Play in the editor

The Play controls in the toolbar run your game:

• Play starts the game; while running the same button becomes Stop, with Restart and Pause/Resume as side buttons.
• The play-mode dropdown chooses Play In Viewport (the game hosts over the viewport) or Play In New Window (a dedicated Game tab), and toggles Maximize Viewport on Play — which hands the whole workspace to the running game and restores your layout on Stop.
• A running game reads as a soft accent ring around the viewport (amber, with the frame dimmed, when paused) — not a badge over the game.
• Shortcuts: F5 play, Esc stop, F6 pause/resume, Shift+F5 restart, and F11 to maximize/restore the viewport at any time.

Because play uses an isolated realm — the same runtime that ships your game — what you see in play is what a player gets.

The Outliner while playing

There is one hierarchy, not two. While the game runs the Outliner shows the running world, and a row that came from your scene keeps the identity it had before Play — so what you had expanded stays expanded, what you had selected stays selected, and the Inspector tracks that entity’s live values. Entities the game spawned appear under a Runtime group; they are gone on Stop, as are any values you tweak while playing.

Authoring is the document’s, so it waits for Stop: while playing you can select, search, fold and hide rows, but not rename, reparent, create or delete.

Moving things while the game runs

The selected entity is outlined on the running frame. Turn on Inspect (above the game) and the pointer belongs to the editor instead of the game: click to select what is under it, then move, turn or resize it with the transform tools, which appear beside the frame while Inspect is on and answer to the same W / E / R keys they do when editing. It is off by default, because a game you cannot click is not a game.

The running world is what answers all of this — where the entity is drawn, what is under the pointer, where a drag lands — so it is the game’s own camera doing the projection, and a moved entity ends up where the game will draw it. As with any play-time edit, it lasts until Stop.

Keeping what you changed

Play-time edits end at Stop — that is what makes them safe to make. But the scene document is never destroyed while the game runs, so the work does not have to be thrown away: if you changed anything, Stop offers to keep it, and the Output Log lists exactly what that would be. Keeping is one undo step.

What gets kept is the FIELD’s value as the running world holds it at Stop, for each field you touched. So dragging one axis of a position keeps the position — including an axis a script was driving. The log line shows the value before you decide.

Entities the game spawned cannot be kept: the scene has no row to write them to. Those are counted in the log rather than silently dropped.

Autosave & recovery

The editor periodically snapshots your unsaved documents — only when there are unsaved changes and no Play session is running — so a crash or power loss never costs more than the last few moments of work. A snapshot is kept in your project’s workspace folder and never counts as a real save. The next time you open the project, if a snapshot is newer than the file on disk, the editor offers to restore it; saving the document supersedes its snapshot. This sits alongside the crash minidump and the automatic reload if the GPU render process is lost.