Dicey Table

Building an Asset Pack

An Asset pack is a publishable bundle of pieces — prefabs, custom decks, the materials and textures they use, and the scripts that give them behaviour. It has no scene, no room and no table. Several games can depend on one Asset pack and place its pieces however they like.

Naming. The wire value in diceytable.mod.json is "type": "component-pack", but the author-facing name is always Asset pack. "Component" in DiceyTable means an engine component — render, rigidbody, collision, light, camera, script — and nothing else.

Open the Asset Editor#

Create one from Create → Asset pack in the chooser, or open an existing component-pack project at /editor/asset/{id}. See Editor URLs and Modes.

The Hierarchy collapses to five rows:

Prefabs (12)
Decks (2)
Materials
Textures
Scripts

There is no Room row, no Table row, no Player Zones and no Seat Template — an Asset pack owns none of those, and the published document refuses them by name. Nothing in your project is deleted by opening this editor; those rows simply are not part of this subject.

Prefabs are definitions, not placements#

A prefab carries a kind, a label, a colour, scale, tags, a material and a metadata bag. It carries no position and no rotation, and this is structural rather than a convention: the schema has no such field, so a placement cannot be saved into one even by hand-editing. The game that depends on your pack decides where each copy goes.

Two ways to make one:

  • Configure a piece on the table, then Save as prefab from its context menu. Everything a definition owns is copied; the position is not.
  • Select the Prefabs row and use the Asset Explorer's Prefabs folder.

Selecting a prefab row opens the same prefab inspector the Game Editor uses — name, ID, kind, colour, the Script binding, and Place copy.

Previewing a prefab#

The prefab inspector renders the actual model the table would draw for it, resolved the same way the runtime resolves it (custom model asset, then standard preset, then the first preset for its kind). Place copy puts a real copy on the table so you can look at it in the viewport.

Placed copies are a preview. The published document caps placed objects at zero, so a save reports them and drops them — the Prefabs panel warns while any are on the table.

Attaching a script#

Bind a script from a prefab's Script field, then press Edit script to open it in the script editor without leaving the mode. Saving there compiles it; compiled is what the sandbox actually runs.

Three rules the published document enforces, all of which the editor shows you first:

Rule Why Where you see it
Every script must be attached to at least one prefab An Asset pack has no scene, so an always-on script belongs to no piece and can never run — nor be attributed in the capability disclosure orphan badge on the script row
A prefab's script must be shipped by this pack Otherwise the piece would bind to whatever script id happens to exist in the game that installed it missing script badge on the prefab row
A script must have a compiled body A source-only script ships a piece that silently does nothing not compiled badge on the script row

Your pack must also declare the capabilities its scripts use in the manifest. That declaration is published to every player of every game that depends on you, so publishing refuses a pack whose declaration does not describe its code — see what gets rejected.

A script is scanned as its compiled body, and comments survive the compile. A bare window, fetch or eval inside a comment rejects the file.

Decks#

The Decks row lists every .deck.json in the project. Cards, sheets and layouts are edited in the deck editor — selecting a deck row here only tells you whether the definition rides inside the published pack.

Use Bundle into pack (or Bundle all decks on the Decks row) to put a definition in the document. A bundled deck makes the pack self-contained: a game that depends on you resolves the deck without reaching back into your repository. A prefab that names a deck the pack does not bundle is refused.

Materials, textures and the viewport#

Materials and Textures are shared with every other editor subject rather than owned by this one — the same library dresses a prefab, a room's floor and a table's model. Selecting a row opens the shipped material or texture inspector.

The Asset Editor's lighting is an editor preview setting. The published document carries a fixed neutral environment, because ambient, fog and skybox belong to the room pack and the surface colour to the table pack. Changing the preview never changes what you ship.

What a save writes#

Saving writes a component pack document, not a plain scene. The editor refuses to save a document the schema would reject rather than writing one that publishing would burn an immutable version on. When something is dropped, it says so — except for the seat and room-settings blocks the editor backfills on every project and the preview environment, which were never yours to author here.

See also#