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Editor Interface

The Lucky Engine editor works in a single window. A title bar with the menus runs across the top, a side bar of layouts runs down the left edge, the panels fill a docking area in the middle, and a status bar runs along the bottom. This page names each part of the window, lists every panel and where it opens, and points to the page that covers it in detail.

In short

Pick a layout in the side bar (Scene, Files, Server, Observe or one of your own) to arrange the panels for a task. Open any other panel from the View menu, the title-bar buttons, or the chevron at the start of a tab strip. Entity properties are edited in the Scene Hierarchy panel, and the play controls sit on the toolbar of the Scene viewport.

The editor window

Region Where What it holds
Title bar Top The menus, five panel buttons, the project name, the zone buttons and the window buttons.
Side bar Left edge Home, the layout buttons, Report a Bug, the documentation link, Settings and Profile.
Layout area Centre The panels of the current layout, arranged in four dock zones.
Status bar Bottom The current scene's name, the engine version and the notification bell.
Notifications Bottom right Messages such as saves, build results, sign-in and available updates.

When the editor starts, the layout area shows the Welcome screen, where you continue the current project, open a recent one or create a new one. Click Continue to enter the layout you used last, or Scene if you have just started the editor. Get Started walks through the Welcome screen.

Upgrading from 2026.2

There are no Simple and Advanced modes any more: the editor has one interface, and you arrange it with layouts. Settings and the sign-in button moved to the side bar, the keyboard shortcut reference moved to Settings, and Audio Events moved to the View menu. Recorded datasets open as file tabs instead of in a Data Viewer, and there is no separate Simulate Physics control: Play runs physics and scripts together.

The title bar

From left to right, the title bar holds:

  • The menus: File, Edit, View, Build, Tools and Help. See Menus.
  • Five panel buttons: File Tree, Scene Hierarchy, gRPC Server, Content Browser and Logs, which opens the Log panel. Click one to open that panel or bring it to the front. The panel flashes briefly so you can spot it. Clicking the button of a panel that is already showing closes it, unless the current layout requires that panel. A dimmed icon means the panel isn't showing.
  • The title, Lucky Engine · project name.
  • Three zone buttons that show and hide the left, bottom and right dock zones. A dimmed button means its zone is hidden.
  • The minimise, maximise and close buttons. On macOS the window buttons sit at the far left instead.

The panel and zone buttons are hidden while the Welcome screen is showing. Drag an empty part of the title bar to move the window.

Button What it does
Home (the Lucky Robots logo) Shows the Welcome screen.
Scene, Files, Server, Observe Switch to one of the built-in layouts.
Your custom layouts Switch to that layout. Right-click to rename it, change its icon or remove it.
+ (Add Layout) Make a new layout, add an existing one, or manage your layouts.
Report a Bug Collects a diagnostic report, opens a pre-filled bug report on GitHub in your browser, and shows the report file so you can attach it. Help → Report Problem does the same.
Open the Documentation Opens this documentation for your editor version.
Settings Opens the Settings panel, or closes it if it is showing. The button is lit while Settings is showing.
Profile Signed out, starts signing in. Signed in, opens your account popup with Profile, LuckyHub and Logout. An orange dot shows that you are signed in.

The button of the current layout is highlighted. Layouts and Docking covers the built-in layouts and how to make your own. Signing in is described in Get Started.

Dock zones

The layout area has four dock zones: Left, Main (the centre), Right, and Bottom, which sits under Main. Every panel opens in its default zone, and each panel can only be docked in certain zones: the Scene viewport stays in Main, for example, and the Scene Hierarchy stays on the left or right. Panels in the same zone share a tab strip. You can split a zone, drag a tab into a window of its own, and hide all the side zones at once with the Fullscreen button at the right end of the Main tab strip.

Layouts and Docking explains all of this step by step.

Panels

Most panels open from the View menu, which shows a check mark next to each panel that is open in the current layout. Choosing a panel that is already open closes it, unless the layout requires it. You can also open panels with the title-bar buttons, by switching to a layout that includes them, or from the chevron menu at the start of any tab strip, which lists the panels that may dock in that zone. Settings, Scene, LuckyHub and the file tabs aren't in the View menu; the tables below say where to find them.

Scene and project panels

Panel How to open Opens in What it is for
Scene Part of the Scene, Server and Observe layouts. Add more from the Main zone's chevron menu. Main The 3D viewport. Each Scene tab is its own viewport. See The Viewport and Viewport Navigation.
Scene Hierarchy View menu, title-bar button, Scene layout Left The entity tree and, below it, the Inspector for the selected entities. See The Scene Hierarchy panel.
Content Browser View menu, title-bar button, Scene layout Bottom The project's assets. See Assets.
File Tree View menu, title-bar button, Files layout Left The files and folders of the project folder. Click a file to open it, usually in a tab of its own. See Viewing Files.
Log View menu, title-bar button (Logs), Ctrl+5, Scene, Server and Observe layouts Bottom Editor and script messages. See The Log panel.
Settings Side-bar Settings button, Edit → Settings Main Editor, scene and project settings. See Settings.

Robots and simulation panels

Panel How to open Opens in What it is for
Content Vault View menu Main Download and manage content packs, such as robots, environments and examples. See Content Vault.
Robots View menu Right The robots available from the Content Vault, with a search box. Click a robot to download it, and a downloaded robot to add it to the scene, or drag a downloaded robot into a Scene viewport. Works while editing, not during Play. See Robots.
Policies View menu Main Import, update and delete the project's control policies. See Robots.
MuJoCo Stats View menu Right Live details of the running MuJoCo model: bodies, actuators, contacts and constraints.
gRPC Server View menu, title-bar button, Server layout Left Start, stop and monitor the gRPC server. See gRPC API.

Recording and sensor panels

Panel How to open Opens in What it is for
Observer View menu, Observe layout Left Record datasets and browse recorded sessions. See Recording.
Lidar Replay View menu Main Play back and inspect recorded lidar scans. See Lidar Replay.

Rendering and authoring panels

Panel How to open Opens in What it is for
Scene Renderer View menu Right Rendering settings and statistics for the active viewport. See Scene Renderer Panel.
Material Editor View menu Main Edit materials. See Lights and Materials.
Statistics View menu Right Frame timing, memory, renderer and audio statistics.
Audio Events View menu Main Create and organise the project's audio events.
Content Creator View menu Right Package assets from your project as a content pack.

Account panel

Panel How to open Opens in What it is for
LuckyHub Profile → LuckyHub in the side bar (signed in) Main Your Lucky Robots account: overview, organisations and usage. See Get Started.

File and editor tabs

Files and some assets open in tabs of their own in the Main zone, one tab per file, named after the file. Open them from the File Tree, the Content Browser or the Observer panel.

Tab Shows
Text Editor Scripts and other text files.
Image Viewer .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .tga and .dds images.
Video Player .mp4 and .mkv videos, such as recorded camera streams.
Parquet Table .parquet data files, such as recorded datasets.
Asset editors Assets that have their own editor, such as procedural graphs. See Procedural Graphs.

If a tab has unsaved changes, closing it asks whether to save them first. The viewers are described in Viewing Files.

AI assistants

The editor has no built-in assistant panel. To work with an AI assistant, connect it to the editor's MCP server, as described in AI Assistants (MCP).

The Scene Hierarchy panel

The Scene Hierarchy panel lists the entities of the open scene as a tree. The docs button to the right of its search box opens this page.

Where the Inspector lives

There is no separate Inspector or Properties panel. The selected entity's components and the Add Component button appear in the Scene Hierarchy panel, below the entity tree. Drag the divider between the two to give either more room. Editing Values explains how to change numbers, vectors, colours and references.

The entity tree

  • Search... narrows the tree to the top-level entities whose name, or the name of an entity below them, contains the text. Case is ignored, and with several words a name must contain all of them. With the panel focused, Ctrl+F puts the cursor in the box. The line below the box shows how many entities the scene has.
  • The Components column shows an icon for each of the entity's main components, such as meshes, lights, cameras, scripts, colliders and joints. Hover over an icon to see the component's name. A collapsed row also shows the icons of the entities below it. Click an icon to select the entity that has that component, with the component open in the Inspector.
  • The eye at the end of a row shows or hides the entity's Static Mesh, Procedural Mesh and Cable Jacket components, and on a collapsed row those of the entities below it too. A crossed-out eye means they are all hidden, and a faded eye means only some are; clicking a faded eye shows them all. A dim grey eye means the row has nothing to show or hide.
  • Click an entity to select it. Ctrl + click adds or removes one entity, Shift + click selects a range of rows, and clicking empty space clears the selection.
  • Double-click an entity to centre the active viewport on it. With the panel focused, F frames the selection in the active viewport; see Focusing on the selection.
  • F2 puts the cursor in the name field at the top of the Inspector, to rename the selection. With several entities selected, the new name goes to all of them.
  • Drag entities onto another entity to make them its children, or onto empty space in the tree to move them back to the top level. Dragging a selected entity moves the whole selection. Drag entities into the Content Browser to save them as a prefab; see Assets.

The entity keyboard shortcuts, such as Del and Ctrl+D, are listed in Settings. In this panel, Del, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V work while the entity tree has keyboard focus: after you click a row or empty space in the tree, not while you are working in the components below it.

Right-click menus

Right-click an entity for the menu below. If the entity isn't selected, right-clicking selects it first; hold Ctrl to add it to the selection instead. The menu acts on the selection, except where an item says otherwise.

  • Unparent moves the selected entities to the top level, keeping their position in the world.
  • Update Prefab, on a prefab instance, saves the instance's changes into the prefab.
  • Create adds a new entity as a child of the one you right-clicked, at its position. A camera created From View keeps the position and direction of the view instead.
  • Group Selection creates an entity named Empty Entity and moves the selected entities into it. If they all have the same parent, the new entity goes under that parent.
  • Delete deletes the selected entities.
  • Reset Transform to Mesh puts a mesh part back where the mesh file places it, and Reset All Transforms to Mesh also resets every part below it.
  • Reset Pose to MJCF Default and Add Policy appear on imported MuJoCo models, such as robots. See Robots.
  • Set Transform to Editor Camera Transform moves the entity you right-clicked to the position and direction of the active viewport's camera.

Right-click empty space in the tree for Group Selection and Create. From there, Create adds the entity at the top level. Its items are Empty Entity, Camera (From View or At World Origin), Text, Sprite, the 3D shapes and procedural primitives such as Procedural Cube (see Procedural primitives), Directional Light, Point Light, Spot Light, Area Light (Rectangle Light, Disk Light, Sphere Light or Tube Light), Sky Light, Ambient Sound and Other → Metadata. The new entity is selected.

The entities that make up the parts of a mesh can't be dragged to another parent, and Unparent and Delete are greyed out for them.

Component menus

Each component in the Inspector has a gear at the right of its header. Click it, or right-click the header, for:

  • Copy, which copies the component's values, and Paste, which applies copied values to that component on every selected entity.
  • Reset, which sets the component back to its default values on every selected entity.
  • Remove component, which removes it from every selected entity. The Transform component can't be removed.
  • Scripting API, on components that scripts can use, which opens the component's page in the scripting reference.

The Script and Robot Controller headers also have a docs button, which opens Scripting and Robots.

Adding components

Click Add Component, below the last component, to open a list of the components you can add, each with its icon. The cursor starts in the Search components... box, so you can type part of a name straight away to narrow the list. Click a component, or move through the list with Up and Down and press Enter, to add it. Press Esc or click outside the list to close it without adding anything.

The list only offers components that at least one selected entity can take, and physics components only for the physics engines turned on in Settings → Scene → Physics. With several entities selected, the component is added to every one of them that can take it.

Fields that refer to an asset, an entity or a script open the same kind of searchable list when you click them; see Reference fields.

The Log panel

The Log panel lists messages from the editor and from your scripts.

  • Clear removes the application messages, and Clear All removes every message.
  • Clear on Play removes the application messages each time you press Play. Auto Scroll keeps the newest message in view; scrolling up turns it off, and scrolling back to the bottom turns it on again.
  • The row-count dropdown shows the last 100, 200, 500 or 1000 messages (the default), or All, which reads the whole log of the session. The clear buttons are hidden while All is selected.
  • Core and App show or hide the two message sources, and the three level buttons show or hide information, warning and error messages.
  • Click a message to open it in a Message Detail dialog, where you can select the text or use Copy To Clipboard.
  • Press Ctrl+End to jump to the newest message.

Which messages are logged at all, and from which level, is set per project in Settings → Project → Log. See Settings.

Menu Items
File Save (Ctrl+S) saves the scene and the project. Create Project..., Open Project... (Ctrl+O), Recent Projects and Save Project As.... New Scene..., Open Scene..., Recent Scenes, Save Scene As... (Ctrl+Shift+S), Set Scene as Startup and Revert to Saved. Import Project... and Export Project... read and write a project as a .zip archive. Exit (Alt+F4).
Edit Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Y) and Settings.
View One entry per panel, with a check mark while the panel is open in the current layout. Reopen Last Closed Window brings back the last separate window you closed.
Build Open Visual Studio Solution, Regenerate Visual Studio Solution, Build C# Assembly (Ctrl+B) and Reload C# Assembly. See Creating and Building Scripts.
Tools Unload Current Sound Bank. FFmpeg Settings, which shows whether FFmpeg is available for video recording and playback and can download it (see Video Encoding and FFmpeg). Remove Stale Colliders (Cache)..., which finds cached collider files the project no longer uses and offers to delete them.
Help Paths lists the editor's folders, such as Default Projects and Cache, each with Copy and Open. Licenses shows the Lucky Engine licence and the third-party licences, on the Lucky Engine and Third Party tabs. Documentation and Scripting API Reference open these docs. Check for Updates, Report Problem, and About, which shows the editor version and third-party notices.

Most of the editor's dialogs, such as Paths, Licenses and About, close when you press Esc or click outside them. In a dialog that asks a question, such as whether to save your changes, that cancels. Press Tab to move between a dialog's buttons and fields. When several dialogs are open, the one opened last is in front.

Status bar and notifications

The status bar shows the name of the open scene on the left, and the engine version and a bell button on the right.

Messages from the editor, such as Project Saved., build results and Signed in as name, appear as notifications in the bottom-right corner, with an icon for success, information, warning or error. A notification disappears after a few seconds; hover over it to keep it, or click its X to dismiss it. Click the bell to open the notification panel, which lists recent notifications and has a button to clear them.

The editor checks for a newer version when it starts. If one is available, a notification that stays until you dismiss it reads Lucky Engine version is available. Click to download it. Clicking it opens the download page. To check at any time, choose Help → Check for Updates.

Play controls

The play controls sit in the middle of the toolbar of the active Scene viewport, the Scene tab you used last.

Control What it does
Play Runs the scene: scripts, physics and robots together.
Pause / Resume Shown while playing. Holds the simulation, and continues it again.
Stop Shown while playing. Returns to the editable scene.
Recorder Status Opens a popup with the recorder's state and controls. See Recording.

Press F5 to play, and again to stop. F5 works anywhere except while typing in a text field and in the Content Browser and File Tree, where it refreshes the list instead. Alt+P does the same while a Scene viewport or the Scene Hierarchy has focus. While the scene is paused, click Stop to end Play: F5 and Alt+P only stop a running scene.

Playing works without signing in. Recording needs a signed-in LuckyHub account, so while you are signed out the Play tooltip adds Sign in to LuckyHub to enable recording. What the viewport shows during Play is covered in The Viewport.

Where to go next