Stride, a C#-based, open-source game engine | Hacker News Reader

Stride, a C#-based, open-source game engine

stride3d.net

83 pointsbj-rn19 comments

Hi, I'm one of the contributors to Stride. The thing about this engine that I care about most is that it follows decent C# practices. You can use it as a library in your existing .NET project, you can use it as a framework for your game, you define your own architecture that interacts with the engine and since it's open source you can modify the engine itself to suit your needs more.

Stride can produce really beautiful renders and used by vvvv platform for visual artists.

There's not many games (especially big ones) created with Stride - doesn't mean the engine isn't capable. It does lack some ease-of-use features around the editor and tooling, but the core engine is very nice to work with.

The community isn't very big yet, but there are active people who will be happy to work with you if you have questions over at Discord https://discord.gg/f6aerfE

Wanted to look up Godot's games since they seem to be in the lead for indie dev. Found out that Godot has at least 5 games on the Switch. 2 on xbox. Does not include the infamous bad port of Sonic Colors for the PC. Godot, except for the console kits, are MIT licensed.

https://godotengine.org/showcase/

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/pi83s0/sonic_colors_...

Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base. Here's the "made with Stride" list.[1]

A few days ago, there was a long discussion of the problems of Rust game development. There just aren't enough games per engine to get the heavy machinery shaken down properly.

[1] https://github.com/Doprez/Awesome-Stride#made-with-stride

I'm not sure social media is ever going to be good at telling you what game engine to use.

People are going to downvote you. I don't think you should be downvoted for stating both facts and opinions.

The rules are simple, it's the BuzzFeed Book Reviews Policy (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/11/buzzfeed...).

What do people want? There are 10,000 highly experienced people, at least, who are on the Internet and can tell you what game engine to use. Instead of picking up the phone and asking any of them - or letting their totally free and unadulterated opinions at least see the time of day - it's downvote this, angry that.

>I don't think you should be downvoted for stating both facts and opinions.

It's not a very constructive opinion. Just saying "there aren't a lot of 'good' games made with it". If you want to put some subtley in: note that this is an engine previously used by Silicon Studio (Bravely Default, 3d dot heroes, Muramusa, etc.) and after a few renames it became open source. So this was used to ship professional projects at some point.

And yes, I do find some Schadenfreude on an appeal to popularity being judged by yet another appeal to popuarity.

>What do people want?

I dunno, I can't speak for everyone. But I click on a page about an engine and expect, well, discussion on the pros/cons of the engine. If I wanted to stick with the popular stuff I would go back to Unity or Unreal.

I think it can be made. Look at the success story blender has become.

Blender took over twenty years. The user interface used to be awful, and it's still not that great. The standard Blender question with a new release is "where did X move to?"

> Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base.

I wonder why some engines are seemingly destined for success and others... aren't.

Godot got really big, despite a somewhat similar feature set that wasn't always better than other options: https://godotengine.org/ (3D rendering was worse until version 4, GDScript has both a nice iteration speed but also has gotten some criticism, while C# was a second class citizen in the earlier iterations, though admittedly really nice 2D support)

Stride is really nice and seemed like it should have been the Unity replacement that people would look at, if it had gotten more attention and a community would have formed around it, like Godot's. Maybe the Xenko name change didn't necessarily help, but it's not like the project was made worse because of it.

There's also NeoAxis which is way more Windows centric, but still seems to be getting updates and is comparatively easy to use, yet similarly never got popular: https://www.neoaxis.com/

Weirder yet, Java doesn't really have that many game engines out there, at least the likes of Unity/NeoAxis/Stride that have nice editors, despite the language being similar to C# in some ways and the runtime being pretty nice. The closest I can think of is jMonkeyEngine which I donated some money in the past to, which is pretty usable but similarly niche: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

I occasionally watch videos on the Gamefromscratch YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@gamefromscratch/videos) and it surprises me that there are so many engines out there, but very few actually are in the public eye. If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

> Godot got really big...

For small values of "big". Here are the "best games made with Godot."[1] All very retro. "99% of Godot games are 2D".

> If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

Because the open source 3D game engines are not close to being finished. As someone who's doing something hard with the Rend3/WGPU/egui/Vulkan/Rust stack, I'm painfully aware of this. Discussed a few days ago on HN, so I won't repeat that here.

[1] https://makeanapplike.com/best-games-made-with-godot/

>There just aren't enough games per engine to get the heavy machinery shaken down properly.

It's more a quality than quantity problem. The best showcase of Godot is a badly reviewed port of a wii game, one which is made with some closed source fork of Godot engine. And that Wii game still is probably more ambitious than 99.9% of anything else shown publicly, be it a fully shipped game or a tech demo. If you could make one big splash, the rest will come out and start poking in (again, similar to what Godot did. But they had the fortune for someone else to make a splash in the form of bad PR).

Stride is in a similar footing, it has a few successful shipped games from multiple rebrandings ago, but that was when the engine was a closed source, in-house engine. Someone has the start the charge and oftentimes the engine makers are too busy working on the engine to properly battle-test it. But whoever is starting the charge needs to do a lot of things that get in the way of actually making their game. And you know that old mantra: "make games, not engines".

Using an untested one is like half game, half engine dev (compared to 90% engine dev, 10% game dev for rolling your own). And put simply many lack the talent to do that. And the few remaining are either already in industry, or choosing to work with proven tech.

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by the way, your work in your Rust metaverse was really impressive. That's exactly the kind of trailblazing I'd want to do myself, but I feel I wanted to learn more in the C++/C# world of game development before jumping into Rust. My long long term goal (5-10 years out) is to one day hope for a proper renderer/engine core made in Rust while binding to some nicer scripting language above. I tire greatly of segfaults and especially concurrency issues in other languages.

Any other good game engines that don’t use c# or c++?

Godot has plenty of language bindings and its own "Python but not really" language GDScript. GameMaker uses its own GML.

Construct uses Javascript, Löve, Bitty and Defold use Lua.

There’s Bevy if you like Rust.

For 2D games, libGDX, used in many Android indie games.

If you are only interested into desktop, jmonkeyengine is also a possibility.

Most good engines, that also support mobile, game consoles and VR/AR headsets, are bound to use languages supported by the platform SDKs, so there will always be some C or C++.

Unity is a special kind, as they took the effort to create their own C# to native code compiler (even if via translation to C++).

Which is basically what everyone not using either C or C++ has to do, and then create wrappers to all the SDK APIs across all target platforms.

Mach engine is written in Zig

Yet again another "alternative" that seems to be missing console and VR/AR headsets support.

https://www.stride3d.net/features/#vr

Thanks, I stand corrected on the VR side.

It's going to be hard for any open source alternative to offer support for close source consoles, since the nature of even seeing that code requires NDAs.

Personally, I'd rather focus on PC first. If I do make some hit game, I can pitch it at publishers who can get resources to help port the game. If it isn't... well, I don't think a switch port would have saved my game to begin with.

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