."

Here are the View type and its parameters. In third person they are Field of view (degrees), Distance to the character, Tilt (degrees) and Smoothing (0 to 1); other views have their own. They are explained in Kinds of game and, for those who write the scene by hand, in Scenes.

Player look#

If the project has models, Player look appears: Player model in this scene draws the player with one of them. See Models in the scene.

Tile maps#

The Tile maps category lists the scene's maps, with their kind, their size, their layers and their tiles. Each one has its Edit button, which opens it in the workshop's map editor, and New map creates another one. What you paint comes back into the scene when you export it or play.

Environment#

Adding a zone or a light#

At the end of Details is Add to the scene.

Both are also in the Scene menu. A selected zone, light or spawn point shows its own fields in Details. On a spawn point, Start the game here makes it the start; the rest work as checkpoints.

Next#

• Content browser: save what you built to use it again.
• No-code rules: make the pieces do something.
• Kinds of game: the views and their parameters.