Table of Contents

Using toolkit components in Game Studio

World Text, Entity Text and Shape added to an entity in Game Studio draw in the editor's viewport before you press Play. This page lists the components the toolkit adds to the Add component menu, explains what makes the drawing ones work, what the Add* calls are for, and what to check when a component does not draw.

What you can add

Reference the package in the game project and the components appear in the entity's Add component menu under the category shown. Their properties are edited in the property grid like any engine component's.

Package Add component Category What it does
Stride.CommunityToolkit Entity Text Text A screen-space label that follows the entity; see Entity Text
World Text Text Text in the scene at the entity's transform; see World Text
Basic 2D Camera Controller Camera Pan and zoom for an orthographic camera; see Camera Controllers
Basic 3D Camera Controller Camera Fly, look and move; see Camera Controllers
Orbit Camera Controller Camera The camera circles a target; see Camera Controllers
Game Profiler Debug Stride's profiler on screen, with its filter, sort and page as properties
Sound Emitter (runtime instance) Audio Keeps a spatialised sound at the entity's position; see Audio
Stride.CommunityToolkit.Shapes Shape Rendering A flat shape at the entity's transform, drawn through a ShapeBatch; see ShapeBatch
Reference grid Debug A numbered grid in world or screen coordinates; see Reference Grid
Stride.CommunityToolkit.Bepu Body2DComponent Physics - Bepu 2D A dynamic body confined to the XY plane; see Physics Extensions
Collidable Gizmo (Bepu) Physics Shows or hides the collider gizmos of every collidable on a key
Debug Render (Bepu) Physics Adds Bepu's debug render component once the scene is ready, with its toggle key
Grabber (pick up bodies with the mouse) Physics Pick up, drag and throw bodies with the mouse

Stride.CommunityToolkit.Box2D adds Box2D Body and Grabber 2D the same way, but it is not on NuGet yet, so it is only available to a game that references the toolkit's source.

A component is data; a processor sees to the rest

The toolkit's drawing components are built the way Stride's own are. The component holds what to draw; a processor collects every component of its kind each frame; a renderer draws them:

graph LR
    C["EntityTextComponent<br/><i>the text, size, colour</i>"] --> P["EntityTextProcessor<br/><i>collects them each frame</i>"]
    P --> R["EntityTextRenderer<br/><i>draws them</i>"]
    P -. "puts it on the compositor<br/>if nothing else did" .-> R

Game Studio never runs a game's setup code, so the processor does the dashed step: the first time it has something to draw, it puts its renderer on the scene's compositor, and checks again whenever the editor swaps compositors (at start and on every change of view mode).

The processors also run in the editor, not only at runtime, which is what makes the viewport show the result while you edit.

What the manual calls are still for

game.AddEntityTextRenderer(), game.AddWorldTextRenderer() and game.AddShapeBatch() are not required for a component to draw; they are how you take control:

Call What it gives you beyond the automatic path
AddShapeBatch(depthTest) The batch handle, for drawing shapes from code every frame; the choice between a depth-tested batch and an overlay one; more than one batch in a scene. Components draw through the first batch registered this way and inherit its border, fill and glow state.
AddWorldTextRenderer() / AddEntityTextRenderer() The renderer on the compositor before the first frame, and at the position in the renderer chain you choose.

Without them a component gets a depth-tested shape batch, or a text renderer appended to the end of the compositor's renderer chain, made on the first frame the component is drawn.

Two things that look like failures but are not

Nothing appears when you click the shape. Clicking a shape in the viewport does not select it: Stride's picking pass renders entity ids for models, and a shape is not a model. Select the entity in the hierarchy instead; the transform gizmo then works as usual.

Text needs no font. Leaving Font empty is the supported path: the renderer falls back to Stride's own StrideDefaultFont. Set one only when you want a different font, not to make text appear at all.

When it still does not draw

Each cause looks the same from the outside.

  1. Does the component appear in Add-component at all? If a toolkit component is missing from the list entirely, the library was not registered for scanning. See Making components work in Game Studio.
  2. Is there anything to draw? A Shape with no vertices, or a text with an empty Text, draws nothing by design. A Shape needs at least one vertex, and a single vertex needs a Radius.
  3. Is the entity where you think it is? WorldTextComponent is positioned in the world and can sit behind the camera; EntityTextComponent in screen mode is placed in pixels; a Shape lies in its entity's XY plane unless Billboard is on, so a rotated entity can show it edge-on.
  4. Look at the Output pane. The shape processor logs one line when it registers its own batch, and an effect that failed to compile is reported there, with the shader's name.
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