Tools overview
Important
Join the Meta Horizon Creator Program! As a member, you gain: - Access to monetization opportunities including monthly bonuses, in-world purchases and competition cash prizes.
- Helpful resources including educational content, technical support and a collaborative creator community.
Important
The desktop editor is in early access and we need your feedback! To report bugs, go to the main menu and select Report a problem. To give us feedback, select Help us improve from the main menu. Meta Horizon Worlds contains a lot of useful tools to help you create engaging new worlds quickly.
The PC creation tools support cross-platform publishing across MR and mobile and offer a significantly richer set creation capabilities. The PC environment provides a more efficient world-building experience with established workflows and powerful tools like the Desktop editor, custom model import, and TypeScript scripting, enabling the creation of more immersive, interactive, and fun experiences.
The VR creation tools for Meta Horizon Worlds are legacy tools. We strongly recommended moving your development process to the Desktop editor and other PC creation tools.
This topic introduces a few of our creation tools: the Desktop editor, TypeScript, Custom Model Import, NPCs, Performance Tools, and a suite of Generative AI Creation Tools.
The Desktop editor is the integrated game development environment for Meta Horizon Worlds. It allows you to build worlds and scenes, and to add and modify objects in your worlds. The Desktop editor runs on Windows, and you control it with the keyboard and mouse, rather than your VR headset.
Note: Building a world with the Desktop editor is similar to building a game in Unity, and is easier than using the editor on your VR headset.
The Desktop editor allows you to:
- Create a world
- Move a camera through the world
- Add shapes, gizmos, sounds, and colliders to the world
- Insert stock assets
- Create quests, leaderboards, and variable groups
- Create and edit scripts using TypeScript
- Generate TypeScript code snippets via AI
- Generate sound effects via AI
- Build and preview the world
- Backup the world
- Publish the world
Using the Desktop editor to build your world makes it easier to:
- Make changes while the world is running
- Update entity property values
- Write and debug TypeScript code
To install the Desktop editor, click
here.
To get started using the Desktop editor, click
here.
TypeScript support in Meta Horizon Worlds gives you a way to write scripts more efficiently using traditional programming processes and tools. You can create a new TypeScript asset from the Desktop editor, type your TypeScript code in VS Code, and then attach it as a component to an object. Using TypeScript expands your development options, and helps you add safety and security to your code.
TypeScript is a strongly-typed version of JavaScript. Support for strong typing provides tight integration with your IDE to provide the following two benefits:
- You can leaverage Intellisense (code completion).
- You can catch errors during development, rather than at runtime.
To get started with TypeScript, click
here.
The Custom Model Import mode in the Desktop editor allows you to fill your world with objects spawned from imported complex 3D models, created using your favorite 3D creation tool. In Meta Horizon Worlds, you refer to the resulting world as a custom model world. You can find your imported assets in your Personal Asset Library. The following image shows an example of what a complex 3D object spawned from an imported asset looks like. In this case, it’s a park bench.
A custom 3D model is composed of multiple files, and you need to specify all of them when you import a 3D model into the Desktop editor. These files include:
- An FBX file. This is the 3D model file format. It contains the 3D mesh along with scene data such as Cameras, Lighting, Geometry, Materials, and Animations.
- One or more PNG files. These are image files, and they contain textures that map onto the 3D model’s surface to make the spawned object look more realistic.
You are able to create your own static lighting and collision models for your imported 3D models.
To get started with Custom Model Import, click
here.
A Non-Player Character (NPC) is a computer-controlled character in a Meta Horizon Worlds world. This is in contrast to the user-controlled avatar. An example of an NPC could be a monster that patrols the hallways of a haunted house. When the player encounters this NPC, the game ends. Creators often add NPCs to their worlds for a variety of purposes. These include:
- To provide information or quests to the player.
- To sell goods and services.
- To engage the player in conversation.
- To serve as enemies or obstacles for the player to overcome.
- To add to the game’s atmosphere and immersion.
NPCs can range from simple scripted characters, to complex AI-driven characters that learn and adapt to the player’s actions.
There are five types of stock NPC characters that you can spawn into your scene, according your your needs. Utility, Storyteller, Antagonist, and Ally types of NPCs exhibit behaviors that are controller with an AI script. The fifth type, Environmental, do not have AI behaviors.
The four behaviors act in the following ways:
- Utility: Performs basic functions to move a narrative or game experience forward. For example, Quest lines, buying, selling, and trading items, or directing the player to do something. Utility NPCs can move around an environment and identify specific things. Utility NPCs support scripting.
- Storyteller: Storyteller NPCs are conversationally driven. Storyteller NPCs operate within specific guidelines to move a narrative forward, but with a comprehensive world understanding and context, including the game state.
- Antagonist: Enemy NPC characters. Antagonist NPCs have the ability to move, fight, and obstruct the player from accomplishing an objective. You can add AI to control this character archtype to add more personality, and to add a higher level of decision making ability.
- Ally: Friendly NPC characters. Ally NPC characters are aligned with the player’s objective. Ally NPC characters can operate on something in the scene. They can folow the player, and they can hide from the player.
To get started with NPC assets, click
here.
Real-time performance metrics and server-side tracing can help creators find and address performance issues in their worlds. You can access the performance tools via browser while visiting your world, alleviating the need to put on a VR headset to get performance data about your world.
The Performance panel displays a real-time view of all currently selected metrics. You can select which metrics to display in the Performance panel. You can also set a Target number for each metric. When a metric exceeds the defined target, a red dot appears next to that metric as an alert.
The Performance panel also supports scrubbing and tracing. With scrubbing, you can review data that has recently appeared on the Performance panel (approximately 30 seconds of data) in detail. With tracing, you can capture performance data from your world to view in Perfetto. Perfetto is a third party tool for performance instrumentation and trace analysis.
For more information on the Performance panel, click
here.
The Desktop editor features a suite of Generative AI Creation tools that assist you in generating script code, audio samples, mesh metadata, and textures.
World creators can struggle when learning Typescript and when trying to convert Meta Horizon Worlds concepts into Typescript code. Luckily, the Generative AI Creation Tool is here to help! Conveniently built into the Horizon Desktop editor, the Generative AI Creation Tool is an authoritative, AI-powered chat assistant. The tool works like a chat app and is as simple as having a back-and-forth, real-time conversation with someone. In this case, that someone just happens to be a
Large Language Model.
The GenAI TypeScript tool has two models available: Llama, and Specialist. The Llama model works well for quick questions, and general information about Meta Horizon Worlds. The Specialist model is trained on TypeScript and the Meta Horizon Worlds API. It can generate scripts and answer questions about scripting and TypeScript. The Specialist model works well as a personal tutor to learn TypeScript and familiarize yourself with TypeScript APIs.
For more information, click
here.
The Generative AI Creation Tool assists in the audio creation process, making it a simple matter of clicking a few buttons and adding the resulting audio.
The Generative AI Creation Tool provides two audio generation modes: sound effect generation and ambient audio generation. Sound effect generation is useful when attempting to create short audio clips, while ambient audio generation is useful when generating longer background tracks.
You can either select sounds based on example prompts, or create your own custom prompts and see what sounds you can come up with.
Once you have that perfect sound, you can use it to create audio assets for your world, or download it to your local hard drive for future use.
For more information, click
here.
The Asset Generation Metadata Tool can create metadata for the mesh assets in your worlds. This will help you better manage and access your 3D models’ assets. It can generate a title, description and tags for mesh assets. It can accept and apply generated title and description for you, and edit generated tags.
For more information, click
here.
Generative AI Texture Generation Tool The Generative AI Texture Generation Tool helps you generate textures for your objects and can improve your flexibility and speed. It can:
- Generate textures for 3D objects.
- Assign the generated texture to a mesh.
- Save the texture both onto your local drive and into your asset library.
- Create textures and work with objects in the wild.
For more information, click
here.
To learn more about Horizon, try the following:
- Create your first world using our step-by-step tutorial.
- Learn about the Desktop editor with the Introduction to the Desktop editor.
- Join the Meta Horizon Creator Program to learn about our program benefits.
