Component glossary

This section serves as a glossary for all the available core components.

Note

The properties of the components are directly documented in the editor and can be accessed by hovering over the property name in the entity inspector.

Camera

Cameras are used to render the world from certain positions. Every world contains a editing_camera, which is used in the editor, and a game_camera, which is used while the game mode is active, by default. It’s possible to create and activate additional cameras, either via the editor or via the scripting interface.

Camera Controller

Camera controllers, as the name suggests, control the camera they are attached to. They can be used to create FPS- or third-person-style camera behaviors controllable via the scripting interface with little effort.

Character Controller

Character controllers are used to provide physics-interactions for characters. The component provides a scripting interface for moving the characters.

Custom Data

Custom Data components offer the possibility to store custom properties for an entity. Properties can be read, added, modified, and removed via the editor or the scripting API.

Joint

Joints can be used to connect voxel shapes with varying constraints. The component offers various types of joints to create various physics-based effects.

Kill Plane

Kill planes can be used to automatically destroy voxel shapes which drop below the y-position of the node the component is attached to.

To ensure that the whole shape is below the plane before it is destroyed, the shape’s bounding sphere is used. The logic is implemented as follows:

if (shape_bounds_center.y + shape_bounds_radius < kill_plane_position.y) {
  despawn_voxel_shape();
}

Light

Use this component to add lights to the scene. More details can be found in the chapter Lighting and GI.

Mesh

Mesh components are used to render triangle meshes with different materials. They are mainly used to render the sky sphere and water planes with the according materials.

Additional meshes can be provided by adding OBJ files to the media/meshes directory in any data source. Currently, only materials named default, water, or sky are supported.

Node

Node components are attached to every entity by default and provide a 3D-transformation, e.g., a position, orientation, and size. They also make it possible to create hierarchies of entities.

Post Effect Volume

Post effect volumes are used to add post effects to certain areas within the world. They are applied hierarchically based on their priority.

Sound

Use this component to play sound effects at certain positions in the world.

Script

This component can be used to add Lua scripts to the world.

Tag

Can be used to add tags to entities. Entities can then be looked up based on the tags via the scripting interface.

Text

Use this component to render text at different positions in the world. It’s also useful for adding notes in the editor.

Voxel Shape

Voxel shapes are in charge of rendering and simulating everything voxel-related. Shapes are either initialized from authored VOX files available in the data sources, or they are procedurally filled with content like, e.g., terrain using a script.

In addition, voxel shapes support the generation of support structures and fracturing for physics-based destruction effects.

Flipbook Animation

Use this component to animate voxel shapes using flipbook-style animations. Flipbook animations operate by changing the voxel data of the corresponding shape component on a frame by frame basis.