[Idea] Supporting the Community Toolkit as a first-class way to use Stride would be a great win for the engine

[JohnLudlow]

Stride is an editor-focused engine like Godot. In my opinion it wins over Godot by having better support for .NET development (using Nuget to share libraries, solutions with projects in subfolders, standard unit testing with xunit) but for those coming from a non-game development background, or those used to a library such as MonoGame, the editor (in my experience) can get in the way of both getting a new project off the ground and also learning how the engine works.

Luckily there is the community toolkit which offers a code-only approach, great for early development before the project is complex enough to benefit much from a 3D editor.

Unfortunately, you get kind of locked in at that point and don't have the editor available when it would be useful.

The dream workflow for me would be to

1. Start a new game project just like any other .NET project, by creating a solution file (.slnx now, obviously)
2. Add elements to the 3D world by creating and editing a scene YAML file in my code editor (with structural intelisense because there's a JSON schema for the YAML files)
3. Open the scene in a 3D editor and continue working with it there.

What are your thoughts?

[VaclavElias]

for those coming from a non-game development background

That is still me! 🤣 More code-only examples, easier life for us later on..

great for early development before the project is complex enough to benefit much from a 3D editor.

💯%

[JohnLudlow]

I should also mention that the flexibility to be code-focused or editor-focused and swap between the two as needed would be something I haven't seen in any other editor - Godot (which is pretty much editor-only) doesn't have that flexibility, neither do MonoGame and Raylib-cs (both code-only). It'd be a unique selling point for Stride

[IXLLEGACYIXL]

"Add elements to the 3D world by creating and editing a scene YAML file in my code editor "

tihs is to cumbersome to implement with strides custom yaml
the new yaml serializer should be public instead of internal and there read and writes should be easier

but its not finished

[JohnLudlow]

the new yaml serializer should be public instead of internal and there read and writes should be easier

I'll take things being better in the future as an answer.