Publishing a scene

Before you begin #

Make sure of the following:

• Your scene complies with all of the scene limitations. Most of these are validated each time you run a preview of your scene.

• You have a Metamask account, with your LAND parcels assigned to it.

• You own the necessary amount of adjacent LAND parcels. Otherwise you can purchase LAND in the Market.

📔 Note: Multi-parcel scenes can only be deployed to adjacent parcels.

Check scene data #

When deploying, the CLI reads information from the scene.json to know where to deploy your scene to.

Open your scene’s scene.json file and complete the following data:

• title: The title is displayed on the UI under the mini-map, whenever players enter your scene. It also shows on the teleport popup.

• description: A description of what players will find in your scene. This is displayed on the teleport popup.

• navmapThumbnail: An image that represents your scene. This is displayed on the teleport popup. The image should be a .png or .jpg image of a recommended size of 228x160 pixels.

• Parcels: The coordinates of the parcels that will be occupied by your scene

• Base: The coordinates of the parcel that will be considered the [0,0] coordinate of the scene. If your scene has multiple parcels, it should be the bottom-left (South-West) parcel.

• spawnPoints: A set of coordinates inside the scene (relative to the scene’s base parcel) where players spawn into. By default players spawn onto the 0,0,0 location of the scene (bottom-left corner). Use this to start out in a specific location, set a region to prevent players from overlapping with each other when they first appear.

📔 Note: See scene metadata for more details on how to set these parameters.

To publish the scene #

Via the Decentraland Editor #

Make sure you’ve installed the Decentraland editor.

1. Open your scene’s folder using Visual Studio Code.

📔 Note: The Visual Studio window must be at the root folder of the scene project.

2. Open the Editor’s menu, by clicking the Decentraland logo on the tabs on the left. Then click Publish scene.

   This opens a new tab in Visual Studio, showing what parcels you’re deploying to.

3. Approve the transaction

   • If the LAND tokens you own or have permissions are linked to a wallet you can use via Wallet Connect, click Connect wallet, then scan the QR code with your mobile device and follow the steps on Wallet Connect.
   • If you need to use Metamask on the browser, click Open in Browser to open this same window on a browser tab. Then approve the transaction on the Metamask browser extension.

Via the CLI #

1. Log into your Metamask account with the same public address associated with your parcels in Decentraland.
2. Run dcl deploy from the scene’s folder.

   💡 Tip: If there are files in your project folder that you don’t want to deploy, list them in the .dclignore file before deploying.

3. A browser tab will open, showing what parcels you’re deploying to. Click Sign and Deploy.
4. Metamask opens, notifying you that your signature is requested. Click Sign to confirm this action.

💡 Tip: If you’re implementing a continuous integration flow, where changes to your scene are deployed automatically, then you can set the export DCL_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable to the private key of an account that has deploy permissions.

💡 Tip: dcl deploy runs a dcl build, which checks the scene for type errors more strictly than running dcl start. If these errors can’t be avoided (eg: they happen in an external library) and they don’t impact the scene, you can use dcl deploy --skip-build to skip the dcl build step and deploy the scene as it is.

Publish from a hardware wallet #

Instead of storing your LAND tokens in a Metamask account, you may find it more secure to store them in a hardware wallet device, such as a Ledger or a Trezor, that’s physically plugged in to your computer.

If you’re using one of these devices, you can link the hardware wallet to Metamask to enable signing messages, while keeping the tokens more secure. See this article from Metamask for instructions to connect your account.

Once your hardware wallet can be used via Metamask, you can deploy following the same steps as if your tokens were on a Metamask account.

Scene overwriting #

When a new scene is deployed, it overwrites older content that existed on the parcels it occupies.

If a scene that takes up multiple parcels is only partially overwritten by another, all of its parcels are either overwritten or erased.

Suppose you deployed your scene A over two parcels [100, 100] and [100, 101]. Then you sell parcel [100, 101] to a user who owns adjacent land and that deploys a large scene (B) to several parcels, including [100, 101].

Your scene A can’t be partially rendered in just one parcel, so [100, 100] won’t display any content. You must build a new version of scene A that only takes up one parcel and deploy it to only parcel [100, 100].

What are the content servers #

The content servers are a network of community-owned servers with a filesystem that’s content-addressed, meaning that each file is identified by its contents, not by an arbitrary file name.

We use the content servers to host and distribute all scene content in a similar way to BitTorrent, keeping the Decentraland network distributed.

1. The content servers store and distribute all of the assets required to render your scenes.
2. The dcl deploy command links these assets to the LAND parcel specified in your scene.json file. Whenever you redeploy your scene, the CLI will update your LAND smart contract, if needed, to point to the most recent content available on the content servers.

The information on each copy of the server is verifiable, as each scene is signed by the LAND owner’s hash. This means that someone hosting a copy of the server won’t be able to tamper with the content to display something illegitimate. The community can also vote to approve or remove any of these servers using the DAO.

The test server #

You can deploy content to the test catalyst server to run full tests with multiple users, the sourrounding scenes, and an environment that is identical to production. The test server is identical to all other catalyst servers, the difference is that the content that is deployed to this server isn’t propagated to the others. Content deployed to other servers on the other hand does get propagated to this server, so surrounding scenes should look as they will in production.

📔 Note: To deploy to parcels in the test server, you must have the same permissions required to deploy to those parcels in the main network.

Players are never directed to this server, the only way to access it is to explicitly provide a URL parameter to connect to it.

If you’re working in a confidential project that you don’t want to unveil until launch, note that the test server is relatively hidden from players, but anyone explicitly using the test server’s URL could potentially run into it.

Via the Decentraland Editor #

To deploy a scene to the test server:

1. Open VSCode in a Decentraland scene project.

2. Click on the Decentraland icon on the left sidebar.

3. Click on the three dot menu at the top right of the sidebar, next to the green reload arrow button, select Publish scene to test server

4. Approve the transaction

   • If the LAND tokens you own or have permissions are linked to a wallet you can use via Wallet Connect, click Connect wallet, then scan the QR code with your mobile device and follow the steps on Wallet Connect.
   • If you need to use Metamask on the browser, click Open in Browser to open this same window on a browser tab. Then approve the transaction on the Metamask browser extension.

To enter the content server, add &CATALYST=peer-testing.decentraland.org to the Decentraland URL

play.decentraland.org/&CATALYST=peer-testing.decentraland.org

Via the CLI #

To deploy to the test server, run:

dcl deploy --target peer-testing.decentraland.org

To enter the content server, add &CATALYST=peer-testing.decentraland.org to the Decentraland URL

https://play.decentraland.org/?CATALYST=peer-testing.decentraland.org

Verify deployment success #

Once you deployed your scene, these changes will take a few minutes to be propagated throughout the various content servers in the network. If you enter Decentraland right after deploying, you might still see the previous version of your content, depending of what realm you enter.

After you sign to authorize the deployment of your scene, the signing dapp will start displaying confirmations that the new version of your content has been propagated throughout all of the servers in the network,

You’ll see a list of each of the servers that make up Decentraland’s content network. For each server, it specifies the timestamp of the last uploaded change on that parcel. Each one of these servers refers to a different realm, you can reference how these server names map to realm names in the catalyst monitor screen.

You can also obtain this information at any time by running the following command on the command line console:

npx @dcl/opscli pointer-consistency --pointer '0,0'

📔 Note: Use the coordinates of your scene instead of 0,0. If your scene has multiple parcels, any one of its parcels will produce the same output. If the coordinates start with a negative number, add a \ at the start of the coordinates to prevent the - character from being misinterpreted by the command line.

Automatic deployments #

If you regularly make changes to your scene’s content and want to implement a streamlined publication pipeline, you can automate the deployment of your scene via a GitHub action.

For this, you must first store your scene in a GitHub project. You can then set a GitHub action with the following script, which runs every time there’s a merge to the main branch. The script installs any dependencies, builds the project and then deploys it to Decentraland.

name: Deploy to DCL PROD

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

env:
  DCL_PRIVATE_KEY: ${{ secrets.DCL_PRIVATE_KEY }}

jobs:

  deploy:
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Install npm packages
      run: |
                npm install
    - name: Build scene
      run: |
                npm run build:ci
    - name: Deploy scene
      run: |
                npm run deploy:prod

Important: For this process to run, you must set a wallet’s private key as an environment variable in GitHub, this is used to sign the deployment. As always, be very careful with keeping public keys secure. Do NOT use the public key of the account that actually owns the land tokens, as that would have very big risks. Instead, delegate operator rights to a disposable wallet that owns no valuable tokens. If this private key is ever leaked somehow, you can easily revoke those operator rights from the account and set up a new wallet.