The editor window

The editor shows one project at a time. Started without a project, it opens the project manager. The first time a project opens, the editor opens its default scene; after that, it reopens the pages that were open when you last closed the project.

Panels and pages

The window has three panels:

• Project, in the middle, holds the project’s page and every page you open. The project’s page shows the project’s name and folder, a button that opens the default scene, the Game menu’s commands, a list of the project’s scenes, the project’s settings and the Project menu’s commands.
• Assets, along the bottom, lists everything in the project (see Assets and importing).
• Console, beside Assets, shows the editor’s log. Its chips (Debug, Info, Warnings and Errors) show or hide each level, the search box filters the lines by text, and the bin button clears the log. Ctrl+C copies the selected lines.

Double-click an asset to open it in its own page, a tab beside the project’s page. Opening an asset that is already open brings its tab forward. Scenes, prefabs, materials, shaders, meshes, textures, images, fonts, particle effects, animation graphs, animation clips, skeletons, input maps, GUI documents and style sheets, sounds, sound cues, audio bus layouts, collision shapes, environment and post-process profiles, heightfields, terrain, vegetation masks and scripts each have their own editor page. Any other asset opens as a form of its properties.

A scene page has its own parts: the hierarchy of its entities, the viewport and the inspector, with an Animation panel that opens below the viewport. See The scene viewport.

Closing a page with unsaved changes asks whether to save them.

Arranging the window

Drag a tab to dock it somewhere else, or drop it away from any dock target to float it in a window of its own. The Assets and Console panels can be closed; View > Reset Layout brings back the default arrangement.

The editor remembers each project’s arrangement, its open pages and the active one, and restores them the next time the project opens.

The menus

The commands below are the menus’ own. Shortcuts are noted where a command has one by default, and every shortcut can be changed in Edit > Preferences…, on the Shortcuts tab.

• File: create new assets, Save (Ctrl+S), Save As…, Close Project and Exit. The new-asset list is the same as the Assets panel’s New menu, but an asset made from the File menu goes into its type’s usual group, such as Materials or Meshes. Close Project returns to the project manager, and is there only when the editor was started from the project manager.
• Edit: Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y), Preferences… and Export Templates….
• Project: Project Settings…, the native code commands (Add Native Code…, Build Native Module and Reload Native Module), Export… and Report Resource Memory, which writes the loaded resources, by type, to the Console.
• Build: Cook All and Rebuild All for the whole project, and Cook This Asset and Rebuild This Asset for the active page’s asset (see Cooking).
• Game: Play runs the game in the Game tab, and Play New Instance opens another Game tab beside it.
• View: Reset Layout, Profiler and Profiler Record (see The profiler), Command Palette… (Ctrl+Shift+P), which finds any command by name, and Screenshot Editor (F12), which saves the editor window as a PNG in the screenshots folder of the editor’s user data folder.
• Scene: the scene page’s commands. They cover simulating the scene, the gizmo’s modes, framing the selection, the orthographic view, entity markers, the animation panel, the viewport tools, creating and editing entities, prefabs, and Set as Project Thumbnail.
• Help: About, which shows the editor’s version.

Preferences

Edit > Preferences… holds your own settings, shared by every project. Save keeps your changes and Cancel puts them back.

• Appearance: the theme (dark or light), the accent colour, the density, Reduce motion, the UI scale (50% to 200%), and Axis views are orthographic for the scene viewport. The window shows appearance changes as you make them.
• Export: where export templates are installed.
• Agent access: whether the editor serves the open project to agents over MCP, and its port and token.
• Game preview: the resolutions the Game tab offers on this machine.
• Shortcuts: every command’s shortcut. Click one and press the new keys; Esc cancels and Del clears it.
• Game audio: Hear every Game tab. It is off by default, so with several Game tabs running only the focused one is heard.
• Navigation: Parallel navmesh bake, which bakes navigation meshes on several threads.

Preferences are saved in editor.settings.xml in the editor’s user data folder: ~/.local/share/assiduousengine on Linux (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/assiduousengine), %LOCALAPPDATA%\assiduousengine on Windows and ~/Library/Application Support/assiduousengine on macOS.

Project settings

Project > Project Settings… edits the project itself (its Project.xml), with a section per category:

• General: the name, the native module, and the engine version that last saved the project.
• Startup: the default scene, the startup script, the default input map and the loading screen.
• Audio: the default bus layout.
• UI: the default UI font, other UI fonts and the GUI sheets.
• Display: antialiasing (MSAA), the render width, height and fit, the window’s width, height and mode, whether the window can be resized, and the screen orientation.

The project folder

Path	What it holds	Keep in version control
Project.xml	The project’s settings	Yes
Content/	The assets, as XML	Yes
Sources/	The files you imported	Yes
Cooked/	The cooked assets the game loads	No, the editor makes them
Editor/	Your editor state: layout, open pages	No
.cache/	Thumbnails and the cook’s records	No

A project that uses Always Export also has export_roots.xml, and one with native code a Native/ folder; both belong in version control. The editor does not write a .gitignore, so add Cooked/, Editor/ and .cache/ to yours.