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dachadacha

Interface tour

The editor is laid out around a viewport. The explorer on the left lists the project. The inspector on the right shows the selected object.

The editor window: the explorer on the left with the Scenes tab open and an actor called Player selected, the viewport in the middle showing a level with the grid drawn over it, and the inspector on the right listing the selected actor's components.
The parts of the editor window. The window title is the name of the project directory.
  1. Explorer. The scenes, templates and assets of the project, one tab each.
  2. Action bar. Adds, cuts, copies, pastes and deletes nodes in the tree below it.
  3. Tools. Hand, pointer, zoom and template. One tool is always active.
  4. Tool options. The options of the active tool.
  5. Viewport. The selected scene, drawn by the engine.
  6. Inspector. The selected object, the systems list and the project settings.
  7. Bottom bar. The cursor position and the grid cell under it.

The viewport runs the engine

Section titled “The viewport runs the engine”

The viewport is not a preview drawn by the editor. It is a Dacha world. It runs the engine’s own Renderer and CameraSystem over your scene’s actors. Sorting layers, opacity and blending modes look exactly as they will in the game.

That world does not run your code. Your systems and behaviors do not run, and no collision is resolved. You edit the scene here, and you watch the game itself in the browser tab.

The view you pan and zoom belongs to the editor. It is not the Camera the game looks through.

Debug layers

Section titled “Debug layers”

Some parts of a scene draw nothing: a collider, a checkpoint, an actor that only carries data. The debug layers draw them in the editor only. Turn them on in View → Settings.

Colliders outlines every Collider in the scene. The color comes from the collider’s debugColor, and green is the default.

Off

A part of a level in the viewport: walls, ground blocks and obstacles, with no outlines.

On

The same part of the level with the Colliders layer on. Every wall, block and obstacle has a green outline with a light green fill.
A long wall shows up as several separate colliders.

Markers draws an icon for each actor that has an EditorMarker component. Add it to a spawn point or a checkpoint, and you can see and click that actor in the viewport. The game ignores EditorMarker.

The viewport and the inspector. In the viewport a yellow flag icon with a selection box sits at the top of a shaft. The inspector shows the selected actor, Finish, with an Editor Marker component whose Name is finish and whose Color is yellow.

The Finish actor and its EditorMarker.

The bottom bar

Section titled “The bottom bar”

Reload Required appears when you add or remove a sorting layer. The renderer builds its layers once at startup, so the editor has to reload to pick them up.

Settings

Section titled “Settings”

View → Settings holds the grid, the debug layers and the theme. The grid step there is also the step that Snap to Grid uses.