v0.83.0 Ship It Whole

An exported game now looks like the game you were just playing in the editor. Models a script puts in a character's hand arrive with it, and the editor's own overlays stay behind where they belong.

Your build contains everything it renders

A script that swaps a model at runtime — node.model = "models/items/medkit.glb", the ordinary way to make one pickup node serve every item in a game — worked in the editor and quietly did nothing in an exported build. The node stayed in the world, kept its collider, kept its interaction prompt, and drew as nothing at all. The same silence covered mesh colliders, mesh shadow occluders and the navmesh bake: a wall you could walk through, a shadow that never fell, a level your agents could not find their way across.

The cause is worth one sentence, because it tells you where else to look. References like models/items/medkit.glb are relative to your project, and the editor happens to run from inside your project — so reading one as a plain file path worked there and only there. A build keeps your project in assets/ beside the executable and starts wherever the player launched it, so every one of those reads missed, and missed without saying so.

If a model of yours has ever been mysteriously invisible in a build and fine in the editor, this was why. Re-export and it will be there.

Nothing from the editor rides along

Three pieces of editor furniture were showing up in shipped games, permanently: the red PLAY — edits here are discarded on Stop banner across the top, the Esc — free the mouse hint along the bottom, and the no-active-camera warning. All three belong to the editor's Play/Stop cycle, which a build does not have. They are gone from builds and unchanged in the editor.

The Steam overlay

Games can now open the Shift+Tab overlay themselves, and hear when the player opens or closes it — enough to pause a single-player game while somebody reads their messages.

steam.openOverlay("community")          -- also "friends", "players", "settings"…
steam.openInviteDialog(lobby.id)        -- the invite panel for a lobby
steam.openOverlayStore()                -- your store page, or a DLC's by id
steam.openOverlayUrl("https://…")       -- the overlay's own browser

steam.onOverlayChanged(function(active)
  paused = active
end)

steam.overlayEnabled() tells you whether the player has the overlay switched on at all, so a Community button can show a plain link instead of doing nothing. A misspelt page name is refused with the valid names in the message, in any session — you do not need Steam running to find that typo.

Make it multiplayer

A new follow-along project takes the platformer from the first tutorial and puts two machines in it: what has to move to the host, what each player owns, and what to do about the half-second the network costs you. It is in the Learn tab beside the others, and in the online handbook.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. If you have shipped a build with a missing model, a missing shadow or an editor banner in it, re-export it — no project change is needed.