SC Studio

A desktop editor for Supercell SC2 files (versions 5 and 6) — browse, edit and author resources, and move movieclips between files with their dependency graphs intact.

Built with Python and PyQt6. Files are read and written losslessly: chunks you never touch are saved back byte-for-byte.

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What it does

Feature	Description
Resources	Movieclips, shapes, textfields, exports and modifiers, with every field in the bundled schemas exposed through Properties, JSON or the geometry editor.
Animation	A multi-track keyframe timeline with per-object tracks, nine easing curves, tween baking and the engine's own inheritance rule — a frame with no key holds the last pose set.
Textures	Browse atlases, outline every command that samples them, crop to the region a shape actually uses, and preview ASTC/ETC/BC1/PVRTC/raw atlases.
Create	Rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, gradient fills, SVG artwork and SVG paths; grouping into animated symbols, nine-slice cutting, parenting, motion guides, colour tweens, matching-topology morphs, text styling and batch export renaming.
Import	PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP images, GIF and animated WebP, SVG artwork, and whole resource graphs copied from another open file.
Render	View → Rendered effects (Ctrl+Alt+R) plays colour transforms, blend modes, text styles and stencil masks the editable scene does not simulate, with onion skin and PNG/GIF/WebP export.
Publish	Non-destructive publishing with atlas repacking, low-res variants, embedded or external KTX sidecars, SC5/SC6 output and JSON presets.
Agents	An MCP server so an agent can inspect and author the same documents you have open.

Screenshots

Light	Dark

Reference tree	Scaling-grid popup

Atlas region outlines	Atlas picker

MCP menu	Create menu

Install

Python 3.10 or newer.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
python -m pip install .
sc-studio

Open a file straight away with sc-studio /path/to/ui.sc. The install adds the sc-studio and sc-studio-mcp commands; sc-studio --help lists the options.

Development without installing

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python run.py

Qt needs a working graphical desktop — this is a desktop app, not a web UI. A platform-plugin error on Linux usually means Qt's XCB/Wayland runtime libraries are missing. On Arch, the system packages python-pyqt6, python-pillow, python-flatbuffers and python-zstandard work, with texture2ddecoder in a virtual environment.

Publishing from the command line

sc-studio-publish ui.sc -o published.sc
sc-studio-publish first.sc second.sc -o combined.sc --preset settings.json
sc-studio-publish additions.sc -o merged.sc --merge original.sc

Linked symbols are the default; --all includes every resource. Output is a JSON summary. Choose an output name distinct from the inputs — the GUI and the CLI both refuse to publish over a source file, so a publish never edits what you are working on.

Agent access (MCP)

1. Start the editor and open your files.
2. MCP → Copy client configuration starts local access and copies a ready-to-paste client config. Start, Stop and Connection status sit in the same menu.
3. Paste that config into your agent's MCP settings and connect. Keep the editor open. The agent's environment needs sc-studio-mcp on PATH, or an absolute path in command.

Access is off by default, binds to loopback only, and uses a private per-session token. The descriptor defaults to ~/.sc-studio/mcp-connection.json; set SC_STUDIO_MCP_CONNECTION to give another editor instance its own file.

Start with guide. One call states the data model and its traps — a placement is [child_index, matrix_index, color_index] where child_index is not a resource ID, 65535 means "inherit" rather than "no transform", draw order is the frame's element order with no separate z-index, and transform_placement writes a transform rather than keying a frame.

Beyond that: document_summary orients you on a file in one call, find_components shows what already exists to reuse, batch runs a sequence in one round trip, and set_keys / tween / get_timeline cover animation without a round trip per frame. Agents go through the same undo history and validation as manual editing, so an agent's edit and yours are the same edit.

Tools use zero-based frame and placement indices. Files are written only when save_document is asked for.

Working with files

Copy a movieclip between files

1. Open the source and destination files — each gets its own tab.
2. Select the movieclip by export name or resource ID.
3. Focus the resource browser and press Ctrl+C (or Resource → Copy with dependencies). Ctrl/Shift-click selects several.
4. Switch tabs, focus that browser, press Ctrl+V.
5. Save with Ctrl+S.

File → Export selected with dependencies writes a standalone SC6 containing just that resource graph. Import handles recursive and shared graphs, remaps IDs, renames conflicting exports with _copy2 and up, and embeds external KTX/ZKTX textures. Each imported atlas is cropped to the region its shapes actually sample — on whole ASTC blocks, copied verbatim, so the result decodes to exactly the same pixels with no re-encoding. On a large UI file that cut imported texture bytes by roughly 69% across 25 clips.

Import an image or an animation

Import image… (Ctrl+Alt+I) takes a PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP, creates the texture and shape, adds a child and places it at the original resolution.

Import animation (GIF/WebP)… (Ctrl+Alt+A) turns each source frame into a movieclip frame, all packed into one atlas, with a configurable name prefix/suffix and framerate. Video formats are not decoded.

Texture atlases

Every draw command that samples the open atlas is outlined, so the whole sheet is browsable — double-click to open a shape, right-click for usages or its reference tree. Most commands in a real atlas are zero-area (all four corners sample one texel); those are drawn as small pickable diamond markers, which keeps shapes that would otherwise be invisible reachable.

Keyframe animation

Every child gets its own labeled track under a shared ruler.

• Drag the playhead to scrub — it moves the cursor only, never creating a key.
• Click a key to select; Ctrl-click adds or removes; Shift-click extends a range.
• Drag a key to another frame; dropping onto an occupied frame swaps the two poses. Dragging past the end extends the clip.
• Right-click a key for per-key actions, or a track/ruler for frame actions and curve application.

X/Y/Rotation/Scale fields below the timeline show the selected track's transform; Key transform writes it as a keyframe. Pick a curve, choose how many frames to write between keys, then Apply to range. The format stores one discrete transform per frame and has nowhere to record a curve, so curves are baked into frames — the game reads ordinary frames.

Interface

The menu bar is File, Edit, View, Resource, Create, MCP, Help. The right sidebar holds one panel at a time, picked from the INSPECTOR dropdown: Children, Properties, Timeline, JSON, Textures, Geometry (Ctrl+1–Ctrl+6). Children leads, since a movieclip is mostly the things it is made of.

Ctrl+F searches the pane you are in — assets in the browser, the inline filter in Children, matching rows in Frames/Placements, text in the JSON editor. Ctrl+Shift+P opens the command palette. The mouse's side buttons are undo and redo, which Qt does not map by default. F1 lists every shortcut.

Single letters are shortcuts, except while typing. G opens Go to ID, X opens Find usages on whatever is focused — a placement picked in the preview or the list, otherwise the open resource.

Copy, Duplicate and Delete follow the pane you are in. A placement picked in the preview counts as focused, so Del removes whatever you clicked in the canvas. With Children or Placements focused they act on that child; with a frame picked, or the timeline focused, Delete removes that frame, the picked keys, or the frame under the playhead — never the movieclip.

A Snap to pixels toggle (on by default, remembered) lands dragged placements on whole asset pixels. A click that does not move the pointer never moves a placement — only an actual drag does.

View → Theme offers System, Light and Dark plus sixteen named schemes (Nord, Catppuccin, Dracula, Monokai, One Dark, GitHub, Solarized, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, One Light and more). Each scheme's colors come from its own project and are mapped onto Qt palette roles here, so no third-party code or data is bundled. Theme, geometry, splitter sizes and recent files persist in the platform settings store.

Textfield flags

Style bits: 1 device font, 2 outline, 4 bold, 8 italic, 16 multiline, 32 unknown, 64 auto kern. Alignment is a packed bitfield — horizontal in the low two bits (left, center, right, justify), vertical in the next two — and is edited on two named dropdowns in Properties, applied live in the preview. Font and outline colors are packed 0xAARRGGBB and edited with a color swatch. Unrecognized enum values are retained, not normalized away.

Support boundaries

Area	Status
SC2 version 5	Create, read, edit, write
SC2 version 6	Default for new and exported files; external transform banks preserved
Movieclips, shapes, textfields, exports, modifiers	All bundled schema fields retained and exposed
Float/half matrices and color transforms	Read and preserve; edits use float matrices
SC6 packed matrices and compressed frames	Decoder implemented; original data preserved
Embedded and external textures	Preserved; imported sidecars copied
Raw RGBA/4444/RGB5A1/RGB565/LA/L	Preview and PNG export
KTX1 ASTC/ETC/BC1/BC3/PVRTC	Preview decoder; encoded bytes preserved on save
SCTX and unsupported KTX encodings	Preserved and copied; no preview
Legacy SC1 / tag-based files	Not supported — clear error on open
Unknown newer FlatBuffers fields	Opening rejected, to prevent silent field loss
Game engine rendering	Approximate preview, not Titan Engine

Not universal SC support. The format is reverse-engineered. Opaque DataStorage fields are retained when editing but their meaning is not inferred, and a revision that adds fields to fixed-size structs needs updated schemas.

The preview is approximate. It draws triangle-strip shapes, nested timeline transforms, text and alpha. It does not simulate RGB multiply/add effects, stencil masks, blend modes, or engine text outline/typography and font substitution — the game supplies its own fonts and typography resources, and this editor bundles none. Those stored properties remain editable and survive saving and import. Edited files have not been verified inside the game.

Performance. The renderer keeps scene instances and shared texture data between frames, caches meshes (128 MiB) and decoded atlases (640 MiB), and decodes only the placements a frame needs. Playback advances one frame per tick, so a heavy frame slows the animation rather than skipping ahead. An edit snapshots for undo, validates what it touched, then commits. Help → Performance shows the rolling cost of each stage, which is the quickest way to find what a slow file is spending time on.

Tests

python -m pip install pytest
python -m pytest tests -q

Most tests run offscreen; set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen on a headless machine. Tests needing a real SC file are skipped unless one is supplied through the SC_SAMPLE environment variable.

Format sources and licenses

The implementation uses an independent, schema-driven Python FlatBuffers codec. The bundled SC2 schemas and packed decoding logic are based on SupercellFlash, the backend referenced by lilmuff2/X-coder. The newer xcoder-tool/XCoder and its sc-py / sc-compression dependencies were inspected for format and container handling; their CLI was not wrapped as a substitute for editing.

Inspected revisions:

• SupercellFlash: 41e894d5a20cc17e47fe32db3106c4c1bec60a3e
• xcoder-tool/XCoder: c14a7949c198c362a93d931edf1ae96bfa797b2d
• lilmuff2/X-coder: 285c36067251cb3b118f006329bc94785d09f183

SC Studio source is GPL-3.0-or-later (LICENSE). SupercellFlash's MIT notice is retained in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSE.txt. PyQt6 is separately available under GPL/commercial terms; all dependencies retain their respective licenses. Extracted game assets retain their original ownership. See FEATURE_COVERAGE.md for the full plugin comparison.