Krotox Engine › Docs › Krotox Manual › The Editor

Editor interface tour

Every part of the Krotox Editor for 2D work: the menu bar, toolbar, Viewport, Hierarchy, Properties, Content Browser, Console, Profiler, Settings and the level-building panels.

The editor is built from dockable panels. Drag a panel's tab to move it, drop it on another panel to stack it, or pull it out into its own window. Window ▸ Reset Layout puts everything back.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| File  Edit  View  Script  Scene  Tools  Window  Help                      |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| [< Level 3 >]   [Play] [Simulate] [Pause] [Step] [Stop]   gizmo Q W E R  |
+--------------+-------------------------------------------+----------------+
| Hierarchy    | Viewport                                  | Properties     |
|  Main Camera |                                           |  Transform     |
|  Player      |      (your scene, gizmos, grid)           |  Sprite        |
|   └ Weapon   |                                           |  Rigidbody 2D  |
+--------------+-------------------------------------------+----------------+
| Content Browser             | Console                     | Profiler       |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Menu	What is in it
File	`New Project...`, `Open Project...` (`Ctrl+O`), `Save Project`, `Build Settings...` (`Ctrl+Shift+B`), `Build Report...`, `Clear Project Cache`, `New Scene` (`Ctrl+N`), `Save Scene` (`Ctrl+S`), `Save Scene As...` (`Ctrl+Shift+S`), `Exit` (`Alt+F4`).
Edit	`Undo` (`Ctrl+Z`), `Redo` (`Ctrl+Y`), `Project Settings`. Undo and Redo grey out when there is nothing to undo or redo.
View	Toggles for every panel (Hierarchy, Properties, Import, Scriptable Object, Content Browser, Profiler, Console, Settings, Build Settings, Tools, Timeline, State Machine, Tile Palette, Level Generator, Prefab Palette, Editor Tools), plus Viewport Overlays, Camera Preview, the Level Stepper and the Angle Snap Gizmo, and the Editor Camera submenu (Perspective or Orthographic).
Script	`Compile C# Scripts` (`F7`) and `Reload assembly` (`Ctrl+R`).
Scene	`Reload Scene`, and render options for the scene (for example Show Light 2D Ranges and Apply to 2D Pass (Bloom)).
Tools	`Asset Dependency Visualizer...` and `Benchmark Suite...`.
Window	`Command Palette...` (`Ctrl+P`), `Audio Mixer`, `Service Events`, `Live Services Simulation`, `Reset Layout`.
Help	`Controls / Shortcuts` (`F1`).

Panel toggles live under View, not Window. The Tools menu is a different thing from the dockable *Tools* panel that View toggles.

Level Stepper (left): < and > walk through every scene in the project in natural order (Level_2 comes before Level_10), with a dropdown to jump anywhere. Level Data edits the open scene's level metadata inline; Playtest plays the level you are looking at. An asterisk marks unsaved changes, and stepping away asks whether to save.
Play clones the scene into a live copy, starts your scripts and starts physics.
Simulate steps physics without running scripts. Use it to check joints, stacks and ragdolls.
Pause and Step freeze time and advance one frame at a time.
Stop throws the live copy away and restores the scene exactly as it was before Play.

Changes made during Play are not kept when you stop. Undo does not record them either. Stop first, then edit.

Viewport

The Viewport shows the scene and is where you select and move things.

Navigate: pan with the middle mouse button, zoom with the scroll wheel, and press F to frame the selected entity.
Select: click an entity. Selection is pixel-perfect: the editor reads the entity ID of the exact pixel under the cursor, so a click never picks something hidden behind transparent space. The background is never selectable.
Transform gizmos: Q select, W move, E rotate, R scale. You can switch between local and world alignment.
Quick add: with the pointer over the Viewport in Edit mode, Shift+A adds a shape at the cursor.

Device presets and aspect. The Viewport toolbar has a Device Presets dropdown covering phones, tablets and foldables. With Free Aspect (the default), the Viewport fills the panel while you edit and only takes the game's shape in Play. Pick a device to hold the editing view to that screen shape too. Cameras and the UI canvas always lay out against the game's real shape, so what you see matches what the player sees.

Camera Preview. Selecting an entity with a Camera component shows a small preview in the bottom-right corner of the Viewport, rendered through that camera. Close it with its ×, or turn it back on from View ▸ Camera Preview. It hides in Play and when the Viewport is smaller than 260×160.

Hierarchy

The Hierarchy lists every entity in the scene as a tree.

Parenting: drag an entity onto another to make it a child. A child's position, rotation and scale are relative to its parent.
Groups: right-click ▸ Create Group makes an organizing parent whose origin re-centres on its children.
Dimension badges show which kinds of components each entity has: [2D], [UI], [CORE]. An amber icon warns about conflicting components.
Search filters by name and keeps parents visible, so a match never appears without its context.
Multi-select: click to extend the selection, Ctrl+A selects all, F2 renames, Delete destroys the whole selection.
Drop a script onto a row to attach it to that entity, or onto empty space to create a new entity named after the script.

Properties (the inspector)

Properties shows the selected entity's components. With several entities selected, it edits the components they share.

The header holds the entity's name, an active toggle and its read-only 64-bit UUID.
Add Component opens a searchable picker with tabs: All, 2D, UI, Core.
Every edit is undoable. A drag counts as one edit when you release it, so Ctrl+Z reverts the whole drag.
A child entity shows read-only World Position / Rotation / Scale under its editable local values.
Script fields: the public fields of your C# scripts appear here and can be edited. See Inspector fields & attributes.

Content Browser

A file browser rooted at your project's Assets/ folder.

Drag and drop: drop a .ktx scene onto the Viewport to open it; drop a texture onto a Sprite Renderer or UI Image slot; drop a .cs file onto an entity to attach it as a script.
Right-click an asset to rename, delete, duplicate, show it in your file manager, apply a texture preset, or (for several images) Generate Texture Atlas….
New C# Script creates a script from a template with OnAwake, OnCreate, OnUpdate and OnDestroy already in place.

See Assets, textures & sprite atlases.

Console

Shows engine and script log messages with colour-coded severity: TRACE, INFO, WARN, ERROR, CRITICAL. Filter by text or severity, clear the log, and click an entry to copy its details. Script errors name the script, the entity and the callback that threw.

Profiler

Live graphs of frame rate and frame time, the 2D renderer's statistics (draw calls, quad, circle and line counts, buffer use) and memory use. The built-in instrumentor can export a trace you can open in chrome://tracing or speedscope.

Settings

A searchable two-pane panel. Search by what you want, not by category: adb finds the Android toolchain, gravity finds physics, autosave finds auto-save, snap finds snapping. Several words narrow the search rather than widening it.

Category	Holds	Saved in
View	Grid, gizmos, collider display, line width	Project
Content Browser	Thumbnails, hidden files	Project
Project	Window and render size, physics, layers, Android, services	Project (`.ktxproj`)
Editor Preferences	Theme, font, auto-save, scripting	Machine
Engine Settings	ADB, SDK, NDK and JDK paths	Machine (`EngineSettings.yaml`)
Grid & Snapping	Snap increments, gizmo space	Project

Dragging a slider updates the value live but writes the file only when you release it. (?) markers next to a label explain settings that are not obvious.

Level-building panels

Panel	Use it to
Tile Palette	Paint tiles into a tilemap with brushes, lines, box and flood fills, and auto-tiling.
Level Generator	Generate a layout procedurally (caves, dungeons, platformer chunks and more) and bake it into a tilemap.
Prefab Palette	Place or scatter prefabs by hand, grounded to tiles and snapped to corners.
Timeline / State Machine	Author animation timelines and animator state machines.
Editor Tools	Run your own C# build scripts as buttons.

These are covered in Tilemaps, Tile Palette & level generation and Editor tool scripts.

Auto-save and recovery

Turn on auto-save under Editor Preferences ▸ Auto-Save and set an interval (10 seconds minimum). Auto-save never overwrites your scene file: it writes a separate recovery copy to Cache/AutoSave/. When you reopen a scene that has a newer recovery copy, the Console tells you. To recover, copy the .autosave file over the scene. Auto-save skips Play, Simulate and prefab editing, and scenes that have never been saved.

Running without a GPU

Krotox can run on Mesa's Lavapipe software Vulkan driver, for virtual machines and build servers. Everything works, only slower, and GPU timings read *n/a*. Packages built with software Vulkan include a Launch-Editor-SoftwareVulkan.bat launcher.