Key concepts

Beginner

This article highlights most important concepts that are used in the engine.

Scenes

A scene is a collection of entities that can be loaded and unloaded on demand. Most often, scenes contain different levels of a game or menus.

In Stride, Scenes can contain sub-scenes that can be loaded and unloaded on demand.

Entities

Entities represent different objects in a scene, like the player, enemies, walls, etc. These entities contain components that dictate how they behave.

Components

Components dictate how entities which they are attached to behave. For example: a player movement component that makes an entity move, when keyboard buttons are pressed.

In code, a component is a class that inherits StartupScript, SyncScript or AsyncScript.

using Stride.Engine;

namespace MyGame;

public class MyComponent : StartupScript
{
    public override void Start()
    {
        // Write your code here
    }
}

Script types

In Stride, a component can be created from one of 3 types of script:

• Startup Script - a script that runs only once when it's added.
• Sync Script - a script that runs when it's added and then every frame.
• Async Script - an asynchronous script that runs only once when it's added, but can await the next frame continuously.

For more information, read Types of script.

Assets and resources

An asset is a representation of an element in the project (like a texture), that contains a list of it's properties in the engine (e.g. .sdmat .sdprefab).

A resource is a file on the disk containing data, like an image (e.g. .png .mp3), that's used in the project.

Assets do not contain resource data. Instead, they reference a resource. For example: a texture asset (.sdtex) has a reference to an image (.png) that is located in the resource folder.

Project structure

A Stride project is separated into multiple project packages, which contain their own code, assets and resources.

For example, a new project consists of:

• MyGame - contains content for the game.
• MyGame.NameOfPlatform (such as MyGame.Windows) - contains content specific to the version of the game for a specific platform (like the window icon).

For more information, read Project structure.