Game Mode

Walk a scene at eye level with a physics-backed character, instead of orbiting it from outside.

Orbiting a scene from outside tells you how it is arranged. It does not tell you how it feels to stand in it. Game Mode puts you inside at eye level, walking.

Game Mode shipped in release 2.0.64.

Open it from the gamepad icon in the bottom toolbar of Build.

Game Mode running inside a Gaussian splat scene, with the control legend visible in the lower left

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Gamepad
Move	W A S D or the arrow keys	Left stick
Look around	Mouse	Right stick
Zoom	Scroll	–
Jump	Space	A
Run	Shift (hold)	Left trigger
Toggle first and third person	V	Right stick click
Fly	F	–
Exit	Esc	–

The on-screen legend changes with the mode you are in. On the ground it lists Move, Orbit, Zoom, Jump and Fly. In the air it swaps the last two for Down / Up on Q and E, and F becomes Walk, which drops you back to the ground.

Run is not in the legend. Hold Shift and every speed, including the vertical one in fly mode, switches to its run value.

Fly has no gamepad binding, and neither does zoom. Everything else in the table works from either.

Where it runs

The gamepad button is in the bottom toolbar of Build, always. It is also in Compose, but only while no shot viewfinder is active: frame up a shot and the button goes away until you leave the viewfinder.

Nothing gates it. Every account has it.

The game toolbar

Entering Game Mode swaps the bottom toolbar for four controls.

Control	What it does
Toggle View	Cycles first person and third person. Also V.
Human	Switches your character to the human
Robot	Switches your character to the robot
Exit game	Leaves Game Mode. Also Esc.

First and third person

Third person shows your character in the scene ahead of you.

Third-person view in Game Mode, the character seen from behind

Human or robot

The two characters do not handle the same. The human cannot fly. There is no fly toggle for it, and jumping in mid-air does nothing rather than lifting you into fly mode. Pick the robot if you want to get above the scene, and the human if you want a human-scaled walk-through, which is usually what an eye-level check is for.

Moving through a scene in Game Mode and switching between the human and the robot character

Game Mode with the robot character active: the four-button toolbar sits at the bottom of the viewport, with the robot's button highlighted

Physics

You collide with the scene rather than pass through it, which is what makes an eye-level walk-through worth doing. Four things are solid:

• Models, including every copy of an instanced one
• Populators, element by element
• Gaussian splats, through the voxel collision mesh built when the splat was imported
• Extrudes, such as roads, re-cooked when you finish dragging a spline handle

Primitives are not on that list. A cube you dropped in as a blocking placeholder has no collision, so you walk through it. Swap it for a model if you need to bump into it.

A character you walk into is solid in its rest pose, not its animated one. The collision shape is a snapshot, so an arm that swings out during an animation does not swing its collision with it.

Do not confuse any of this with Apply Physics in the object menu. That is a one-shot drop used to settle an object onto what is beneath it, and it ends as soon as the object stops moving. It does not leave the object simulating for you to push around in here. See Working with objects.

A note on the name

Linear tickets call this Explore Mode. The product calls it Game Mode, and so does this page.

Related

• Viewport navigation for orbit, pan, and zoom outside Game Mode
• Import Gaussian splats for walking a photographic capture