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Objects & props

Objects are the scenery of your desktop: beds, plants, bookcases, campfires, lamps. Unlike pets, they don’t walk around or run a behavior graph, they sit where you put them and can play a looping animation. The demo ships 27 of them, and you can make your own in the Object Editor.

The Object Editor: States/Assets sidebar, sprite preview, Properties/Settings panel
The Object Editor, showing the States and Assets sidebar, sprite preview, and Properties panel.

Objects live in the Library’s Objects tab and work just like pets:

  • Toggle Live to place one on your desktop.
  • Drag it anywhere; if it goes off-screen, use Reset position in the detail panel to bring it back.
  • Set its Scale, and its Back / Front layer, which orders it relative to other objects. Whether a pet appears in front of or behind an object is set by the object’s pet layer in the Object Editor (see States and layers below).
  • Right-click a live object for a quick menu without opening the Library: Hide this Object, Bring to Front, Send to Back, or Reset Position. Works on macOS and Windows.

From the Library (Custom source) click New Object and give it a name; the Object Editor opens. You can also Clone an existing object (yours or a default) and edit the copy.

The editor is organized into panels:

  • States (left). The object’s animation states.
  • Assets (left). Import and manage the object’s sprites (opens the same Importer you use for pets).
  • Properties / Settings (right). Edit the selected sprite, and the object’s metadata: icon, name, author, scale, description, and tags.

Save with ⌘S / Ctrl+S. Saved custom objects appear under Custom in the Library’s Objects tab.

  • States are named animations for the object, for example an “on” and an “off” look. Add, remove, and mark one as the Default (it carries a Default badge). A new object starts with one state; in this demo you work with one selected state at a time.

  • Layers build up a state’s picture from back to front. Each state has an ordered list of layers where index 0 is the front and higher numbers are further back. A layer is either:

    • a Sprite layer: a piece of artwork you assign, or
    • the Pet layer: a placeholder that “follows the pet window position,” so you can compose art in front of and behind where a pet stands.

    A valid state requires exactly one Pet layer.

Deeper pet-to-object interaction (anchor points where a pet walks over and docks onto an object, and nodes that send a pet to a specific object) is part of the larger vision but not in this demo. Today, objects are scenery you place and layer; pets don’t automatically interact with them.