Previewing a Draft and Photo Mode

Preview lets you play your unpublished draft at the real table, alone, without creating a room or publishing anything. Photo mode hides the interface so you can frame a clean shot of the table and capture it at the Ultra graphics tier. In Preview, those captures are saved into your mod, ready to become its cover or store screenshots.

Photo mode is not editor-only. Every player can use it at a normal /table, where a capture is simply downloaded.

Previewing a draft#

Opening Preview#

Click Preview on the topbar (Full Editor, Game Editor, Room Editor or Table Editor). The editor saves every dirty editor tab, saves the draft, and opens the preview in its own tab at /table?preview=<projectId>. Clicking again reuses that tab and reloads it.

Preview saves first on purpose: the preview then shows exactly what Publish would ship, rather than something in between.

Previewing a room pack or a table pack#

A room pack and a table pack are each half of a table, so previewing one stands it next to the other half. The picker beside Preview chooses which half that is, and your pack is then loaded the way a game loads it at play time: as an assigned pack of a throwaway scene, composed by the same code that composes a published one. Nothing else is on the table — no pieces, no seats, no game — so what you are looking at is your pack and only your pack.

Previewing	Picker	Options	Default
A room pack	with	The built-in table, any published table pack, No table, or a published game	The built-in table
A table pack	in room	The built-in room look, or any published room pack	The built-in room look
An asset pack	in room and on table	The built-in room and table, or any published room/table pack	The built-in room and table

An asset pack is not half of a table — it has no other half to stand next to, it has both — so it gets the two pickers rather than one, and they set what its own editor viewport stands your pieces in.

The first time you are asked is in the create dialog: the step after choosing what you are making offers exactly the room and/or table the kind can use. Whatever you pick there is what the pickers start on, and you can change it at any time.

Three things follow from this being a composition rather than a special renderer:

It is the real thing. If your pack composes here, it composes when it is published; if a reference is missing or a document is malformed, the preview refuses in the same words the play path would use.
The pick is never published. It is remembered against your project, in your editor workspace, and it travels to the preview tab in the URL (&with=…) — but it never enters your pack. A room pack that recorded which table it likes in its own document would be a room pack assigning a table, which the play path refuses outright, because a pack must not be a second writer for a subject it does not own. So the choice follows you, not the pack: nobody who installs your room gets your preview table with it.
The document must be current. The preview reads the pack document your draft actually holds. A project last saved before the pack-document format existed is refused with "open it in the editor and save once" — publish would ship those same bytes.

No table hides the table; it does not remove it. The physics table is still there, so nothing falls through the floor — it is simply not drawn, exactly like the editor's own render-layer toggles.

Previewing a room with a whole game#

An empty table in a finished room tells you very little. What a room is actually judged on — does it read at playing distance, is the light right over the surface, does the wall art compete with the cards — needs the cards. So a room pack may be previewed with a published game instead of a table, listed under Games in the same picker.

This is the same choice as picking a table, so picking one clears the other: a room has one thing standing in it.

When you pick a game, the load inverts. Everywhere else your draft is the thing being loaded and the companion is assigned to it; here the published game is loaded exactly as a player loads it — its own document, its own pieces, its own repository's files — and your draft stands in for its room. Concretely:

Your room replaces the game's room. If the game assigns a room pack, or authors a room in its own document, that room is set aside and yours is used; the status line says which. Nothing else about the game is touched.
The game keeps its own table. Its table is part of the set-up you asked to see, and its pieces were authored against that surface height. You do not get to override it, and your own table pick is ignored while a game is selected.
Nothing runs. The game is set up and then left alone: no table scripts, no mod script. You are reviewing a room, not playtesting somebody else's game, and a script that deals a hand or moves pieces would keep rearranging the thing you are lining a camera up against. The seat ring still appears, because that is scene shape rather than behaviour.
A game that cannot load degrades. If it cannot be fetched, or was published without a scene document, the status line says so and the room is shown on its own table instead. Your room is perfectly reviewable without it, so this is never an error card over a draft you can still work in.
The pin follows the live record. A game's /artifact is always its currently published version — there is no way to fetch an older one — so if your pick names a version the publisher has since moved past, the status line names the version you are actually looking at.

The same game also appears in the editor viewport, not just the preview tab, so you can author against it directly. There it is scenery: every piece is locked so nothing drifts as you work, none of it appears in the Hierarchy, none of it can be selected or moved, and none of it is ever written into your pack. A room pack that shipped another game's cards would be republishing somebody else's mod.

What the preview loads#

The preview tab runs the same table app players use, through the same load path a published mod takes. Only the source of the files differs:

Part	Comes from
Manifest and setup scene	Your saved server draft. Only the owner can load it; anyone else gets not found.
Entry script	Your local draft files when present, otherwise the server draft
Models, textures and other files	Your local draft files, opened read-only. A file missing locally is fetched from your linked repository's `wip` branch; with no linked repository it keeps its placeholder.

The preview can never change your draft. Its view of your files has no write, move or delete, and it takes no editor lease.

What the preview refuses#

Before anything runs, the draft goes through the checks Publish would apply later:

Draft validation (validateLocalModProjectDraft). An invalid draft does not load.
The script scanner (scanModScriptSafety) on the entry script that would actually run. A script the publish scanner would reject does not run.

A refusal is shown in the preview banner, and each individual problem is logged to the browser console. The sandbox itself is unchanged: a script that passes runs under exactly the rules it would at a live table.

What the preview never saves#

The banner says it plainly: "Preview — unpublished draft. Nothing here is saved."

A preview is a peerless offline session. It is not a room, so it never:

autosaves the table (to the server or locally), or overwrites a solo offline save;
restores a previous autosave;
records a play in the mod's play stats;
sends a room load report;
joins or creates a room, sends invites, or triggers push notifications — a room in the same URL is ignored;
uploads or stores a named table save.

Plugins are unavailable. No plugin is installed in a preview, so api.listPlugins() answers [] and api.callPlugin(...) answers not-found, the same answer as a table without that plugin. A console notice says so. Publish the mod and play it at a table to use its plugins.

Button	Does
Reload preview	Reloads the tab, reading the saved draft again. It does not save the editor: save there first (or click Preview again).
Back to editor	Switches to this project's editor tab when it is still open, instead of opening a second editor on the same files. If there is none, it opens `/editor?project=<projectId>` in a new tab.
Photo mode	Enters photo mode (below).

Photo mode#

Entering and leaving#

Where	How
Preview	The banner's Photo mode button
`/table`	The Photo toolbar button (camera icon), available to hosts, players, spectators and offline tables
Either	`Shift`+`P`

Leave with Exit in the panel, Esc, or Shift+P again. Photo mode will not start while a dialog is open, and it is not available inside a VR session (starting one leaves photo mode).

While photo mode is on:

all interface panels are hidden — toolbars, the hand drawer, toasts, banners, mod screen UI — and the table fills the window;
picking up, flicking, drawing, stamping, selecting, context menus and hover tooltips are suspended, so a stray click cannot move anything;
the camera still moves exactly as usual, so you can frame the shot.

Photo mode is purely local. Nothing about it is sent to other players, and it does not change the table.

The Visibility panel#

The panel on screen in photo mode chooses, per photo-mode category, what stays visible. Its rows are generated from the shared category list (PHOTO_MODE_CATEGORY_DESCRIPTORS in packages/shared/src/photoMode.ts), so the table below is the complete set. Hover a row in the panel for its description.

Group	Row	Shows	Default
Interface	Interface panels	Toolbars, hand drawer, toasts and banners.	Always hidden — never in a capture (the row is disabled)
Interface	Mouse cursor	Keeps the pointer visible in the live view. The cursor is never in a capture.	Hidden
Selection & tools	Selection outlines	Selection and hover-highlight outlines around pieces.	Hidden
Selection & tools	Transform gizmos	Move, rotate and scale handles.	Hidden
Selection & tools	Editor helpers	Light helpers, table and model gizmos, room placement guides.	Hidden
Selection & tools	Drag ghosts	Group drag previews and the drop indicator.	Hidden
Selection & tools	Tooltips	The in-world object info tooltip.	Hidden
Seats	Seat areas	The coloured seat zone boxes.	Hidden
Seats	Seat labels	Seat names and claimed-seat usernames.	Hidden
Seats	Hand zones	Hand-type seat zones.	Hidden
Table guides	Snap points	Snap point markers and the snap-grid ghost.	Hidden
Table guides	Zones	Table zone visuals and the play-area guide.	Hidden
Table guides	Vector lines	Lines drawn with the vector line tool.	Hidden
Table guides	Debug overlays	Collider, rigid-body, trigger and player-zone debug drawing.	Hidden
Presence	Presence avatars	Other players' VR avatars and name tags. (DiceyTable has no remote cursors today.)	Hidden
Game content	Mod in-world UI	Buttons, panels and text a mod places in the world.	Visible
Game content	Text labels	Text labels placed on the table.	Visible
Game content	Decals	Stickers and decals on pieces and the table.	Visible

In short, the defaults hide every overlay and keep the game's own content. Toggling a row takes effect immediately in the live view. Reset to defaults puts every row back.

With Mouse cursor off, the pointer disappears after 1.5 seconds without movement over the table and comes back when you move the mouse. With it on, the pointer stays. It never reaches a capture either way.

Getting the panel out of the way#

The panel hides itself 3 seconds after the pointer leaves it (or after it opens with the pointer elsewhere). It stays while the pointer is over it or a capture is running.
Dismiss it with its ✕ or H.
Bring it back with H, or by moving the mouse to any edge of the screen.

So you can compose a completely clean live view, then capture with Enter.

Remembered choices and presets#

Your last visibility choice is remembered per user, per device (browser localStorage, key diceytable.photoMode.v1.<your user id>, or anon when signed out) and shared between Preview and /table. It is not synced to your account.

Presets save the current rows under a name, up to 8 per user and device, with names up to 40 characters. Click a preset to apply it, or its delete icon to remove it. Saving under an existing name (case-insensitive) updates that preset. A ninth new preset is refused until you delete one.

If the browser blocks storage (some private modes), choices still work for the rest of the session. A category added in a later release simply takes its default.

Capturing#

Pick a Size and Format in the panel's Capture section, then press Capture or Enter.

Size	Pixels
Screen × Ultra (default)	Your window size × Ultra's supersampling ratio, `min(devicePixelRatio × 1.5, 2.5)`, but never more pixels than 4K (3840 × 2160, about 8.3 MP). A larger result is scaled down with its aspect ratio kept.
1080p	1920 × 1080
1440p	2560 × 1440
4K	3840 × 2160

A fixed size shows a framing guide at that aspect ratio. The camera keeps its vertical framing, so a size whose aspect differs from your window shows more or less at the sides. Format is PNG (default) or WebP.

A capture:

switches to the built-in Ultra tier (High on a weak device, see below) and renders the camera at the chosen size;
lets the scene settle (loading, shadows, reflections, anti-aliasing), showing its progress;
reads the rendered frame and encodes it;
restores your own graphics settings exactly, even if the capture fails.

While a capture runs, photo mode is locked. Exit, the category rows, Reset to defaults, the presets, the Size and Format pickers and every photo-mode shortcut (Esc, Shift+P, H, Enter) do nothing until it finishes. If photo mode ends anyway (for example, a VR session starts), the capture is abandoned and your settings are restored.

What you see is what you get, with the current visibility rows applied. The panel, the framing guide, toasts, the cursor and every interface panel are never in a capture: the image is read from the rendered table, never from the page, so no interface element can appear in it, whether it is on screen or not.

Limits and safeguards:

Any size is shrunk, keeping its aspect, to the largest image your graphics device can render; the result message says "clamped to W×H by this device".
On a device whose detected graphics tier is Low or Medium (whatever tier you have chosen in Settings), a capture renders at High instead of Ultra and never turns on soft shadows the device was not already using, because that can hang a weak GPU. The size is also capped at 1× the screen: Screen × Ultra renders at your window's size, and a fixed size is shrunk to your window's longest side. The panel shows a warning, and the Preview sidecar's tier records the tier actually used.
In a live room, 4K asks first, because rendering a 4K Ultra frame briefly loads your GPU and the other players may notice a short stall.
The simulation is never paused in a room. Only a Preview, or an offline table that is not in any room and has no one connected, holds the simulation still while the capture settles. Anything in motion, such as a rolling die, carries on with the same velocity afterwards. A host captures live even when the room is momentarily empty.
A capture is cancelled, and your settings restored, if the tab is hidden, the graphics device is lost, photo mode ends, or it takes too long (try a smaller size).

Where a capture goes#

Where you are	Result
`/table`	A browser download named `diceytable-<mod slug>-<yyyymmdd-hhmmss>.<png\|webp>` (your local time). Nothing else: nothing is uploaded, and nothing is written to a repository or to browser storage.
Preview	Saved into your mod as `screenshots/<yyyymmdd-hhmmss>-<id>.<png\|webp>` plus a `.json` sidecar, by the editor tab that holds the project's lease. The message reads "Saved to screenshots/…".

In Preview, a capture is never silently lost. Every outcome other than Saved offers a Download:

What happened	Result
The editor received it and saved it	"Saved to screenshots/…". The editor confirms receipt first, then writes, so a large image does not time out while it is being saved.
No editor tab answered within 3 seconds, or the editor could not save it yet (still loading the project's files, read-only because it lost the lease, or the write failed)	Queued in this browser and imported the next time you open the project in the editor, which reports "N screenshots imported from Preview." Download offered. If even queueing fails, the Download is the only copy, and the message says so.
The editor refused it for good (the image data is empty or not a valid PNG/WebP)	An error naming the reason, with Download. It is not queued, since it could never be imported.
The image is over 40 MB	"Too large to save into the mod", with Download. It is never sent to the editor or queued; capture at a smaller size to save it into the mod.

The queue keeps captures for at most 30 days and at most 50 at a time across all your projects; older ones are dropped first.

Manage, promote and retake captures in the Screenshots gallery.

Retaking a capture#

Retake in the gallery saves the draft and opens Preview at /table?preview=<projectId>&retake=screenshots/<name>. Once the draft loads, the capture's sidecar puts the camera and the visibility rows back and photo mode starts, so you can reshoot the same composition after changing the scene. The restored rows apply to that session only: your remembered choice is not changed until you toggle a row, reset or apply a preset yourself. If the sidecar cannot be read, photo mode opens with your current settings instead.

Common mistakes#

Expecting Reload preview to show an unsaved edit. It reloads the saved draft. Click Preview in the editor, which saves first.
Looking for a /table capture in screenshots/. Only Preview captures are saved to a mod; a /table capture is in your downloads folder.
Expecting a capture to be on the store page. screenshots/ is not media/. Use Use as store screenshot or Use as cover in the gallery, then Save Draft.
Pressing Enter with a panel button focused. Enter activates that button instead of capturing. Click the table or use the Capture button.

Previewing a Draft and Photo Mode