Showcade Editors

Showcade is the browser harness that showcases a Cade table — it renders the playfield, simulates the physics, and runs the live engine so you can play and inspect a table without hardware. Alongside the table view it ships a set of visual editors — node graphs, a 3D object editor, and a text editor for the configuration itself — that let you see and shape a table’s parts:

The media those editors draw on — models, images, sounds, video — is shared through the Asset Catalog, which has its own browser page and docks beside the table. If you model in Blender, the Blender Bridge extension sends your selection straight into that catalog as a GLB.

Which table you are editing is its own page: Tables lists the tables you have worked on, everything anyone has published, and the ones people have shared with you, and opens the one you pick.

Playing the table is its own reference: Playing the Table covers the flippers, plunger, nudge, and camera keys, plus the panels you can toggle while a ball is in play. If you’d rather follow a short recipe than read a reference, start with the How-tos.

The rules, lightshow, sound, DMD, and testing pages all sit on one shell and share the same gestures and the same rebindable shortcuts, so once you know one you know the others. Start with Node Editor Basics for the shared model — the palette, selecting and inspecting nodes, the editable Details rail, the context menu, and navigation — then read the per-editor pages for what each one adds. The Object Editor is a different tool — a 3D geometry editor rather than a node graph — but shares the same live-vs-sample behavior.

Opening the editors

Showcade runs at show.cade.run — there’s nothing to install, download, or run locally. Open it in a browser and the table loads with the real Cade engine behind it.

On your first visit a short Getting started tour introduces the table, the play controls, and the editors, links out to these docs and the release notes, and closes with a look at what’s coming next — with a Send feedback button if you want to weigh in on it. You can replay the tour any time from the ⚙ menu (Getting started…), and a Show the intro on load setting decides whether it greets you again.

After a new release, the first page you open shows a What’s new panel with that version’s notes — once per release, not once per visit. Dismiss it with Got it; ⚙ → What’s new… brings it back whenever you want to reread it.

Each editor is its own page — Rules, Lightshow, Sound, DMD, Source, and Testing — and the top bar of every page links to all of them, along with Tables and Assets. The Object Editor is the exception: it is a mode of the table page itself, opened with E.

The ⚙ menu and settings

Every page carries a ⚙ menu with the app-wide chrome: About Showcade…, Getting started… (replay the intro tour), What’s new…, Send feedback…, quick per-editor toggles, and All settings…, which opens the settings dialog grouped by scope:

• Global — master volume and Mute audio, Reduced motion, Touch controls, the Feedback button, Show the intro on load, Colour-blind-safe palette, and the Perf HUD.

• Video — the render quality and look:

  • Bloom (Auto / Off / Low / High / Ultra) — how far lit lamps and inserts glow. Ultra extends the glow to the bumper, target, and drop lamps, which are drawn differently and cost an extra pass.
  • Antialiasing (Auto / Off / FXAA) — post-process edge smoothing. Turning any video effect on bypasses the GPU’s own multisampling, so this is what keeps edges clean while effects are active.
  • Resolution scale — a slider: render below native resolution and upscale to buy frame rate. 1.0 is native.
  • Lamp light scatter (Auto / Off / Low / High) — how many lamps light the playfield around them.
  • Lamp highlights (Off / Ball only / All surfaces) — specular highlights cast by lamps; the ball is where they read most.
  • Tone mapping (Auto / Off / Standard / ACES filmic) — how bright values compress into display range. ACES rolls highlights off the way film does, which stops lit lamps clipping to flat white under bloom.
  • Vignette (Auto / Off / Subtle / Strong) — darkens the frame edges, pushing the eye onto the playfield.
  • Film effects (Auto / Off / Subtle / Full) — film grain, chromatic aberration, and sharpening, moved together as one control.

  On every Auto, the harness detects your GPU and turns the effect off on software renderers, so the defaults are safe to leave alone.

• Key bindings — the play controls, all rebindable. See Playing the Table.

• Keyboard shortcuts — one set of editor commands shared across rules, lightshow, sound, DMD, and testing. See Node Editor Basics.

• A section per editor, holding that editor’s own toggles — and, under Object editor, its tile mnemonics, digit row, and camera keys.

Settings persist in your browser. Sync settings to my account is an opt-in toggle that roams them when you’re signed in — device-specific choices like the video quality tiers and touch controls deliberately stay per-machine.

Working against the live table

Every editor reads — and, where supported, writes — the running table’s real configuration through the engine. That’s the normal and expected state: the site always ships the real Cade engine, so you don’t have to arrange anything for it.

Edits round-trip: your change is applied to the engine and the graph is re-read from what the engine actually accepted, so what you see is always the real state. A rejected edit is reverted and the reason is shown in an inline banner rather than failing silently.

Live edits also persist across a reload and sync between open windows — edit a table in one tab and another tab open on the same table follows along, so you can keep the 3D view and a node editor side by side and watch them stay in step.