Locations

This page walks the location authoring workflow: what a location holds, how to add and connect locations, how to fire a Move to event, and how to bundle location-scoped audio as an ambience. For the mental model of the layer as a whole (the two independent axes, Move to vs Go to, when to reach for it), see World layer.

What’s not here: the World Graph editor mode itself, how encounters work (Encounters), the field-by-field reference for the Location entity (Location reference), and the full Move to event reference (Move to reference).

What a location holds

A location’s inspector groups its fields into blocks that map one-to-one onto the sections below.

  • Identity (ID, Display name, Description): the free-form label the host shows the player, plus the ID that names this location in Move to events and expressions.
  • Connections: outgoing Connections in the spatial graph, each with an optional Visible when gate. Passive routes; they don’t fire anything by themselves. Add and connect locations walks through authoring one.
  • Encounters: scenes staged at this location. Authoring is on its own page, see Encounters.
  • Enter events and Exit events: event lists that fire when the player arrives or leaves. Move the player walks through the shape.
  • Ambiences: named audio bundles the host can layer or cross-fade based on the player’s location. Ambiences covers them in full.
  • Tags: expression-visible group markers, same shape as tags on nodes or scenes.

Add and connect locations

  1. Open the Locations tab in the Data View and click Add location, or right-click an empty patch of the World graph and pick Add Location Here. Give the new location an ID (prefixed location_) and a Display name.
  2. Open the location’s inspector. Under Connections, click Add connection and pick a destination from the combobox. Leave Visible when blank if the connection is always traversable, or fill it with a condition (“Locked until the player finds a key”) to gate it. Add the reverse Connection on the destination location if the route is two-way.
  3. Save. Both endpoints show up on the World graph with a Connection line between them; the runtime lets a Move to event target the destination.

Dragging from one location card to another in the World graph gives you the same result without leaving the graph: pick Adjacent Connection from the disambiguation menu.

Move the player

The Move to event does the work. Add it to any event list, a node’s events, a scene’s intro or outro, another location’s Enter or Exit events, and set its Location field to the destination. When the event fires, the runtime runs the source location’s Exit events, updates the player’s current location, then runs the destination’s Enter events.

Enter and Exit events are ordinary event lists, cropped to the location-safe event kinds (Set variable, Jump, Enter scene, Move to, and a small allow-list of others). They’re the natural home for state you want to fire whenever the player crosses a threshold: a Set variable that ticks a visit counter, a Play sequence that fires an arrival cutscene, a Move to that redirects the player somewhere else on arrival.

The numbered callouts mark (1) an encounter row, (2) its trigger sub-label, (3) the Go to heading, and (4) a connection row.

To test the Move to, run the project in the simulator and fire the event. The World panel refreshes to show the destination’s encounters and outgoing connections; the connections are clickable Go to affordances (the player-driven path). See World layer for how the authored and player-driven paths differ.

Ambiences

An ambience is a named audio bundle attached to a location. Each ambience carries an ID (the name other parts of the project refer to it by), a Name (display label), and a list of ambient-layer audio cues to play together. The runtime exposes the location’s ambiences to the host; the host decides when to layer, swap, or cross-fade based on its own policy.

Reach for ambiences when the same location has more than one mood (“front of shop” vs “back alley”) and you want the host to choose between them.

  1. Open the location’s inspector and scroll to the Ambiences section. Click Add ambience.
  2. Set ID (prefixed amb_) (1) and Name (2).
  3. In the Audio cues picker (3), add one or more ambient-layer audio cues. The picker only shows cues whose Layer is set to Ambient; cues on other layers are invisible here. See Audio cues for how the layer is set.
  4. Save. The location exposes the ambience through the runtime’s location API; hosts that read it can layer or cross-fade the bundled cues.

See also

Docs last synced: 2026-07-08
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