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Manual

The manual explains how Skywalker works and how to use each part of it: the data model of scenes, entities and components, the renderer, the world tools, characters and effects, gameplay systems, the Wander behavior language and the production pipeline. Every page shows the same task three ways where it applies (a tool call, Wander code and the command line), because the editor, agents and scripts all use the same tools. For exhaustive lists of tools, components, builtins and CLI options, use the Reference.

The hello_sky scene with entity ids

Core

Scenes, entities, components, assets and the deterministic simulation every other system builds on.

A neon street at night

Rendering

Materials, lights and shadows, sky, GI and reflections, camera and grading, debug views and the profiler.

An island bay with an ocean and palms

World

Eroded terrain, FFT water and GPU-instanced foliage for landscapes of any size.

A campfire effect at night

Characters and effects

Strand hair and fur, particles and fluids, skeletal animation and cinematics.

Map of the manual

Core

Page What you learn
Scenes and entities Scene files, stable ids, hierarchy, tags and vars, the undoable and attributed edit history, saving and loading
Components The reflected component model, component families, reading and writing fields, adding a component to the engine
Assets and prefabs Asset records and GUIDs, mesh import, materials, prefabs, licensed downloads, placement on real geometry
Simulation and time Play, pause and step, determinism, the game's pause and time scale, process modes, render interpolation

Rendering

Page What you learn
Rendering overview The frame and its passes, real-time versus stills, quality tiers, render scale, shaders, render layers
Materials Surface fields, PBR, toon and unlit shading, presets, generated PBR textures
Lighting and shadows Clustered lights, the light component, sun cascades, cloud shadows, volumetric light
Sky and atmosphere Gradient, atmosphere and HDRI skies, volumetric clouds, stars, fog, wind, presets
GI and reflections Screen-space GI, reflections and AO, the sky probe, samples for stills
Camera and post-processing Lens and depth of field, exposure, tonemapping, grading and looks, bloom, TAA, motion blur
Debug views Every buffer and diagnostic view, legends, texture density checks
Profiler Per-pass GPU timing, CPU scopes, benchmarks, the slow-frame recipe

World

Page What you learn
Terrain Heightfield terrain generation, sculpting, painting layers, heightmaps and map overlays
Water The FFT ocean, lakes and pools, shores, and querying wave heights for gameplay
Foliage GPU-instanced grass, plants, rocks and trees, wind, LODs and impostors

Characters and effects

Page What you learn
Characters Humanoid maps, retargeting, foot and hand IK, turn in place, skinned grooms, skin / eye / cloth / hair-card materials
Hair and fur Strand grooms from presets or files, shading, simulation and budgets
Visual effects CPU and GPU particles, volumetric fluids and the effect presets
Animation Skeletal animation, animator controllers, IK, bone attachments and sequences

Gameplay

Page What you learn
Physics and navigation Rigid bodies, colliders, characters, joints, navmeshes and agents
Audio Sound sources, the mixer and its buses, listeners and generated audio
Input Input actions and axes, keyboard, mouse and gamepad, simulated input for tests
2D and UI Sprites, tilemaps, 2D lights and cameras, world text, UI canvases and dialogue
Scene flow Changing scenes while the game runs, carried entities, sub-scenes, loading scenes, fades and crossfades
Save games Checkpoints, autosaves and slots, the persist component, exact replay after a load, migrations
Localization String tables, @key texts, plurals and numbers per language, the locale, the translation workflow

Wander scripting

Page What you learn
Wander overview Behaviors as intent plus code, and how scripts attach to entities
Language Syntax, triggers, states, coroutines, types, modules and builtins
Specs and tests Deriving rules from an intent and proving them with test blocks
Graphs and native code The node-graph view, compiling behaviors to native code and C++ modules

Production

Page What you learn
Studio and crews Agent crews, tasks, feedback, loops and playtests inside a project
DCC bridge Agents working in Blender (and, through untested adapters, Maya, Houdini and 3ds Max), with results imported as assets
Movie renderer Offline cinematics with accumulated samples and real motion blur
Shipping game.json, quality presets and packaging a standalone macOS app
Performance Budgets and measurements across rendering, simulation and effects

How the manual is organised

Every manual page follows the same shape, so you know where to look:

Section What it holds
Introduction What the feature is and what you use it for, in a few sentences, with a picture made by the engine
Concepts How it works: the mental model, the important fields in tables, defaults and ranges
How to … Task steps with tabs for the tool call, the Wander code and the CLI command that do it
Recipe A complete, copyable sequence that reaches a concrete goal
Pitfalls and Limits Real limitations and the mistakes people make, taken from the engine's own design notes
For agents The tool calls an AI agent uses for the feature, in order, with one line each on why
Reference Links to the generated reference for every tool, component and builtin on the page, and to the design document

Code samples on this site are checked against the engine: tool calls use real tool names and arguments, Wander blocks compile with skywalker check, and CLI lines use real commands.

scene_overview {}

on tick
  rotate self by (0, 90 * dt, 0)
end

skywalker render scenes/main.sky.json -o shot.png --samples 8

For agents

The manual is written for people and agents alike. An agent that starts on an unfamiliar feature reads the matching manual page, then confirms the details in the live registry, which always matches the running engine:

engine_info {}                                   # version, renderer, tool categories
component_schema {"component": "light"}          # every field of a component, with ranges and enums
wander_reference {}                              # every Wander builtin and trigger

The design documents under docs/ are also served by the MCP server as resources (skywalker://docs/<NAME>). See the Agent Guide.

Where to go next