[HN Gopher] Announcing the MonoGame Foundation
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Announcing the MonoGame Foundation
Author : pjmlp
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-11-14 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (community.monogame.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (community.monogame.net)
| CodeCube wrote:
| Woooo!!!!! This is awesome news.
| squigz wrote:
| Is it just me, or is open source picking up more steam than it's
| had for a while? Very happy to see all the initiatives, funding,
| and people & companies embracing it
| stratigos wrote:
| From what I gather, Unity has recently made moves to lose the
| trust of all of their customers, and there is a massive exodus
| towards other game dev software/frameworks/etc.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, until they realize what Unity (or Unreal) offers,
| doesn't come only from late nights, and someone has to put
| money in for feature parity.
|
| Anyway I really appreciate MonoGame folks carry on the XNA
| flag, after the people responsible for it on Microsoft lost
| to the DirectX/C++ group, hence DirectXTK as its replacement.
| gunselginsel wrote:
| Out of the pan, into the fire.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| The biggest advantage Unity has over alternatives like
| Godot and MonoGame is the ecosystem around the engine, not
| the engine itself. Things like the asset store and the
| wealth of tutorials out there. It will take time for the
| ecosystems around open source engines to match or exceed
| that of Unity, but the more people leave Unity the faster
| that will happen.
| lambda_garden wrote:
| Unity and MonoGame are not really comparable. Unity is a
| game engine that is also an IDE, whereas MonoGame is
| simply a set of libraries.
| Qwertious wrote:
| Or to give an example: Unity provides a decent workflow
| for artists. XNA doesn't.
| pjmlp wrote:
| An engine that also targets consoles and VR headsets,
| uses C# as the main language, has an AOT toolchain for
| it, thanks to HPC# subset also allows for low level
| engine code in C#, and naturally the graphical debugging
| tools for profiling and GPU.
| pdpi wrote:
| Parity with Unity/Unreal is very much a non-goal for
| MonoGame. They're very different abstraction levels with
| very different purposes.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I know, the point was about any FOSS engine, and the
| overflow expectations of pushing them as alternatives.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| It might be somewhat related but Unity and Monogame target
| very different developer experiences. Monogame is an
| alternative to low level frameworks like SDL/SFML/etc for
| C++. It's not a game engine.
|
| The difference is that you get to code most of the engine as
| opposed to mostly coding gameplay. That's of course a
| significant trade-off. If you like being low level and
| understanding how things work and learning a ton then
| Monogame is the tool to use. If you strictly want to make a
| game and don't mind ramping on someone else's toolset to "go
| slow to go fast later" then Unity/Unreal/Godot are the tools.
|
| Monogame shines when it comes to 2D games since 2D games
| require less specialized engine tools and most of the editors
| can be made quite easily for a 2D game and will teach you a
| lot. Don't get me wrong, it's capable of 3D but the
| experience will be much harder and unstable. You'll be much
| more at the mercy of outdated open source libraries for
| things like importing animations from your favorite 3D
| editor. Conversely, writing a library to import and load your
| own 2D animations can be done in an afternoon.
|
| The showcase of games built in Monogame echo this with lots
| of heavy hitters and well-known 2D games and very few well-
| known 3D games.
| reactordev wrote:
| This was a result of the MonoGame community having nervous
| feelings about the state of affairs around Unity and just
| changing ToS and charging installation fees. MonoGame always
| wanted to have a foundation to steer direction but didn't feel
| it was warranted until now. Until now, the community mostly
| agreed on what was needed and what was superficial. Just
| provide an XNA-compatible API that works on all platforms.
| Nothing more.
|
| Glad to see it.
| rob74 wrote:
| I remember playing _Atom Zombie Smasher_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_Zombie_Smasher more than 10
| years ago and being slightly surprised that it was developed
| using .NET/Mono (not with MonoGame though). Nice to see game
| development with Mono is still going strong...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| FYI MonoGame actually supports modern .NET (6+). In fact I
| think it no longer supports Mono at all, though I'd need to
| double check on that.
| reactordev wrote:
| There's nothing to "support". That's why it's a standard.
| Mono will run MonoGame builds on platforms where Roslyn/Core
| won't. I can think of a couple. PS4 for example.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Same engine used in StarDew Valley![0]
|
| Thats pretty neat that its opensource.
|
| Between this and Godot, I think indie developers and smaller
| professional studios will have options to choose from in the
| future.
|
| [0]: https://monogame.net/showcase.html
| debugnik wrote:
| Just to be clear, MonoGame has existed and been open source for
| a really long time now, and it's a mostly compatible successor
| to Microsoft's XNA; it's more of a platform abstraction library
| than a game engine, although it fills a really sweet spot
| between using engine and starting from scratch, IMO.
|
| There's also FNA, which is more focused on being an accurate
| reimplementation of the original XNA on top of exclusively OSS
| libraries and open APIs, although you can use it to make new
| games as well. Some games have actually used both to target
| different platforms in the past, as MonoGame is arguably
| buggier.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| I remember using XNA, at university, when it was still in vogue.
| I'll have to dig up that old project and see if it can be built
| with MonoGame.
| NBJack wrote:
| I had a project I started in XNA, and I was surprised at how
| little effort it took to migrate to Monogame. Hardest part was
| really switching the build process.
|
| Just note if you wrote it in XNA 3.x, you might need a guide as
| the modern version is more akin to v4.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Assuming you at one point upgraded to XNA4, it's not that hard.
| About 3 years ago I decided to see how hard it would be to get
| a game I released on Xbox Live Indie Games running on Monogame,
| and I had it building and showing the main menu in about 2
| evenings of work, and worked out most of things that needed to
| be changed (namely storage and some Xbox Gamerprofile stuff, I
| believe) after about a week.
|
| Had I known it would be that easy I would have done it years
| ago. Actually lead to me remaking the game in 3D and turning it
| into a proper sequel (which I'm still working on).
| mr_sturd wrote:
| It shouldn't be too hard. It was a small project with only a
| few source files if I remember correctly.
| subtra3t wrote:
| You might have more luck with FNA, it is meant to be completely
| compatible with XNA.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Cheers, will have a look.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah if you have an old XNA project in a folder, you can
| trivially port it to FNA usually in an hour or two. FNA is
| able to load all the .xnb files that were built by your
| project initially so you won't have to mess with content
| builders or anything.
| torginus wrote:
| Not sure about MonoGame. Way back when XNA was released it was a
| great step forward for indie development - a framework using an
| easy-to-use language that allowed publishing even for the Xbox
| 360 - that was a great step forward. It included solutions for
| every problem that tended to come up in gamedev - from audio to
| graphics, font rendering etc.
|
| But it had a fair bit of downsides too - it had to have all
| content compiled into a proprietary format using a Visual Studio
| plug. The font rendering was blurry and had poor support for
| internationalization. And the ergonomics of its APIs left
| something to be desired.
|
| MonoGame has essentially replicated XNA 4 wart for wart including
| the content pipeline. Development has been really slow on new
| features.
| lambda_garden wrote:
| The content pipeline is optional in MonoGame. You can load
| assets directly from ttf, png, etc.
|
| You can also run the content pipeline as a .NET tool outside of
| Visual Studio. It works on Linux too!
| cableshaft wrote:
| It definitely has its warts. I've been making a game using it
| and I've been annoyed how difficult certain things have been.
| 3D and cross-platform support in general isn't great (it's
| technically there, but any platform outside of Windows has a
| lot of hoops to jump through, at least in my experience).
|
| But it's also one of the more lightweight and code-centric game
| development frameworks out there currently, and I do prefer
| that to working with a heavy bloated editor like Unity (which
| I've used professionally in the past). And as long as my game
| takes the warts into consideration, 95% or more of my time is
| just spent coding, not figuring things out the quirks of the
| framework or engine.
|
| Like I had some issues getting some animations to import
| properly from Blender the other day (there's some video with
| like 100 views of someone who got something a bit different
| sort of kind of working, but I didn't feel like figuring out
| how to decode what they're doing and transpile that over to my
| needs), and just decided "Okay, I guess I'm not going to bother
| with making animations in Blender and only use static models
| instead. What I wanted it for isn't really that necessary
| anyway." And I'm only targeting Windows for now. I'll try to
| get other platforms working later, if ever (got it working on
| Steamdeck, at least).
|
| It was also pretty disheartening to see almost zero development
| on Monogame over the past year (judging by its Github
| activity).
|
| I have been considering giving Godot or Defold a try for my
| next game (Godot I was highly considering since it has XR
| support, and I've really wanted to make a VR-compatible game
| for a while now), but I'm hoping I can at some point jump back
| into Monogame once this Foundation gets into gear.
| pixelbyindex wrote:
| > But it's also one of the more lightweight and code-centric
| game development frameworks out there currently, and I do
| prefer that to working with a heavy bloated editor like Unity
|
| I also started with XNA, and I quite enjoyed it. But this was
| back in 2012, and I felt the shift happening. I used Unity
| for several years, and always felt a sense of confusion when
| looking at someone else's implementation: should I look at
| the code? The scripts? How is the project structured? It can
| be quite a task.
|
| In the last 6 months (shortly before the infamous Unity
| debacle) I started using Godot with C#. Like many, I can say
| that I quite like it. Related to your comment though, I tried
| going back to a code-first approach, and so far I have to
| say, it's going great. I have managed to create most of my
| scenes with scripts alone, and as far as I can tell, Godot is
| made for this. Everything that can be done in the editor can
| be done in code.
| doix wrote:
| That's great to hear. Way back in the day I played around
| with libgdx and xna and they made sense to me.
|
| The shift to unity killed any desire I had to try to make
| indie game experiments. The UI was confusing and I couldn't
| grok it. It just felt so alien to me.
|
| Awesome to hear that you can use godot in a code first way.
| I might have to try and pick it up at some point when I
| have free time.
| brnt wrote:
| > And as long as my game takes the warts into consideration,
| 95% or more of my time is just spent coding, not figuring
| things out the quirks of the framework or engine.
|
| Of course you don't spend time on warts if you know where
| they are and how to avoid them. The problem is learning that,
| which you apparently have, but then again, this can be said
| for any cumbersome tool.
| hu3 wrote:
| > MonoGame has essentially replicated XNA 4 wart for wart.
|
| This was intentional and beneficial in some aspects. So games
| could be ported easily. And existing team expertise could be
| leveraged.
| torginus wrote:
| Emphasis on the _was_. No existing content has been ported to
| MonoGame for over a decade. It 's high time to break backward
| compatibility.
| gsuuon wrote:
| How does MonoGame compare to Stride nowadays? Does anyone have
| experience with both?
| crypticgraffiti wrote:
| It's not included in the announcement post, so I'll leave this
| here: MonoGame is one, open source framework for creating
| powerful cross-platform games.
| squimby wrote:
| Anyone who's interested in any XNA successors I'd highly
| recommend checking out FNA instead. It uses exclusively FOSS
| libraries, the maintainers are actively anti content pipeline
| (MonoGame actively invested time and resources into building
| their own version), and FNA's just all around more stable.
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