v0.89.0-rc1 Stay In Your Lane

A script stays inside its project, a loop without an exit stops the script rather than the editor, and the editor no longer goes down with the terminal it was launched from. A release candidate on the beta channel: nothing in it changes how you write a game, but it draws lines a game could previously cross, so play yours on it before it goes stable.

A path is relative to the project, and stays inside it

Every path a script or a scene file names — assets.getFile, assets.getContents, node.model =, a texture, an audio clip, a scene, a script name on a node, a terrain save folder — is read relative to the project folder and resolves inside it. One that would land anywhere else, whether spelled as an absolute path or climbed to through .., resolves to nothing, and the Console says which rule refused it, once per distinct reference.

A game runs on a machine that is not yours. What is on that machine's disk is not your game's business, and a scene file is data that may have been written by somebody else.

assets.getContents lists at most 20 000 files and says so when it stops, and it does not follow a linked folder. A linked package's folder still resolves, because that is where a linked package is.

A loop without an exit stops the script, not the editor

while true do end in update used to freeze the editor, the player and a dedicated server alike, forever, with nothing to say why.

A pass into your scripts may now run for 2 seconds — 500 ms on a dedicated server, adjustable with floptle serve --script-budget-ms. Past that, the script that overran is stopped with an error naming the budget, and it is not called again until you edit its file. Everything else keeps running, and the Console still says what happened.

The scripts share 512 MB between them. A table that only grows hits "not enough memory" in its own call, and the rest of the game goes on. A print inside a loop keeps a thousand lines a frame on the Console and reports the rest as a count, and a save slot holds at most 10 000 keys and 4 MB.

A game reaches public addresses only

http.* from a script connects to public addresses and nothing else. Loopback, private networks, mDNS names, .internal names and link-local addresses are refused, judged on what a name resolves to rather than on how it was spelled, and the refusal is res.error with the rule named.

The editor's Play is the one exception: hitting http://localhost:3000 while developing is the ordinary case and keeps working, and the Console says once per session that an exported game and a dedicated server will not allow it.

Redirects are no longer followed. A 3xx arrives as an ordinary reply with res.location, and the script decides. A request body is capped at 8 MB like a reply, and Host, Content-Length, Transfer-Encoding and Connection are the transport's headers to set.

The editor survives losing its terminal

Every line the engine writes to the terminal now survives the terminal going away — a closed window, a pipe nobody reads. The Hub launches the editor with its output in a log file of its own (logs/ under the Hub's data folder, the last five kept), which is also the file to send along with a bug report.

openUrl parses what it opens

openUrl, ed.openUrl and sys.openUrl parse the address before anything opens it: http or https, a host, no username or password, and nothing in it a shell could read as its own syntax. An address that fails is refused at the call with the reason, on every platform. On Windows the link is handed to the shell's own open call rather than through cmd.

For a server you run

A dedicated server's unit keeps its runtime and state directories to its own user, denies the process link-local addresses, and gives up a handful of capabilities a game server never uses. Its status file names the prefix of the game key rather than the key. A deployment row carrying a control character in any field is refused with the field named, rather than written into a unit file.

Upgrading

If a script of yours reads a file by absolute path or through .., it now reads nothing and the Console says so — move the file into the project and reference it relatively. If a script reaches localhost from an exported build, it is refused; in the editor's Play it still works. If http.get was relying on a redirect being followed, read res.location and make the second request yourself. Nothing else needs a change.