Editor Overview

Welcome to the Renzora editor! This is where you build your game — place objects, tweak them, write scripts, and press Play. This page is a quick visual tour so you feel at home the first time you open it.

Good news: the editor is the engine. What you see while editing is exactly how your game runs, so there are no surprises when you ship.

The big picture

When you open a project, the editor fills the window with a few main areas.

From the screenshot above:

• Top bar — on the left, the menu button (☰) and everything that acts on the whole session: Settings (⚙), undo / redo / save, and the Play button. The workspace ribbon is in the center and the window buttons on the right. These sat in the viewport's own toolbar until recently; the top bar is on screen in every workspace, and none of them is a viewport action. Your open document tabs are not in the top bar itself — they're the strip directly under it, spanning the window (or, if you'd rather keep that row, a dropdown beside Play — see Document tabs).
• Toolbar — the viewport's tools live on the viewport itself, in the strip along its top edge: Select / Move / Rotate / Scale, the snap steps, the shape and display menus, and the view-angle / World-Local controls. Undo, redo, save and Play are not here — they're session-wide, so they live in the top bar. Other panels keep their tools the same way, in their own header; the strip under the top bar is your open document tabs.
• Left — the 3D viewport where you see and move your world, taking most of the window.
• Right — one column, the Scene tree (everything in the current level) stacked over the Inspector (the settings of whatever you click). They're paired because that's the loop: pick an entity above, edit it below.
• Bottom — the global bottom panel: a collapsible strip with the Assets browser, Timeline, Console, Mixer, and Shape Library. Ctrl+Space toggles it, opening it to 40% of the editor's height. It's shared by every workspace rather than belonging to this one.

The window is borderless: drag the top bar to move it (double-click to maximize), and drag any edge to resize.

Click the ☰ menu button to open the main menu. Your account is the first row — your username when you're signed in (hover it for My Library and Sign Out), or Sign In when you're not — followed by File, Edit, View, and Help. Hover one of those and its items slide out beside it, so everything that used to sit across the top bar is now one click away in a single dropdown. Settings is the last row — top-level, not buried in File; the gear button beside the hamburger opens the same panel in one click. Notifications moved in here too, under your username, now that the top bar has no bell.

The workspace ribbon has a fixed width so it can't be pushed around: add a tenth workspace and the ribbon stays exactly where it was. The document tabs on the row below get the window's full width instead. Either way, whatever no longer fits folds into a caret button (⌄) at the end of the strip, which opens a menu of the hidden tabs — click one to jump straight to it. The tab you're currently on never folds.

The Help submenu holds links to the documentation, YouTube, Discord, and the GitHub repo, plus About Renzora Engine — an overlay that shows the current version, a short description of the engine, and credits for the open-source community crates Renzora is built on. Each credit row links out to that project's repository; click anywhere outside the card (or press Esc) to close it.

Workspaces

The tabs in the center of the top bar are workspaces. Each one is a ready-made layout tuned for a job, so the right tools are already in front of you:

• Scene — build and arrange your level (this is the default).
• Scripting — write Lua or Rust code.
• Blueprints — visual node-based scripting, no typing required.
• Animation — clips, state machines, and timelines.
• Materials — design how surfaces look with a node graph.
• Particles — fire, smoke, sparkles, and other effects.
• Debug — performance and diagnostics while you test.
• Hub — the Marketplace, full screen: browse and install plugins, assets, and themes.

Click a tab to switch — and if you have more workspaces than the ribbon's width allows, the last ones fold into the caret menu at its end. You can drag tabs to reorder them — a blue insertion line shows where the tab will land as you drag — right-click to rename or remove, and press + to add a new one. Your changes to each layout — split sizes, where panels sit, which tab is active, even workspaces you add or rename — are saved automatically and restored the next time you open the editor. (The layout is stored per-user in ~/.renzora/layout.json; delete that file to reset every workspace to its default.)

Three reset actions live under the View menu:

• Reset Layout restores the active workspace's panel arrangement to its built-in default.
• Reset Workspace rebuilds the entire ribbon — discarding any workspaces you added, removed, renamed, or reordered and restoring every default workspace's layout.
• Reset Global Docks restores the global bottom panel: one set named Default, holding Assets, Timeline, Console, Mixer and Shape Library, opened at its default height.

The first two never touch the bottom panel, and Reset Global Docks never touches a workspace. The bottom panel is global — it belongs to the editor rather than to any workspace — so restoring the shipped Scene arrangement doesn't cost you the panel set you built alongside it, and vice versa.

Panels can go anywhere

Every workspace is made of panels that you can rearrange to taste. Drag a panel's tab and drop it on the edge of another panel to split the space, or onto its center to stack it as a new tab. Drag the divider between panels to resize.

You can also drag a panel's tab up onto the workspace ribbon (the tabs in the top bar, or the +) and drop it there: that pops the panel out into a brand-new workspace of its own, named after the panel. It's the quickest way to give a single tool the whole screen — the panel moves out of its old workspace, and the new one is selected for you.

To add a panel, click Add Panel on an empty space. You'll get a searchable picker with everything grouped by category:

Don't worry about memorizing these — just open what you need, when you need it.

The Scene hierarchy

The Hierarchy panel is the tree of everything in your scene: lights, cameras, models, terrain, and more. Items can be nested, so a model can contain its own parts.

What you can do here:

• Click + Add Entity to create something new.
• Drag an item onto another to nest it (parent / child).
• Right-click for duplicate, delete, or rename.
• Click the eye to hide an item, or the lock to stop accidental edits.

Selecting an item here highlights it in the viewport and fills in the Inspector. See Scenes & Hierarchy for more.

The Inspector

When you select something, the Inspector shows all of its settings, grouped into sections called components.

The fixed row at the top is the entity header — the object's icon, its ID, its Hierarchy label colour, an eye to show or hide it, and a lock to pin the Inspector to it. Below that comes one section per component:

• Transform — position, rotation, and scale.
• Directional Light — brightness, color, and shadows.

Type new numbers into any field to change them live. Use Add at the top to attach more components (a physics body, a script, a custom one your plugins provide). For the full list of what each component does, see the Inspector docs.

The 3D viewport

The viewport is your window into the world. Click an object to select it, and a gizmo appears so you can move, rotate, or scale it by dragging the colored handles.

The toolbar at the top of the viewport switches your tool between Select, Translate (move), Rotate, and Scale. To look around, orbit, fly, and zoom with the mouse — the full controls are listed in Viewport & Camera. You can even open up to four viewports at once to see your scene from different angles.

The Console

The Console is where the engine talks to you. Messages stream in as you work and while you test your game, sorted into categories so you can focus on what matters.

Use the filter buttons to show only warnings or errors, search to find a message, and the box at the bottom to type slash commands (start with /help to see what's available).

The Console keeps the most recent 100 messages by default and drops the oldest as new ones arrive — a deliberately small cap, because each retained message is a row the panel has to lay out, and a very long backlog can cost frames. Want deeper scrollback? Raise Settings → General → Developer → Console Log Limit (identical messages already collapse into one row with a count, so the limit measures distinct entries).

The Assets browser

The Assets browser along the bottom is a file explorer for your project: a folder tree on the left and a grid (or list) of the current folder's files and sub-folders on the right.

Tiles show the asset, not a generic icon: textures show themselves, .material and .glb files show a rendered preview, and a scene shows the viewport snapshot taken when you last saved it. Folders show a mosaic of up to four images found inside them — the folder's own images first, then a couple of levels down — so a texture library reads as its contents instead of forty identical folder glyphs. The mosaic sits inset from the tile edge with a small folder badge in its corner, in the folder's own accent colour, so a previewing folder still reads as a folder and not as a texture. A folder with no images keeps its plain centred icon.

What you can do here:

• Double-click a folder to open it, or a file to open it in its editor (materials, blueprints, scripts, particles, …). Double-clicking a scene (.bsn) opens it in its own scene tab, loaded from disk.

• Click to select; Ctrl+Click toggles, Shift+Click extends the range.

• Left-drag in empty space to box-select. Drag near the top or bottom edge and the grid auto-scrolls so the selection can reach files that are off-screen.

• Drag a file onto a folder to move it, or out into the viewport to spawn it. Dragging a scene (.bsn) onto the viewport or the Hierarchy adds it as a nested scene instance. While mid-drag, hover over another panel's tab for a moment and that tab springs to the front — so you can reveal a drop target (the Viewport, the Inspector, …) that's hidden behind another tab without ever letting go of the drag.

• Right-click any item for an Open action (routes to the matching editor; for a scene this is Open Scene, which loads it into its own tab), Rename, Duplicate, Favorite, Reveal in Explorer, Delete — and a color-coded create-new section (the same one the Add button opens) so you can make a new asset without reaching for the toolbar. New files land in the current folder.

• To rename a file or folder inline, press F2, click its name while it's already selected, or pick Rename from the right-click menu. The whole name starts highlighted, so typing (or Delete) replaces it; press Enter to confirm or Esc to cancel.

  • Extensions stay out of your way. Tiles, list rows and the tree all label a file by its name alone — main.bsn reads as main — because the icon, its accent colour and the type label already tell you what it is. The rename field is seeded the same way, and the extension is put back when you confirm, so renaming rock.png to boulder gives you boulder.png.
  • Write an extension explicitly to change the type (boulder.jpg), or end the name with a dot (boulder.) to drop it entirely. Folder names are left exactly as typed — a dot in a folder name is part of the name. Search still matches the real file name, so typing png finds every PNG.

• Use the toolbar to Add a new asset, Import, create a New Folder, change the sort order, switch between grid and list views, and zoom the tiles. The Add menu (and the right-click menu) creates a Material, Blueprint, Lua Script, Particle, Template (HTML markup UI), or Scene (BSN) — each row color-coded to match its file type's accent on the tiles.

• Import opens a short menu with two choices, because no operating-system dialog can select files and folders in one pass:

  • Import Files… — the multi-select file picker, filtered to every extension the importer accepts.
  • Import Folder… — the folder picker. The chosen directory is walked recursively for importable files, and its subfolder tree is recreated under the destination, so a props/ folder with crates/ and barrels/ inside it arrives with those subfolders intact. A folder holding nothing importable says so instead of silently doing nothing.

  Whichever you pick, the import overlay opens pre-loaded with what you chose, and models start converting straight away. The same two choices appear on the right-click menu in empty space, on the narrow layout's + Add menu, under File in the title bar, and in the command palette. The overlay's own Files / Folder buttons add more to the queue once it's open, as does dragging files or folders in from the desktop.

Settings

Ctrl+, (or the ⚙ button beside the hamburger) opens Settings: a search box and a category list on the left, the settings themselves on the right. A category is a page — it stacks one or more collapsible sections, so related settings stay together instead of each one costing you a trip back to the sidebar.

Group	Category	Sections
Project	Project	Project, Global Scenes
	Window	Window, Render Resolution
	Rendering	3D Rendering, 2D Rendering
Appearance	Interface	Fonts, Language, Display, Hierarchy, Inspector, UI Workspace (incl. Document Tabs)
	Theme	Active Theme, Semantic Colors, Surfaces, Text, Widgets, Panels, Syntax Tokens, Editor Chrome, Widget Styles
Editor	General	Developer, Renderer, Import
	Auto-Save	Auto-Save
	Viewport	Grid, Labels, Performance
	Camera	Camera
	Gizmos	Gizmos
	Scripting	Scripting, Code Editor
Controls	Input	Input actions and their bindings
	Shortcuts	One section per shortcut category
Plugins	one per plugin	Whatever the plugin registers

Everything under Project is stored in the project's project.toml and travels with the project; everything else is per-user, in ~/.renzora/editor.toml.

Window vs Render Resolution trips people up, because both have a width and a height. The window is the OS surface your shipped game opens — its size, whether it's resizable, and windowed / fullscreen / borderless. The render resolution is what the camera actually renders at before being scaled onto that window, and it only takes effect once Stretch Mode is set to Viewport. Leave Stretch Mode disabled and the two are the same thing. Turn it on and set the resolution to, say, 320×180, and you get chunky pixel-art upscaled to a 1080p window.

Scaling the UI

If the editor looks too small (or too large) on your monitor, open Settings → Interface (Ctrl+,) and pick a UI Scale under Display — from 75% to 300%, applied instantly on top of your OS DPI setting. The choice is saved per user, so it sticks across projects and restarts. If you ever pick a scale that makes things awkward, press Ctrl+0 to snap back to 100%.

Handy shortcuts

A couple of shortcuts you'll use constantly:

• Ctrl + P — open the command palette, a quick search for any action or tool.
• Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y — undo and redo.

What's next?

Now that you can find your way around, learn about Core Concepts — entities, components, scenes, and how scripts attach to them.

Want to build your own editor panels or dig into the architecture? That's covered in the advanced Building Editor Panels guide.