Massive Editor Update: Welcome To dot big bang 0.8!

Today we released dot big bang v0.8, unleashing a torrent of new functionality in our Game Editor . This has been a long time coming, and adds support to all the features in our engine. We think you’ll enjoy the results. Read on for a look at all the new features and functionality you can now use to build games!

A New Entity Panel

First up, the reworked Entity Panel now shows you all the components on an Entity, making it more convenient to change properties or add new components. On top of that, the whole UI has been reworked to deal with the increase in displayed elements.

You can now filter by component type, add components by type, and easily edit, remove and toggle whether a component is enabled or not. This means the Particle effects, Sounds and many other pieces of functionality are front and center, and available to use.

As a final piece of polish we’ve also reworked the properties for most Components so they are easier to use and understand.

Reimagined Resource Browser

The second big update is the reworked Resource Browser, which now provides all the functionality previous reserved for Voxel Objects to Scripts and Templates. You can browse the full selection of available Scripts, as well as finding those you’ve written specifically. You can also browse through all the Templates you’ve created.

These changes makes level design far simpler, as you can now drag and drop Templates straight from the Browser to add Entities with a full set of functionality. As with all our features there is also full search to help you find what you’re looking for.

Redesigned Entity Search

The third big piece of our Game Editor rework was to take our Entity Search and multiply its usefulness by a thousand. By default we now pattern match across Entity names, tags and script names.

If that’s not enough to narrow your search, we’ve also provide a full set of filters to help you further refine things both for the fields we’ll match against but also the components on the Entities. Want to find the only duck in your game with a Particle component on it? Now that’s easy, even if you had hundreds of them.

On top of that the Search also supports all the multi-select shortcuts you’re used to from other applications, has a wealth of information displayed in-line and quick shortcuts to alter your selection and frame the selected objects in the scene view.

We’ve also added a whole bunch of quality of life improvements:

• The script editor now decreases its opacity when it loses focus allowing you to see what’s happening in the scene without having to close the editor.
• The script editor saves its last position and size when you reload or come back to dot big bang. No more rearranging windows each time!
• We noticed the parkour route in our Hub World had a missing element. We fixed it, so you can now get to the hot springs for a soak. Sorry about that!

We hope you find all these new features useful. If you’d like to give feedback on the changes, you can do so over at Discord. If you’d like to see them in action, tune in to our regular live game development streams over on YouTube. You can see a changelog of further improvements in version 0.8 here.

Finally, you can follow this blog using the button at the bottom right (desktop) if you’d like to be inboxed when new posts go up about exciting dot big bang developments!