Entity Prefabs - first iteration

[garrynewman]

Instead of spawning a raw entity in code and filling its attributes, adding components and children. we can have a "description" of an entity configuration to spawn. This can be copied, edited and updated outside of the game. This is an entity prefab.

This is the first iteration so I can find out what sucks nice and early. It should be safe enough to use right now and if the format changes I'll add upgraders so it'll retain backwards compatibility.

Example

2f67f1b7-cd1f-4108-9216-fd662d910b05.mp4

Eligibility

Entities, Components and their properties need to be marked with an attribute to show up in the editor.

[Prefab]
public class MyTestComponent : EntityComponent
{
	[Prefab]
	public int IntegerValue { get; set; }

Spawning

Right now the only way to spawn a prefab is from code. Hammer doesn't see these entities yet.

	if ( PrefabLibrary.TrySpawn<Entity>( "grenade.prefab", out var spawnEntity ) )
	{
		spawnEntity.Position = tr.HitPosition;
		spawnEntity.Rotation = Rotation.LookAt( tr.Normal );
	}

Future

I've got a list of things on the todo list for the future of this.

• Spawning from Hammer
• Parameters/Variables
• Adding Prefabs in Prefabs
• Custom Gizmos
• Client only entities

Side Changes

This was a couple of weeks so it brings along with it a bunch of loosely related changes..

EditorForAssetType attribute

[EditorForAssetType( "entity" )]
public partial class MyEditorWindow: DockWindow, IAssetEditor
{
}

This replaces [CanEdit("asset:entity")]. This has the advantage that this is only created when double clicking an asset. This means that the panel in the inspector is a different thing.

CS Project Names

You can set the name of your addon's csproj file in project settings. This lets you give them nice names instead of whatever the addon is called.

Scene Tracing

You can trace against scene worlds now, to be able to pick objects inside.

var tr = World.Trace.Ray( ray, 10000 ).Run()

BoneCollection

I created a new abstract class called BoneCollection and made Model.Bone return one, rather than trying to fumble around using GetBoneName etc. This provides a flat bone list and a heirachy (with bone.parent and bone.children).

SceneCamera.GetRay

Given a cursor position get a scene aiming ray

SceneObject.Model setter

Can change the model on SceneObjects instead of just being able to set it on creation. This needed a bunch of internal changes to wipe up all the old setup.

SceneSunLight works

Added ShadowCascadeCount, SetShadowCascadeResolution, SetShadowCascadeDistance and gave it sensible defaults that will work out of the box.

GameResource serialization, compilation

• GameResource source is stored as json instead of keyvalues
• Compiling into a _c is done in c# now
• Scanning Json for resource usage and adding dependencies is done in c# now
• Cleaned up hacky code around loading resources (deleted all of JsonAsset)

Entity Auto Flushing

I moved the logic code to call ExecuteQueuedCreation to c#. This means we can decide whether to call auto spawn at some point. This isn't exposed to addons at all.

Entity Constructor

I added an internal Entity.CreateByName where you can create an entity and configure it before Spawn is called.

		var ent = Entity.CreateByName<T>( e.Class, ent =>
		{
			DeserializePrefab( ent, e, self, ent );
		} );

This probably isn't much use right now, but it does mean that when spawning a prefab the model, children and components etc will all be setup before Spawn is called.

TypeDescription additions

• Added .OwnAttributes (attributes that are applied directly to this type)
• Added .Namespace
• Added .Fullname
• Changed HasAttribute to take a bool (inherited)

Added CaseInsensitiveDictionary

This dictionary is a regular dictionary with a string key, with StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase set. This is useful when serializing to and from json, where you want to enforce this behaviour - which seems pretty common.

BBox.AddBBox

Add a bbox to a bbox, which will expand it.

Transform Scales

The transform class didn't really pay any attention to Scale when doing ToWorld and ToLocal. I made this work and added some tests around it.

SceneCamera.RenderToWidget removed

You can't render to just ANY widget now. I ran into a bunch of weird problems by doing this. You can now only render to a NativeRenderingWidget

Dragging

I simplified how dragging works, made it possible for dragging and dropping virtualWidgets from list widgets like ListView and TreeView.

DragData is now persistent and can hold an Object - which simplifies things a LOT when dragging internally.. but you obviously need to keep an eye on people dragging between windows.

FloatProperty

LineEdit had a horrible thing where when you clicked on it the precision would change. I removed that and increased the default precision to 3 places. I also made it so when dragging side to side the value changed even if the textentry has focus.

Max Shadow Cascades

MaxShadowCascades was set to 2. I increased that to 4.

UndoSystem

Added Sandbox.Helpers.UndoSystem, which gives a quick and dirty undo system. It's missing a few features that I'm sure people would like but it's a start.

[NotGaylien]

This is so cool and going to be super useful testing iterating, and working on everything everything going forwards, thank you!
For this 🙏🙏.

All the scene related stuff is super useful also.
I been wanting to make a model / asset renderer at some point as a tool for wuick ewsy and dirty portfolio related dtuff if i get around to it.
To quickly get some in sbox pics of all my models.
So that's all gonna go a long way towards that all!

Massive thanks to garry and the facepunch team for all this work in s&box, I very much appreciate it and love it all, its so cool and amazing and always gets me hyped and wanting to make stuff!.
Its all so nice and amazing from the code changes, tools, featurs, models, shaders to animation changes and so on.

[gio3k]

I agree!
You should limit your drinking

[LiminalCrab]

Wow this is incredible.

[PatrickJnr]

Love it!

[dch-GH]

Currently can't seem to serialize custom GameResources on the prefab. Is this intentional or a bug? Dragging a custom GameResource onto the prefab's variable slot, saving it, and then opening the prefab again results in the custom GameResource variable being empty again.

[garrynewman]

Bug!

[garrynewman]

Should be fixed next build

[dch-GH]

Should be fixed next build

All fixed, thanks. 👍

[Fortune117]

edit: Just gonna add more things that I notice here while I work with prefabs.

It'd be nice if we could adjust the scale of the root entity as well.

[Fortune117]

Private properties marked with [Prefab] don't appear in the editor

[Fortune117]

I made an issue for it already but category support for prefabs would be really nice ;~;

[Fortune117]

when you have a lot of prefab properties they start getting squashed:

[Fortune117]

hotloading takes considerably longer when you have a prefab open

[Fortune117]

this is the only actually breaking issue i've run into with prefabs:
#2947

[TheBoxTrot]

one thing i would suggest is a way to filter the select entity and select component prompts. being able to filter the entity list based off projects would be nice

[Phyksar]

@garrynewman what's the state of this API? Tried making a custom editor with EditorForAssetType attribute, the wiki says it's located in Sandbox.Tools namespace, but the whole namespace doesn't exist. Is it outdated or do I need to include any additional package for this to use?

[matekdev]

Would be nice if some of the features that were planned for prefabs got finished up. It has been many months and they have been sitting to rot in their unfinished state.