Dicey Table

Render Layers

Everything the engine draws goes through a layer. DiceyTable defines three, and every piece of geometry in a scene belongs to exactly one of them:

Layer What lands on it
Scene The room. Floor, ceiling, the four walls, posters, window and skylight openings, the exterior seen through them, and every scenery placement the room pack puts in the box.
Table The furniture of play. The table model itself and the seat zones — fixed for a session, but neither part of the room nor a piece anyone picks up.
Game The pieces. Every card, deck, die, token, board and custom model on the table.

They are drawn in that order — Scene, then Table, then Game — which is the order their positions already imply: a card draws after the table it sits on, and the table after the room it stands in.

Why they exist#

Two jobs, and both are things that were previously impossible to express.

Seeing your work. The viewport toolbar has a show/hide button per layer. Laying out a starting position is much easier with the room switched off; checking a ceiling is much easier without a table full of cards underneath it. Hiding a layer is a view, not an edit — nothing is removed, nothing is disabled, nothing is written to the mod, and the setting lives in your browser tab only. Two people editing the same room may legitimately disagree about which layers they are looking at.

Aiming a light. A light reaches only the layers it lists. A lamp prop can be set to light the Scene and the Table but not the Game, so it warms the room without washing out the card art in front of it; a hard key light can be set to reach the Game layer alone so the pieces get crisp shadows and the room keeps its baked look. This is the Layers field on both LIGHT and the Room Light panel, and it defaults to all three — a light you never touch behaves exactly as it always did.

Assignment is derived, never authored#

You do not choose an entity's layer. It follows from what the entity is: a room surface is Scene, the table model is Table, a table object is Game. There is nothing to set, nothing to get wrong, and nothing to migrate — a mod authored before layers existed loads onto the right ones without a single change to its files.

Gotchas#

A cleared Layers field leaves a light on, shining on nothing. Unticking all three is a legal state and the runtime honours it, because reinterpreting "none" as "all" would make the field impossible to clear. If a light stops doing anything, check its Layers before its Intensity.

Hiding a layer does not stop it lighting or colliding. The toggles hide drawing. A hidden wall still blocks a die, a hidden light-carrying prop still lights the room, and the physics simulation is entirely unaffected. If you want geometry to stop existing, disable the entity; if you want a wall out of the way of the camera specifically, use Wall cutaway.

Chrome is not on any of the three. Gizmos, light markers, the drag landing ghost, the collider overlay and the VR widgets are drawn on the engine's own World layer and are unaffected by these toggles — and every light always reaches World, so turning a layer off a light never darkens the editor's own overlays.

See also#