Scenes

A scene is a level, a menu, a cutscene — a collection of entities saved as one .jscene file. This page is about working with them in the editor. For loading and unloading scenes from a running game, see Scenes (API Reference).

The Scene Hierarchy panel

Every entity in every open scene appears here, nested to show parent/child relationships. Selecting a row shows that entity in the Properties panel.

Right-click blank space to create something:

• Create Empty Entity — an entity with nothing but a transform
• A category submenu (General, UI, 2D, Physics 2D) — creates an entity with that component already on it, named after the component. This is the quick way to get a Sprite Renderer, a Camera or a Tilemap into the scene.
• New Script… — writes a new script file from a template

Creating an entity with a component is a single undo step, so one Ctrl+Z removes the whole thing rather than leaving a nameless empty entity behind.

Drag a row onto another to parent it. A child moves, rotates and scales with its parent, which is how you build anything made of parts — a character with a weapon, a platform with a trigger volume.

Right-click an entity for per-entity actions, including adding components without going through the Properties panel.

Turning things off

Every entity has an enabled checkbox. Disabling one hides it and stops its scripts, and it takes its children with it — which is the usual way to hold a pause menu, a boss room or a tutorial popup in the scene, switched off, until something turns it on.

The same switch is Enabled from a script:

GameEntity? menu = FindEntityByName("PauseMenu");
if (menu != null)
    menu.Enabled = true;

Working with more than one scene at once

You can have several scenes open together — a level plus the manager scene that sits over it, or two levels while you copy things between them.

To open one alongside another, right-click a .jscene in the Content Browser and choose Open Additively. It appears as a second section in the Scene Hierarchy. (Double-clicking a scene instead replaces everything open, which is the other thing you often want.)

With more than one open:

• Set Active Scene (right-click a scene's heading) chooses which one new entities go into, and which one Ctrl+S saves.
• Close Scene closes just that one.
• Dragging an entity from one scene's section to another moves it between scenes, keeping its children and components.

Each scene owns its entities. Closing a scene takes its entities with it and leaves the others untouched.

Saving

Ctrl+S saves the active scene. The title bar marks a scene with unsaved changes, and the editor asks before you close or open over one.

Files added outside the editor

If you copy a .jscene (or any asset) into your Assets folder through Finder or Explorer rather than through the editor, close and reopen the project so the editor picks it up properly.

Which scenes ship

A built game needs to know which scenes to include and which one starts first. That list lives in your project settings — the scene at the top is the one the game boots into. A scene that isn't in the list isn't in the build, and Scenes.Load won't find it at runtime.

From here

• Scenes (API Reference) — Scenes.Load, LoadAdditive, Unload, Reload, async loading with a progress bar, and fade transitions
• Session — carrying a score or a checkpoint across a scene change
• Saving and settings — writing progress to disk
• Performance — what a scene costs in memory, and how to watch it