Stride 4.4 Release Notes

Stride 4.4 is one of the largest engine updates in years, with roughly 2,400 commits since 4.3.

The theme of this release is modernization and reach: much more stable Vulkan and Direct3D 12 backends, full platform coverage across Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS (all continuously tested on CI), an improved shader compiler, and a command-line workflow as an alternative to the Game Studio.

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✨ Highlights

📱 Platforms & Cross-Platform

Stride 4.4 widens both where you can build games and where they run.

Build anywhere: with changes to the asset compiler, projects can now be built on Linux and macOS, not just Windows.

Run everywhere: non-Windows platforms were brought back into shape, while the test suite for them was expanded to ensure they are kept that way.

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⌨️ A command-line workflow: the stride CLI + dotnet new templates

You can now create, build and run Stride games entirely from the command line, with no Game Studio install required.

Command	Purpose
stride new	instantiate a project from installed templates in this directory (stride new list to browse)
stride build / stride asset	build the project and compile assets
stride upgrade	upgrade a project to a newer Stride version
stride studio	launch the Game Studio associated with the Stride version you use for this project
stride sdk install / uninstall / update	manage installed Stride versions
stride self update	update the CLI itself
stride version	print the CLI's version, as well as the Stride version for this project

You'll need to install the Stride CLI through dotnet tool if you want to use this new feature:

dotnet tool install -g stride.cli                 # install the Stride CLI
stride sdk install                                # install the latest Stride
stride new topdownrpg && cd TopDownRPG            # create a project from a template
stride studio                                     # open it in Game Studio

dotnet new templates are also available as a lightweight fallback if you'd rather use the standard .NET tooling directly:

dotnet new install Stride.Templates
dotnet new stride-game -n MyGame

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🎮 Vulkan & Direct3D 12

Both backends got a big overhaul and stability pass this cycle and are in much better shape. They're now solid enough that we expect to make a modern backend the editor default before long, and Direct3D 11 is a candidate for removal in the next major release. GPU crashes are also far easier to track down: Stride can now pinpoint the exact rendering step that caused a device hang.

If you write custom low-level rendering code, note that D3D12 and Vulkan now use an explicit barrier/layout model (and D3D12 requires Enhanced Barriers — the legacy path was removed).

You can also pick the graphics API right from the UI now. Game Studio itself can render with a chosen backend via Settings → Environment → Graphics API (Game Studio only) — this takes effect after a restart:

And each Windows game project can select its own Graphics API from the package build settings in the property grid:

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🎨 A brand-new SDSL shader compiler

The biggest internal change in 4.4 is a complete rewrite of the SDSL shader compiler, now built around a modern SPIR-V-centric pipeline.

Instead of parsing and stitching shaders together as text, Stride now works in SPIR-V bytecode end to end:

• Each .sdsl shader is parsed once and compiled into its own SPIR-S module (SPIR-Stride, Stride's extended SPIR-V dialect).
• Effects (.sdfx) then mix and compose those modules directly as bytecode, lowering the result to standard SPIR-V for the GPU backend.
• Crucially, text parsing happens only at that first step: recombining a new shader variation from already-compiled SPIR-S needs no re-parsing.

What this means for you:

• Much faster shader handling. Generating the many shader permutations a real game needs no longer touches a text parser; variations are recombined straight from cached bytecode.
• Built on mature, standard tooling. Vulkan consumes the SPIR-V natively, while Direct3D 11/12 and Metal reuse SPIRV-Cross (to HLSL/MSL), battle-tested components instead of a bespoke translator.
• Far better support for advanced features. Direct3D 12 and Vulkan now handle things like tessellation and compute shaders much more reliably.
• A future-proof foundation. With a real SPIR-V pipeline in place, adding modern GPU features such as ray tracing, mesh shaders/meshlets and wave intrinsics becomes much easier going forward.

Warning

Because the entire shader compiler was replaced, custom .sdsl shaders may need minor adjustments to compile cleanly. If you maintain shaders, give them a pass on 4.4. See Upgrade Notes below.

Huge thanks to Youness Kafia, whose early prototyping and experimentation laid the foundation for the new SDSL pipeline.

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⚡ NativeAOT & Trimming Support

The engine is now NativeAOT and trimming-friendly. This unlocks smaller, faster-starting, self-contained game builds.

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🛠 Engine & Graphics

• Video subsystem rewrite: a fresh Windows Media Foundation backend, plus a new AVFoundation backend on macOS.
• Direct3D 11 stability & correctness fixes.
• Fonts: upgraded to FreeType 2.13.
• Model importing: upgraded to Assimp 6.

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🧰 Build, Tooling & Project System

• Much faster asset builds. Warm asset compiles drop by around 40% for a typical game, and up to 10× for Stride's own tests, thanks to a new asset-build cache.
• .slnx is the new default solution format for projects created by Stride. Existing .sln solutions still open and save normally.
• Per-package asset URLs & namespacing. Assets now live under a rooted, per-package path (e.g. /MyGame/UI/Title), so plugins and libraries can ship assets without name collisions. Games stay bare by default and opt in via StrideAssetNamespace, so existing projects keep working unchanged.
• Typed asset URL constants. Projects now generate an Assets class of strongly-typed constants (e.g. Assets.Scenes.MainScene), so you can reference content by an IDE-completed symbol instead of a magic string. Renames then become compile errors instead of a runtime "content not found".

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🧪 Quality & CI

Mostly under the hood — but it directly changes how confidently you can contribute back to the engine.

Stride 4.4's test suite has been greatly expanded. Where earlier versions only exercised a slice of platforms, every change now runs the entire test matrix in one pipeline — engine builds, game and Game Studio tests, and end-to-end sample/packaging builds, across all platforms and graphics APIs, including GPU image-comparison tests (Windows D3D11/12, Linux Vulkan, macOS, Android, iOS):

Breakage on any platform or backend is now caught automatically before it reaches a release. For contributors, that's the real win: you can open a pull request and trust CI to prove it works everywhere, instead of testing each platform by hand — which makes contributing a feature back to the engine far less daunting.

A gold-image generation workflow runs directly on CI, so you no longer have to regenerate reference images by hand on every platform. Golds are produced and promoted straight from the CI workflow.

The new CompareGold tool makes reviewing these tests painless — visually diff failures against their gold images, promote the ones you accept, and even pull results directly from any CI run or fork (see GPU-TESTING.md).

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⚙️ Physics Character

While our integration of the Bepu physics engine is definitely mature enough by now, the CharacterComponent we introduced was not as well put together as it ought to have been.

• The gravity you may set would be mutated internally to prevent the body from sliding down slopes.
• Moving surfaces would not carry the character along with them.
• Moving past a slope would cause the character to fly off.
• Forces applied to bodies, and especially constraints, required unintuitive tweaks to work.

We looked at Bepu's own character example to solve these issues; unfortunately, we could not avoid introducing a fair amount of breaking changes. Fortunately, we added a couple of sections in Characters to describe the new features and properties.

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Breaking changes

• Custom shaders: the SDSL compiler was rewritten; you might want to review how your custom shaders render. If you hit a shader that no longer compiles or behaves differently, please open an issue on GitHub so we can fix it.
• Direct3D 12 now requires Enhanced Barriers; the legacy barrier path has been removed.
• Convex hulls: The library we use to generate convex hulls, V-HACD, was updated. This new version improves on speed and accuracy, but has a wildly different set of configurable parameters; you may want to validate them for accuracy.
• Bepu CharacterController was reworked: existing character setups will behave differently and need adjustment. See Physics Character.

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🙏 Contributors

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Stride 4.4:

• Youness Kafia (ykafia)
• Nicolas Musset (Kryptos-FR / Color-Rise)
• Mario Guerra
• Johan Gustafsson
• Eideren
• Vaclav Elias
• Virgile Bello (xen2)
• Jakub Ławreszuk
• Feralnex (Tomasz Czech)
• Nicogo (Nicolas Gomez)
• Doprez
• ds5678
• w0wca7a
• Basewq
• D4rkDuck
• Elias Holzer
• Peter Laske
• Will Bentz
• Henrik Gedionsen
• Kevin Norris
• Luca Domenichini
• MiyaGrace
• MsEpsilon
• Rafael Stahl
• Redwarx008
• Steve Berdy

…and everyone who reported issues, tested builds and helped on the community channels. 💙