Dicey Table

Edit Mode

Edit Mode is where you build a game. It is the same PlayCanvas table players sit at, put into an authoring state: physics held still, an editable hierarchy on the left, an Inspector on the right, and an asset explorer underneath. You reach it at /editor, or from the Edit Mode toggle on the /table toolbar.

Everything you do in Edit Mode writes to one thing — the scene document. Understanding that single fact explains most of the editor's behavior, so it has a page of its own.

Edit Mode is built for a desktop or tablet. On a tablet the panels and buttons are touch-sized and the transform gizmo is operable by finger; opening it on a phone shows a prompt to switch to a larger screen, because the hierarchy, Inspector and gizmos need the room. The live /table itself is fully playable on a phone — only authoring needs the space.

What you are actually editing#

You are not moving PlayCanvas entities around. You are editing a document, and the engine is redrawn from it.

When you drag a die two feet to the left, the editor writes the new position into the scene document and the runtime rebuilds the die's live entity to match. The live entity is a render artefact. It is destroyed and recreated whenever the document is re-applied, and nothing that lives only on it survives that.

This is why the editor can save, version, restore, replicate and export a scene without ever serializing the engine's scene graph — and why "it looked right until I reloaded" is almost always a symptom of something written to the engine but not to the document.

How Edit Mode differs from the live table#

Live table Edit Mode
What you manipulate A replicated TableSnapshot An EditSceneSnapshot — the scene document
Physics Always simulating Frozen by default — entities hold their authored position
The hierarchy Not shown The full authoring tree: Room, Walls, Lights, Table, Player Zones, Entities
Names Display names only Both the human Name and the machine Slug, side by side
Where changes go Broadcast to every peer by the host Into your local draft until you save a version or publish

Frozen vs Live#

The viewport toolbar has a Frozen / Live pair, and it starts on Frozen.

  • Frozen — entities hold their position. This is what makes authoring deterministic: you can place a board, set a die on top of it and reload without everything having settled somewhere else overnight.
  • Live — physics runs, so you can test how entities actually behave.

Frozen is not a "preview off" switch — the scene is fully rendered either way. It only governs whether the simulation steps. Running a scene script switches Frozen to Live automatically, because most scripts need physics to observe motion at all.

Frozen mode is the single most commonly misread editor behavior. If an entity refuses to fall, drop or settle, check this toggle first.

The vocabulary comes first#

DiceyTable borrows PlayCanvas's ECS vocabulary and uses it strictly. That strictness is load-bearing: "Component" always means an engine component — render, rigidbody, collision, light, camera, script — and never means a thing you place on the table. A thing you place on the table is an Entity.

Read these four pages before the rest of the editor guide. Every other page in the guide, and the scripting and mod references too, assume you have.

  • The scene model — Entity, Component, System, Folder, Tag Group, and the two-tier component split.
  • Provenance and lifecycle — Engine vs Platform vs Project; Definition vs Scene Entity vs Live Entity.
  • Document vs engine — why the schema document is the source of truth, and what that rules out.
  • IDs, names and tags — the three names an entity has, which one is an address, and the reserved dt: tag namespace.

There is also a glossary that defines every term the Developer Docs use, exactly once, with a stable anchor per term.

What Edit Mode is not#

  • It is not a PlayCanvas project editor. You author a DiceyTable scene document. You do not get scenes, script attributes, render layers or the engine's asset registry.
  • It is not a code sandbox with engine access. Scene scripts and mods address entities through the replicated document. pc.Entity, findByTag, entity.tags and engine guids are not reachable from either surface.
  • It is not a server-side workspace. Your draft lives in your browser and, when you publish, in your GitHub repository. Model and texture files are never stored on DiceyTable servers.