Table of Contents

Release Notes

Welcome to the Release Notes for the Stride Community Toolkit. This section aims to provide you with an organized, high-level summary of changes, enhancements, and fixes made in each version release. If you're looking to understand what has changed from one version to the next, you're in the right place.

What to Expect

The Stride Community Toolkit is developed with rapid iteration in mind. It moves at a faster development pace compared to the Stride Game Engine. As a result, you should expect frequent updates that may introduce breaking changes. This fast-paced approach allows us to incorporate community feedback quickly and continue improving the toolkit.

1.0.0.0-preview.68

What's Changed

💥 Breaking Changes

  • Built against Stride 4.4.1 (was 4.4.0). What a game sees from the engine: transparent materials are brighter, since alpha is applied once; Direct3D 12 needs no Developer Mode and ships the Agility SDK in a D3D12 folder beside the executable; every effect, shader and material compiles again once on the first run; MaxStepPerFrame is honoured; a hybrid laptop runs on its discrete GPU.

Lettering comes from fonts

LetterMeshFactory, with its 37 hand-authored glyphs, is gone; TextMesh builds solid lettering from any font, with the toolkit's embedded Open Sans as the default.

Before After Note
LetterMeshFactory.CreateTextMeshDraw(device, "XYZ") TextMesh.CreateMeshDraw(device, MeshFont.Default, "XYZ") In Stride.CommunityToolkit.Rendering.Text. Any character the font has, upper and lower case, digits, punctuation.
CreateTextMeshDraw(..., depth: 0.3f, spacing: 0.1f, centerOrigin: true) new TextMeshOptions { Depth = 0.3f, LetterSpacing = 0.1f, Anchor = TextAnchor.MiddleCenter } Size is world units per EM; the old glyphs were one unit tall, a capital is now about 0.7 of Size.
LetterMeshFactory.SupportedCharacters, TryGetOutlines font.HasGlyph(c), font.GetGlyph(c) A glyph the font lacks draws its "missing glyph" box instead of throwing.

🎉 New Features

  • EarClipping.Triangulate(outer, holes) is new; the one-polygon overload is unchanged. MeshBuilder.AddExtrudedPolygon is unchanged.
  • scene.GetComponentsInScene<T>() and game.GetComponentsInScene<T>(), with GetComponentInScene<T>() for the first match: every component of a type across a scene, its children and child scenes, or across every scene the game has loaded. The scene-wide half of the FindObjectOfType answer.
  • game.Script.RunOnGameThread(action) and RunOnGameThreadAsync(function): hand work from any thread to the next update, with the result back as a task. Ends "Collection was modified" from network callbacks and finished downloads.
  • transform.RotateAround(point, axis, angle) swings an entity about an axis through a point and turns it by the same angle; transform.FaceDirection(direction) turns the forward axis along a world direction, with the same smooth as LookAt. Both update the world matrix.
  • MeshFont: a font file opened for its glyph outlines through the FreeType the engine ships, so TrueType, OpenType and collections work on every platform. MeshFont.Default is an embedded Open Sans Regular; Load(path), Load(bytes) and FromFamily(family, style) open any other. Outlines come back in EM units as curves (GlyphOutline, GlyphContour, OutlineSegment) and flatten into polygons with their holes sorted out (GlyphShape).
  • TextMesh: solid 3D text from a MeshFont. Create gives CPU mesh data, CreateMeshDraw uploads it, CreateGlyphs gives one centred mesh per glyph for a body or an animation per letter, Measure gives the block. Lines, alignment, letter and line spacing, curve quality, the nine-point anchor, and texture coordinates on caps and walls, through TextMeshOptions.
  • Primitive3D.Text: lettering as a shape, so CreatePrimitive gives it a material and a collider of one convex hull per glyph, on Bepu (TextCollider) and on Bullet.
  • TextBevel: a rounded edge between the caps and the walls of 3D text, front and back, through TextMeshOptions.Bevel; a bevel wider than a glyph's thinnest stem shrinks for that glyph instead of folding.
  • Instancing needs one call, not three: UseInstancing() on the scene setup puts the render feature in the compositor from the first frame, and AddInstancingBufferUpload adds it itself. A master whose compositor has no render feature used to draw as one model with nothing said; the run loop now logs a warning naming the entity.
  • EntityInstancing and BufferedEntityInstancing unregister an instance whose entity leaves the scene, as the engine's InstanceComponent does; a removed entity no longer draws on as a ghost until Clear().
  • AddOrientationGizmo(): the world axes in a corner of the screen as arrows with white letters, in the proportions of Game Studio's space marker, turning with the camera and ignoring depth; OrientationGizmoRenderer for the corner, size, colours and opacity. AddGroundGizmo stays the world-space marker of the origin.
  • AddPhysicsDebug(contactsVisible: true) draws the solver's contact points and normals with the debug meshes, the debug view Stride 4.4.1 added; DebugRenderComponentScript.ShowContacts is the same switch on the component. E05_3D_TriggerZones turns it on.
  • ToMeshDraw(device), ToMesh(device) and Bounds() on GeometricMeshData<VertexPositionNormalTexture>, for any procedural mesh data; TextMesh.CreateMesh and CreateModel give lettering with its bounds, so the renderer can cull it.

🐞 Bug Fixes

  • E20_3D_CubeCollapse: the tower spread apart as it spawned. Since the scene setup chose Bepu (preview.67), CreatePrimitive gave every cube a dynamic body of its own on top of the spawner's SlidingCubeComponent, and the two pushed each other apart; the cube is now created with IncludePhysics = false.

✨ Enhancement

  • SceneSetup.None still honours what is not scene: the physics engine, the game settings, the overlay and the profiler. SceneSetup.None.UseBepu() is a hand-built scene whose primitives and ground get Bepu bodies, the way a tutorial that adds the camera, light and ground line by line wants it; before, the engine chosen on it was silently dropped. It is a new instance each time.
  • AddSceneRenderer keeps a Game overload with the signature binaries built against preview.66 and earlier bind to, so Gum.Stride 2026.10.1.1, built against preview.63, runs again; source binds to the IGame overload as before.
  • E02_3D_MaterialPreview runs on SceneSetup.None again: the default scene's ground, light and sky had crept under the thumbnail rig since the scene setup became data. The thumbnail camera has the controller; the editor's pose is the start and H brings it back.
  • GrabberScript picks through trigger volumes: a body inside a zone can be grabbed, since a collidable whose handler says NoContactResponse does not stop the pick ray; TryPick(segment, out hit) is that pick, for a game that wants the same rule.
  • GrabberScript serves a 2D scene as it is: under an orthographic camera the pick ray runs along the view and a Body2DComponent is carried across its plane; the mouse wheel does nothing for a 2D body or under an orthographic camera, since depth there is the plane itself. game.AddGrabber() is the same call in 2D and 3D. The reach (MaxDistance) defaults to 100 instead of 50: a 2D camera stands 50 from its bodies, and the stress pile is viewed from 80.

📄 Docs

  • The glossary is in the top navigation, and defines gizmo, mesh collider, glyph and EM.
  • FAQ: why a HUD never goes through the tone map (Stride's UI stage and the toolkit's overlays draw after the post effects), and the scene-wide search and game-thread helpers in the FindObjectOfType and background-thread answers. The entity extensions page gains a turning-and-moving section for the transform helpers.
  • A manual page for the orientation gizmo (rendering/orientation-gizmo.md), with the two gizmos side by side.
  • A correctness and verbosity sweep of the whole docs/ tree against the code: stale physics plumbing (CreatePrimitive overloads that no longer exist, SetupBase*), wrong defaults, keys and paths, dead links, the superseded Windows package, the four packages missing from the libraries list, example pages whose code includes swallowed the metadata block or described code that had changed, and the story-led rendering pages (render to texture, GPU picking, MeshBuilder, TextureCanvas) rewritten as reference pages.
  • Game Studio: a table of every toolkit component in the Add component menu, with its package, category and page.
  • The examples pipeline's design-decisions page is gone from the contributing section; the three rules a contributor needs that were only there (why slugs carry no level, the metadata block last in the file, the navigation depth) are on the examples page and in the generator README.
  • Every example page is now owned by the metadata block in its example: 24 hand-written pages became generated, and four keep a hand-written tail below the generated part (generated: partial) for a second file, a multi-file walkthrough or the SignalR how-to.
  • Physics extensions: a section on the simulation clock (TimeScale, Enabled, PoseGravity, MaxStepPerFrame, ISimulationUpdate), a Triggers and contact events section (Trigger, IContactHandler, what the callbacks get and when they run), a Shape queries section (Overlap, OverlapInfo, SweepCast, SweepCastPenetrating, what the distance means), and a Mesh colliders section, what a MeshCollider on a static keeps that a hull fills in, and what a mesh is not (a surface with no inside), measured in E05_3D_MeshColliders.
  • A manual page for 3D text (rendering/text-3d.md); the MeshBuilder page points at it. A second page, rendering/text-3d-pipeline.md, walks the pipeline from the font file to the mesh, with the files behind each stage.

🎓 Examples

  • Cube Collapse orbits its camera with RotateAround and turns its falling letters with FaceDirection, in place of the quaternion maths each script carried.
  • E04_Myra_DraggableWindow is back in the solution and the docs: Myra.Stride 1.6.8 carries the Stride 4.4 retarget, so it builds and runs again.
  • E04_Myra_ControlPanel: Myra's widget set in one draggable window that drives a Stride scene. A menu bar, tabs, sliders for the light and the physics clock, a combo for gravity, check buttons for shadows and collider gizmos, a spin button and buttons that spawn bodies, a list view that selects and lights one, a dialog before clearing, tooltips and a status line.
  • E03_3D_TextShaders: four materials on the same solid lettering, a gradient texture through the caps' texture coordinates, a rim light as a shader-class colour node, a vertex-stage wave on Global.Time and a pixel-stage dissolve driven per frame, each shader in the example's Effects folder.
  • E03_3D_MeshText is 3D text from a font: the embedded font, an installed font found by family, lines that align in one mesh, the frame counter, and words with physics through Primitive3D.Text. E07_3D_ProceduralGeometry and E20_3D_CubeCollapse use TextMesh for their lettering.
  • E05_3D_MeshColliders: a convex hull against a mesh collider on the same ring model, with a ball resting on the hull's lid and falling through the mesh's hole; a mesh sphere with a ball outside and one inside shows that a mesh has no inside; a moving mesh ring lands on a mesh ring. The overlay prints where each dropped thing came to rest, measured, and P draws the colliders.
  • E05_3D_ShapeQueries: the two questions a raycast cannot answer. A probe box follows the mouse over a field of bodies and lists what it holds through Overlap, a click tosses them; a ball is swept from a launcher through SweepCast, a ghost marks the first touch, and T throws a real ball, without gravity, to land where the ghost was.
  • E05_3D_Raycast casts two rays: the camera's finds the clicked point, and a second one from the sphere through that point lists everything in that direction through RayCastPenetrating, drawn as the line; panels stand around the sphere to be gone through.
  • E05_3D_TimeControl: the simulation's own clock. TimeScale from 1/16x to 4x, Enabled to pause, PoseGravity cycled through Earth, Moon, none and upside down, a dropper on the game clock against a spinning bar on the physics clock, and an ISimulationUpdate component counting the steps.
  • E05_3D_TriggerZones: reacting to contact. A Trigger zone with no model counts who enters and leaves, a solid plate with an IContactHandler counts what stands on it, and a crate measures each hit with ComputeImpactForce. Space drops balls, the grabber carries them.
  • A sweep of the example comments: references to the helpers that SceneSetup3D replaced are corrected, comments that only restated the code and leftover commented-out code are gone, and the longest metadata descriptions are shorter.
  • A grabber in every Bepu example with bodies to pick up and a free left mouse button: E01_2D_FallingShapes, E02_2D_Primitives, E04_2D_SpawnMenu, E05_2D_FallingShapes, E08_2D_DebugRender, E10_2D_StressPile, E01_3D_FallingShapes, E08_3D_CollidableGizmo and E08_3D_DebugRenderComponent, one line each; the overlay says so where there is one.

🔧 Engineering

  • The text-3d gold scene, the whole alphabet with a bevelled sample and a Primitive3D.Text, joins the gold images; the text pipeline is covered by TextMeshTests, TextBevelTests, TextReviewTests and TextColliderTests, every mesh checked watertight and outward-wound.
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