Attention: Here be dragons

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Redot.

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Using the Web editor

There is a Web editor you can use to work on new or existing projects.

Note

The web editor is in a preliminary stage. While its feature set may be sufficient for educational purposes, it is currently not recommended for production work. See Limitations below.

Browser support

The Web editor requires support for WebAssembly's SharedArrayBuffer. This is in turn required to support threading in the browser. The following desktop browsers support WebAssembly threading and can therefore run the web editor:

  • Chrome 68 or later

  • Firefox 79 or later

  • Edge 79 or later

Opera and Safari are not supported yet. Safari may work in the future once proper threading support is added.

Mobile browsers are currently not supported.

The web editor only supports the Compatibility rendering method, as there is no stable way to run Vulkan applications on the web yet.

Note

If you use Linux, due to poor Firefox WebGL performance, it's recommended to use a Chromium-based browser instead of Firefox.

Limitations

Due to limitations on the Redot or Web platform side, the following features are currently missing:

  • No C#/Mono support.

  • No GDExtension support.

  • No debugging support. This means GDScript debugging/profiling, live scene editing, the Remote Scene tree dock and other features that rely on the debugger protocol will not work.

  • No project exporting. As a workaround, you can download the project source using Project > Tools > Download Project Source and export it using a native version of the Redot editor.

  • The editor won't warn you when closing the tab with unsaved changes.

  • No lightmap baking support. You can still use existing lightmaps if they were baked with a native version of the Redot editor (e.g. by importing an existing project).

The following features are unlikely to be supported due to inherent limitations of the Web platform:

  • No support for external script editors.

  • No support for Android one-click deploy.

See also

See the list of open issues on GitHub related to the web editor for a list of known bugs.

Importing a project

To import an existing project, the current process is as follows:

  • Specify a ZIP file to preload on the HTML5 filesystem using the Preload project ZIP input.

  • Run the editor by clicking Start Redot editor. The Redot Project Manager should appear after 10-20 seconds. On slower machines or connections, loading may take up to a minute.

  • In the dialog that appears at the middle of the window, specify a name for the folder to create then click the Create Folder button (it doesn't have to match the ZIP archive's name).

  • Click Install & Edit and the project will open in the editor.

Attention

It's important to place the project folder somewhere in /home/web_user/. If your project folder is placed outside /home/web_user/, you will lose your project when closing the editor!

When you follow the steps described above, the project folder will always be located in /home/web_user/projects, keeping it safe.

Editing and running a project

Unlike the native version of Redot, the web editor is constrained to a single window. Therefore, it cannot open a new window when running the project. Instead, when you run the project by clicking the Run button or pressing F5, it will appear to "replace" the editor window.

The web editor offers an alternative way to deal with the editor and game windows (which are now "tabs"). You can switch between the Editor and Game tabs using the buttons on the top. You can also close the running game or editor by clicking the × button next to those tabs.

Where are my project files?

Due to browser security limitations, the editor will save the project files to the browser's IndexedDB storage. This storage isn't accessible as a regular folder on your machine, but is abstracted away in a database.

You can download the project files as a ZIP archive by using Project > Tools > Download Project Source. This can be used to export the project using a native Redot editor, since exporting from the web editor isn't supported yet.

In the future, it may be possible to use the HTML5 FileSystem API to store the project files on the user's filesystem as the native editor would do. However, this isn't implemented yet.