Essentials Series/Asset Templates

This page is part of the Essential Series modding tutorials. It will cover the basics of placing new assets via templates with Industrial Park.

Templates
Using templates is the fastest way to place new assets in the scene. You can either place new asset templates by right clicking the asset list in the Archive Editor and choosing the template you want to place, or you can right click on the view, choose one of the templates and use Shift + Right click to place the template in the scene (you must first activate template focus by clicking on the Template Focus checkbox in an Archive Editor, also make sure the correct layer for that asset type is selected - usually it'll be Default). Many templates are composed of multiple assets (for example, the Bus Stop template will place 7 different assets).

Note: placing a template is not enough for the asset to function if an asset of the same class was not present in the level before (for example, placing a Fodder template in Bikini Bottom (HB01) will crash the game unless you port the Fodder assets to Bikini Bottom's HOP file first). This is explained better in the ../Tikis and Enemies/ tutorial.

Available Templates
Tutorials for specific asset types will explain some of the templates better.


 * Stage Controllers: assets such as Counters, Conditionals and Portals, which you cannot see or touch and control the stage's functions.
 * Placeable: a few other assets with a position in the world (such as Cameras and Triggers) and also empty/generic versions of Entity Assets which you must set up yourself after placing.
 * Battle For Bikini Bottom, Movie Game, Scooby and Incredibles: these contains templates for enemies, pickups, stage items and other elements which are specific to each game.
 * Other: mostly HOP assets, such as PIPT, LODT, SNDI.
 * PasteClipboard is a special template that simply pastes any asset you have copied. Asset which have positions will be placed in the new position you choose.

There is a Templates: Persistent Shinies toggle in the Tools tool strip menu which sets whether the shiny object and manliness point templates will be set as Persistent or not (persistent assets have keep their state saved to the save file, so persistent pickups remain collected forever and never reappear).

Another toggle is Templates: Chain Point MVPTs:. When checked, each time you place a Point MVPT template (starting from the second one in the session) the previous one's "NextMVPTs" will be updated to point to it.

If you have an idea of something that could be added as a template, please talk about it in the Heavy Iron Modding Discord server and it just might be added!

User Templates
Aside from the included templates, you can also create your own templates to place. User Templates can be composed of any number of any asset; they function the same as the PasteClipoard template, except User Templates can be saved to files.



The User Template Manager is accessed through the Tools tab and the Copy and Paste buttons function the same as those in the Archive Editor: you can copy assets from the HIP/HOP and paste them here, and they'll be instantly available as templates. Double-click a template to rename it and press Delete to delete the template.

The template is identical to the asset that was copied (including all fields and links), and the only change made to it is that a new position will be assigned (only for assets with a position value; others will be simple copies).

User Templates are global and will be saved to Resources\UserTemplates. You can rename them manually and share them if you want to.

Links
You already know the basics of placing new assets and editing them; let's move on to the ../Links/ page to take a step further and learn how to create game logic by connecting assets to each other.