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The editor

The editor is a regular Balaur project: its scripts draw the whole interface through the ui module, and editing any editor script hot reloads the editor itself. Nothing in it is privileged — every binding it uses is available to any project.

cargo run -p balaur_cli --features window -- edit my-game

How it works​

balaur edit <project> runs the editor with the game's path in its arguments. The editor parses the game's scene TOML into a document model and mirrors it as a real node subtree, so the viewport shows the actual scene and physics builds the actual bodies (paused until play). Edits are written back to the scene file as TOML.

Play-in-editor attaches the game's scripts to the mirrored nodes and unpauses: the actual game code runs against the actual scene inside the editor. Stop rebuilds the mirror from the document.

What it has today​

  • Scene tree with connector rails, collapse arrows, colored type icons, and a right-click context menu per row (add child, attach script, duplicate, delete).
  • Inspector generated from the component registry: every registered component — including third-party plugin components — is addable and editable with no editor changes.
  • Viewport gizmos. A bounding-box gizmo: dragging a face translates in that face's plane (with snap), face-center handles scale along the normal, corner brackets scale uniformly, and a three-ring rotation ball rotates.
  • 2D mode. The editor detects a 2D scene from its components and switches automatically: 2D grid, pan/zoom camera, a 2D selection gizmo, world-space click-picking, and collider overlays.
  • Script editing. Buffers persist per file; save writes to the game project and hot reloads the code — live, while playing. The buffer is Luau-syntax-highlighted.
  • Animation. A keyframe system implemented in editor scripts: clips live on scene nodes and are saved with the scene, a timeline dock scrubs and inserts keys from the node's current transform, and play samples every animated node.
  • Command palette as the single overlay, dark and light themes, and an output dock over the engine's log ring buffer.

Why it is built this way​

The editor dogfoods the scripting surface: everything it needs — filesystem access, TOML parsing, scene instantiation, script reload, camera control, debug drawing — exists as ordinary script bindings, all reusable by any tool or game.