1.3. Scene Editor

As both scenes in the demo have too many things going on, we’ll start something simpler. In the Project Manager right click the folder scenes and choose Add scene. From the left side choose a template “Empty Scene 800x600” and name the scene warehouse.
Then locate the folder warehouse in your sandbox→scenes folder and copy the contents of Chapter 1 resources inside. Double click on the warehouse.scene in the Project Manager to open a Scene Editor.

As you can see in the section 4, your scene can consist of many layers, but we’ve selected the main layer for now and we’ll get to the purpose of multiple layers later. Also you see there Waypoint groups and Free entities. Let’s demonstrate how to use them after we get used to the logic of our Scene editing.

For now we’ll focus on sections one and two:

Tip: You can see that next to each scene element in the Scene Editor is a little checkbox. You can uncheck it to make the Node invisible and disabled at the same time. Shortcut for that is a keyboard
key “space”. This sets the internal attribute of the Node called Active to either true or false. More on that comes later.

Before we try to experiment with the scene, let’s clarify a couple of terms again. In WME each element of the scene is called Node. It’s important later because you can from your script reference every scene node. Now let’s see what nodes are available. The third image from the left in section 1 creates a region.

Region is used for actors and it serves several purposes:

1. To show where actor can go (floor).
2. To block actor from entering certain places.
3. To decorate actor with a color (for example if there is a blue light from the sign player can get blue when entering the region.
4. To make a trap region – upon entering some game event is triggered.
5. To help determine where actor stands. This is crucial for z-order to know when actor stands in front of objects and when behind.

Some time there is confusion with region entity, but I’ll try to clarify the difference. So again note the reason why we have regions → Only for actor’s movement on the screen.