Stride, the game engine previously known as Xenko (and Paradox before that), just released version 4.0. Details of the release from the Stride 4 release notes (no link possible currently).
Thanks to a substantial contribution from Sean Boettger and sponsored by David Jeske, Stride now supports Voxel Cone Tracing GI!
.NET Core
As a first step toward .NET 5, Stride editor and toolchain is now running with .NET Core! Runtime has been working with .NET Core for a few versions already. This allows to have scripts and custom assets in a project targetting .NET Standard 2.1 or .NET Core. If you have scripts or custom assets in a .NET Framework project rather than a .NET Standard project, you can still choose between .NET Core and .NET Framework within the launcher. Framework will also be displayed in Game Studio toolbar for easier identification while both coexist.
.NET Framework version can be considered deprecated and will likely be removed in future release (likely 4.1) to allow us to take full advantage of C# 8.0 and soon-to-come C# 9.0. We also expect dropping .NET Framework and supporting only .NET Core will greatly simplify our installation process since we won’t depend on specific workloads or packages of Visual Studio being installed anymore. This was a recurring issue with our users. Later down the road, we plan to switch to .NET 5 once it’s in good enough shape.
GPU Instancing
TODO
Graphics API
Different selection mechanism + Vulkan improvements. There’s been a big overhaul on Stride build system to make Graphics API selection work in a more future-proof way. It was previously relying on custom RuntimeIdentifier being set in the solution. This didn’t work very well because it was completely orthogonal to existing RuntimeIdentifier, and sometimes not having good fallbacks. From now on, user project will use StrideGraphicsApi in the .csproj project file to specify the graphics API. We hope to expose this in the editor later.
We also took the opportunity to improve state of Vulkan renderer (thanks to a switch to Vortice.Vulkan bindings from Amer Koleci) and automatize graphics unit tests, currently running for D3D11 and Vulkan. It’s still a work in progress so expect more in future releases.
Documentation & Tutorials
The first 10 C# beginner tutorials are recorded and uploaded to the official Stride Youtube channel. These videos are the video equivalent of the existing online documentation for the C# beginner template tutorials and the ‘new project’ template when creating a new project from the Stride launcher. The C# beginner series should be fully recorded by the end of July 2020. After those videos are done, Jorn will put his focus on the C# Intermediate project template.
You can learn more about the Stride 4 release in the video below.