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Asset Manager Editor Guide

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Peter Robinson edited this page Aug 19, 2026 · 2 revisions

Introduction

The Asset Manager editor is where you make and edit the content your game is built from — images, animations, particle effects, bitmap fonts and sounds. It replaces hand-editing .taml files in a text editor, which is how all of this was done before 4.0 and is especially painful for particle effects.

This guide covers version 4.0 Early Access 4.

"Asset Manager" means two things. This page is about the editor — the tab you open to work on assets. There is also the asset system built into the engine: the AssetManager object your scripts reach through AssetDatabase, which loads assets and hands them to your game. That is documented in the Asset Manager Guide, and you want it if you are writing script or building your own tools. The editor is simply one program that uses it.

Opening it

Press Ctrl + Tilde (~) anywhere in the engine and pick Asset Manager from the tabs across the top.

You need a project open first. Assets belong to modules, and modules belong to a project — see the Project Manager Guide if you have not made one yet.

Finding an asset

The library down the left lists every asset in your project, grouped by the module it belongs to. Three controls sit above it:

  • Tiles or rows. Tiles show each asset as a picture, which is what you want for images and animations. Rows show a small icon and the name, which is faster to scan when you already know what you are after.
  • Sort by asset name, or by category and then by name.
  • Search — type, and the list narrows to matching names.

The view mode and the sort are remembered between runs. The search box is not: it starts empty every time, on purpose, so you never come back to a list that is mysteriously missing things.

Making an asset

Use the File menu, then the kind you want. There are five:

Kind What it is
Image Asset A picture, optionally cut into a grid of frames. The foundation for nearly everything else.
Animation Asset A sequence of frames from an image, with a speed.
Particle Asset An effect — fire, smoke, sparks — made of one or more emitters.
Bitmap Font Asset A font, from a .fnt file.
Audio Asset A sound or a piece of music.

Each dialog asks roughly the same things: the file or asset it is built from, an Asset Name, and a Target Module. That last one decides which module owns the asset, and therefore the front half of its asset id — an image named hero created in CoinCollectorGame is CoinCollectorGame:hero everywhere in your game.

An asset is only found if its module declares the folder it sits in, and if the file extension matches what was declared. If something you just made does not appear, check the module's declared assets in the Project Manager.

Saving

This is the part to read. Editing an asset changes it in memory. The file on disk is not touched until you save — exactly like a text editor.

  • Save Asset writes the one you are editing.
  • Save All Assets writes every asset you have changed.
  • Revert Asset throws away the unsaved changes and reloads it from its file.
  • Undo and Redo, on the Edit menu, step back and forth through your changes.

The editor keeps track of what you have changed and asks before anything is thrown away — closing the project or quitting with unsaved assets gets you a confirmation dialog listing them.

An asset with unsaved changes will not be quietly unloaded to free memory either, so you cannot lose work just by clicking away to something else.

Changed in 4.0. Older versions wrote the file the instant you changed any field. That sounds convenient, but it meant a mistake reached the disk before you noticed it, and there was no Undo. If you are following an older tutorial that never saves anything, this is why.

Editing each kind

Select an asset and it opens in the middle of the screen, with its settings in the inspector on the right. The inspector only shows fields that kind of asset actually has — an audio asset is not offered cell counts.

Images

An image asset is a picture plus, optionally, instructions for cutting it into frames.

Most sprite sheets are a regular grid, so you give it a cell width and height and how many across and down. The editor draws that grid over your picture with each cell numbered, and those numbers are what Frame = "3" means on a sprite.

If a grid does not suit your art, explicit mode lets you place and name each cell individually. Named cells are easier to live with than numbers, because re-cutting the image later does not silently change which picture you get.

Images can also carry layers — further images stacked over the first, each with its own position and blend color, flattened into a single texture. Useful for building variants of something without exporting a new file for every combination. The ImageAsset Guide covers what layers cost and when they are worth it.

Animations

Selecting an animation turns the preview into a three-part editor:

  • The stage, in the middle, plays the animation.
  • The palette, on the right, shows every frame the animation's image has to offer.
  • The timeline, along the bottom, shows the frames this animation plays, in order.

You build an animation by dragging frames from the palette into the timeline. The transport bar gives you play, rewind and loop, so you can watch it as you work rather than guessing.

Whether an animation refers to frames by number or by name is decided by its image, not by the animation. An image in explicit mode has named cells, so animations built on it use names. See the AnimationAsset Guide.

Particles

A particle asset holds one or more emitters, and each emitter has a great many settings. Most are not single values but graphs — the size of a particle over its life, its color over its life, how many are emitted over time.

The editor draws each of those as a curve you drag points around on. This is the reason the editor exists: the same effect built by typing time and value pairs into a .taml file is close to impossible to get right, because you cannot see what you are doing.

A transport bar plays the effect while you edit, and channel toggles let you show and hide individual curves, so a graph carrying several does not become unreadable.

The ParticleAsset Guide explains what each field does, and what the file underneath looks like.

Fonts

A bitmap font asset points at a .fnt file — a picture of the letters, plus a description of where each one sits. The inspector shows what actually loaded: how many glyphs, the size the font was generated at, and the pages it uses.

If your text does not appear, this pane is where you find out why. See the FontAsset Guide.

Sounds

An audio asset points at a sound file and carries how it should be played — its volume, whether it loops, whether it streams from disk rather than loading whole, and which volume channel it belongs to.

The pane has a play button, so you can hear it without running your game. See the AudioAsset Guide and the Audio Guide.

Duplicating and deleting

Duplicate Asset makes a copy under a new name. The copy is taken from the asset as it stands in memory, so any unsaved changes are included in it.

Delete Asset removes an asset, asking first. Deleting something other assets are built on — an image that an animation uses — breaks them, so it is worth checking before you confirm.

Where to go next

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