Editor guide

The editor window is split into areas, as in Blender. Each area shows one editor type, such as Scene View, Hierarchy, or Inspector, and you can split, resize, and change areas freely. Every change to the scene can be undone.

• Projects
• Areas and layout
• Scene View
• Hierarchy
• Inspector
• Assets
• Preview and Play
• Code Editor
• Exporting a game
• Profiler and diagnostics
• Keyboard shortcuts

Projects

Start the editor from the engine folder:

./scripts/run_editor.sh

The Project Manager appears first.

1. To create a game, press New Project..., choose the parent folder, type the project name, pick a Template, and press Create Project. The templates are Empty 3D (a lit cube), 3D first person, 3D third person, Physics sandbox, 2D platformer, and Coin Run (a complete 2D game). The editor makes a new folder and refuses to overwrite an existing one.
2. To open a game, select a recent project or press Browse for existing project... and choose its folder.
3. Press Projects in the top bar to change projects later.

A new project contains its Cargo.toml, project.json, Rust entry point, main scene, assets folder, shaders folder, and build folder. See Getting started for what each one holds.

The top bar groups commands into menus:

• File holds project and scene files. Save Project writes the open Rust source and the scene. Save Scene and Save Scene As... write only the scene. The editor asks before it replaces a scene with unsaved changes.
• Edit holds Undo and Redo.
• View holds area and layout commands, UI scale, and text size.

Unsaved scene appears beside the engine name while changes still need to be written.

Areas and layout

Each area has a header with an editor-type drop-down.

• Click a header to select its area. A blue border marks the selected area.
• Choose the editor type from the header drop-down: Scene View, Game View, Code Editor, Hierarchy, Inspector, Project Settings, Console, Assets, Keyboard Shortcuts, Profiler, Render Settings, or Physics Diagnostics.
• Press ↔ to split an area left and right, or ↕ to split it top and bottom. Add Area in the View menu splits the selected area left and right.
• Drag the divider between two areas to resize them.
• Press × to close an area. The area beside it takes the space.

For example, to put Code Editor beside Scene View, select the Scene View area, press ↔, and choose Code Editor in the new area’s drop-down.

View > Save Layout writes the layout to editor_layout.json in the open project, and Load Layout restores it. Reset Layout returns to the default layout.

Only one Scene View or Game View renders at a time. If the layout has several, the first one in the layout draws and the others show a notice. Other editor types can appear any number of times.

Scene View

Scene View shows the scene through the editor camera. Game View shows it through the scene’s active camera.

Moving the camera

While the camera is flying or orbiting, the rest of the editor ignores the mouse and keyboard.

Selecting and transforming

Click an object to select it. Shift-click adds objects to the selection or removes them from it.

The transform gizmo works like Blender’s:

1. Press R to move, R to rotate, or S to scale the selection. You can also use the toolbar buttons, or drag a gizmo handle.
2. Press X, Y, or Z to lock the change to one axis.
3. Click to confirm. Right-click or Escape cancels and restores the old transform.

The toolbar has two toggles:

• Snap rounds moves to 1 unit, rotations to 15°, and scales to steps of 0.1.
• Global and Local choose whether the gizmo follows world axes or the object’s own axes.

A whole gizmo drag is one undo step.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy lists the scene as a tree. Each child appears under its parent, indented one level, with branch lines.

• Press + at the top of Hierarchy to add an Empty Object, a Perspective Camera, or a light.
• Click to select. Ctrl-click adds or removes one object. Shift-click selects a range.
• Drag a row onto another row to make it a child. A red outline means the move is not allowed, for example onto the object’s own child. Dragging a selected row moves the whole selection.
• Press the eye icon to hide or show an object.
• Right-click a row to add a child object, rename, duplicate, delete, or move the object to the scene root. Deleting a parent also deletes its children.
• For an instanced scene, the right-click menu also has an INSTANCE section: Revert Object (one placed object) and Revert Instance drop your changes, Apply to Source writes them into the source .rscene file, and Unpack Completely turns the instance into ordinary objects. Undo restores the open scene, but not a source file written by Apply to Source.
• Rename opens a text field on the row. Enter confirms it and Escape restores the old name.
• Type in the filter field to find objects by name.

Inspector

Inspector shows the selected object’s components, each in its own section.

• Transform, Mesh Renderer, Material, Camera, lights, and Physics have their own editors.
• Every other component, including your own game components, gets typed fields generated from its reflect! description: numbers with their unit and valid range, colors, check boxes, drop-downs for enums, and lists with + and - buttons. See Tutorial 3 for how to describe a component.
• A field that refers to another scene object is a drop-down of the scene’s objects. A field that refers to a texture or mesh is a drop-down of assets that are already loaded.
• Add Component at the bottom adds Physics or any registered game component. Components are listed by their short name (“Sky Light”, not rusting.sky_light); hover one to see its full ID. The × button in a section header removes that component.
• Environment settings (Sky Light, Ambient Light, Tone Mapping, Background Color), HUD elements and tile maps make an object into something of its own, so Add Component does not offer them on meshes, cameras or lights, or on an object that is already another of these kinds. Create them from Add Object instead: Environment and UI has World Environment and HUD Element. A scene has one sky; a second one is greyed out with the name of the object that holds the first.
• Classes holds the object’s class names, which scene patches and scenarios use to find groups of objects.

A continuous drag in the Inspector is one undo step, not one step per frame.

A data asset (.rdata) picked in Assets replaces the object in the Inspector until you press × or select another object. Its fields use the same editors as components. Each change is written to the file when the mouse button is released, and every object that uses the file sees it. These edits change files, not the scene, so Undo does not revert them.

A data asset field’s drop-down lists the loaded files and Unique (saved with this object). Unique copies the current file’s values into the object, and the fields appear under the drop-down. Edits to a unique value change only this object, are saved with the scene, and undo like any other component edit. Pick a file again to go back to shared values.

Assets

Assets lists the files in the project’s assets folder. Press Import to copy models and images into it. Import never overwrites a file that is already there. Images load as textures. Each triangle primitive in a GLB or glTF file becomes a mesh and a material, with a reloadable .rmesh file written beside the model.

• Double-click a model, or drag it into Scene View, to add it to the scene.
• Double-click a scene (.rscene), or right-click it and choose Instance in Scene, to place it in the open scene as a prefab. It appears as one object whose children come from that file; see Scenes. New Variant in the same menu creates <name>_variant.rscene, a scene that inherits this one.
• Double-click an image to use it as the base color of the selected object. You can also drag it onto a Hierarchy row or an Inspector texture slot.
• Right-click a file for more actions. Replace… swaps an imported file for a new one of the same type, and shows its size and which objects use it before you confirm.
• Type in the filter field to find a file.
• New lists the data asset types the game registers. It writes a file with the type’s default values, named after the type, into the selected folder, and opens it in the Inspector. Click a .rdata file to edit it; see Data assets.

Preview and Play

The editor runs a scene in two ways:

• Preview runs the scene inside the editor without compiling the project. Use Pause, Resume, and Step to go one fixed tick at a time. Stop Preview returns the scene to exactly how it was before Preview.
• Play saves and cooks the scene, compiles the project’s Rust code, and starts the game in its own window. Stop ends the game or the build, and Restart rebuilds and runs again.

Reload Code

Change your Rust code while the game runs, then press Reload Code. The game saves its objects and exits. The editor rebuilds the code and starts the game again from where it was, so a changed system runs on the same scene. Only the code changes.

• Every object keeps its transform, physics, and each component registered with register_scene_component. Resources, and components that are not registered, start fresh.
• Startup systems and once blocks that already ran do not run again.
• When a saved component no longer fits its changed Rust type, for example after a field changed type, the game starts clean. The Console gives the reason.
• When the new code does not build, the game stays stopped and the Console shows the errors. Fix them and press Play to continue from the saved objects.
• The Console reports each reload, and how long the game took to show its first frame again.

Choose Debug beside Play for fast compiles while you work, and Release for full optimization. Build output and panics from the game appear in Cargo Output in Code Editor.

Code Editor

Code Editor edits the project’s Rust source. Check saves the source and runs cargo check in the background. Errors and warnings appear in Cargo Output, and the editor stays responsive while Cargo runs. Build & Run does the same as Play.

Exporting a game

Open Project Settings and press Export Game..., then choose a parent folder. The editor saves and cooks the scene, builds the game in release mode, and creates a new <game>_export folder. It never overwrites an export: later exports are named _2, _3, and so on.

The export holds the executable, build/main.rscene.bin, the project’s assets folder, the RustingEngine license, and a short README. All paths are relative to the export folder, so it runs without the project or the editor. Results appear in Cargo Output.

Profiler and diagnostics

• Profiler graphs the last 180 frames. It splits CPU time into physics, extraction, preparation, recording, and editor work, and shows GPU pass times, draw counts, and culling results. GPU times can lag the CPU sample by a frame or more.
• Render Settings holds the scene’s render settings, VSync, the FPS limit, the GPU in use, and rendering diagnostics. Its Quality section sets anti-aliasing (Auto, Off, MSAA 2x or MSAA 4x) and the shadow map size (Auto, Low, Medium or High); Auto follows the quality profile. Like VSync, these two are not saved with the scene. MSAA 2x falls back to off on a GPU without it, and “MSAA in use” shows the count the renderer picked.
• Physics Diagnostics shows which physics backends are available, how many bodies run on the GPU and the CPU, the GPU work and readback each frame costs, and what falls back when a capacity limit is reached.

Keyboard shortcuts

These are the default keys. Open a Keyboard Shortcuts area to change them: click a shortcut, then press the new key. Escape cancels. The keys are saved to editor_shortcuts.json in your user config folder and apply to every project.

No shortcut fires while a text field has focus.