Overview

Entities are the stuff that dot big bang games are made of. The ground, all the voxel objects you add, and every script running in a project will be part of entities. Each entity can have multiple components, like voxel objects, but also collision, particles, and scripts, which we will go over in later lessons.

Entity Search

You can use the Entity Search on the right hand side to see every entity in your project, listed in alphabetical order. You can click on an entity in the list to select it in game, and hold down the Ctrl key to select more than one at once. At the top of the panel is a search where you can type a key word and find any entity that matches text in its name, scripts, and tags.

Entity Props

Once you have an entity selected, you can examine it’s properties through the Entity Props panel on the left side of the screen. The left side of this panel shows all of the different components that an entity can have, and you can open and close them with the drop down arrow.

In the Entity section, you can change the entity’s name, as well as give it tags. We will learn more about ways to use tags in a later lesson.

Components

Entities have several optional components that you can add and modify through the Entity Props menu. If you create an entity with a voxel object, by default it will have a Transform, which saves the position, rotation, and scale of the entity, a Collision that keeps players from being able to walk through the entity, and a Voxel Object which saves what creation from the Voxel Editor the entity is supposed to look like. Entities have to have a name and a transform, but other components like collision and voxel objects are actually optional. You could have an entity that is just one script, or just some text, and you can also have an entity with multiple voxel objects, or multiple types of collision. We’ll discuss these in the Complex Vodel Objects lesson and the Collision lesson.

The Palette

The easiest way to create a new entity is using the Palette, the panel on the bottom. Here you can use the Voxel Object section to find voxel objects created by the community, and drag them into your game. You can use the drop down menu on the top right corner of the palette to narrow down to only voxel objects that you have created, or only voxel objects that are already in the project, and you can use the search to look for a specific keyword in the voxel objects’ names.

You can also find templates in the Palette, which are entities that have both Voxel Object components and scripts, so they can be used to start building interesting levels and interactions right away.

Finally, you can find scripts made both by the community and by you in the Scripts section. These scripts need to be dragged on to an existing entity, so drag out a voxel object first, and then add the script.