A Stingray game is made up of many data files, also known as resources. Each resource contains a small piece of the game's content, such as a texture or a character definition, that gets loaded into the game at runtime and used according to the gameplay rules you set up in Stingray.

Some of these resources contain content that you create in other content creation tools, like Maya, 3ds Max, or a texture painting application. These kinds of assets you import into your Stingray project. See the section on Importing assets.

Other kinds of resources you create and modify using the Stingray editing tools. Note that the Stingray resources are case sensitive.

Your project will also use a set of basic resources called "core" resources. These resources don't live in your project's source folder, and aren't visible in the Asset Browser. Instead, they accompany the Stingray application in your Stingray installation directory, and they are shared between all the projects you create.

One of the most important things for you to know about in the core resources is the Appkit, which is a collection of Lua scripts that provides support for some basic gameplay needs out of the box. For more on the appkit, see Scripting with Lua.

For a more in-depth discussion, see Working with core resources.

Most of the resources that you work with in the Stingray editing tools are stored in your project's source folder in a human-readable data format called SJSON, for simplified JSON. As you work in the editing tools, the data in these resource files will get automatically updated. However, since the files are text-based, you can also modify them by hand.

For more details, see About the SJSON data format.

Each piece of content in your Stingray project is uniquely identified by a name and type. You will need to use these names and types in order to refer to the different resources in your project as you build your game.

• The type of each resource is determined by its file extension.
• The name of each resource is determined by its placement within the project. It is the fully qualified path to the file from the root of the project, using forward-slashes as separators, omitting the file extension.

For example, the content/materials/floor.material file within the project's source directory is a resource of type material. which you can refer to using the resource name content/materials/floor.

Note: When you need to refer to a resource by name, you need to use the name exactly in this formulation. It is a unique name, not a path: you cannot substitute backslash characters, and you cannot use relative or absolute disk paths.

Note: Periods in file and folder names may sometimes be used for special purposes. For example, the .s2d folders created by Scaleform Studio are treated as a single resource by the engine, even though they are folders containing multiple files. Plugins can extend the engine with other types that behave the same way. Periods are also often used as suffixes for localization and platform mapping. For example, floor.ps4.material can indicate a PS4-specific version of floor.material. Be aware when using periods in files and folder names to not use a suffix that has a special meaning in the project, such as .s2d or .ps4. These special meanings are configured in the .stingray_project, so you can change them if you need to. For more information on this, see Localizing resources.