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MonoGame On GitHub Updates

April 3, 2014 by Tom Spilman in Development, News

Wanted to catch everyone up on some updates to MonoGame on GitHub.

Protobuild

MonoGame has gotten a lot of new platforms and we foresee more on the way.  It has become a challenge to manage so may projects and keep them in sync to each other.  This causes frequent build errors from missing files, wrong files being included for  some platforms, missing features caused by missing files, etc.

To alleviate this a few weeks ago we started the migration to Protobuild.  Protobuild is a simple tool which generates Visual Studio projects and solutions from a common definition file.  It is a single small 106K EXE that is fully cross-platform running on Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops and some configuration files to drive the process.

With this in place we’ve removed the .sln and .csproj files for MonoGame.Framework from the MonoGame develop branch.   To generate the projects you simply double click the Protobuild.exe and it will automatically generate all the projects and solutions relevant to your current desktop platform.  You can also manually generate projects via the command line:

Protobuild.exe -generate Android
Protobuild.exe -generate WindowsGL
Protobuild.exe -generate PlayStation4

So far things have been great with it and the effort to make changes to the projects is largely automated.  We plan to move more of the projects over to Protobuild in the coming weeks.  I encourage you to learn more about Protobuild on its wiki and consider if it is a good solution for your own projects.

Dependencies

For a long time the binary dependencies for MonoGame have been in the ThirdParty/Libs folder which redirected to kungfubanana/MonoGame-Dependencies.  This was fine for a long time, but the owner of that repo hasn’t been around in over a year now and it made it difficult to get things merged.

Just last night we moved the dependencies to a new repostitory Mono-Game/MonoGame.Dependencies controlled by the MonoGame team.  Because of how Git submodules work we had to move it from ThirdParty/Libs to ThirdParty/Dependencies.

For developers with downstream forks you may see some messages related to this when merging the latest develop.  Just remember to initialize and update submodules after you merge:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Also if any of your own projects referenced binaries in ThirdParty/Libs you will need to update those.

Let us know how these changes affected you and how we can improve things moving forward.

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MonoGame for PlayStation 4

March 23, 2014 by Tom Spilman in News

ps4logo

The big news this week is that MonoGame is coming to PlayStation 4.

Open-source game development framework MonoGame will be free for all registered PS4 developers. – Develop

Unity, GameMaker: Studio and MonoGame are three of the most commonly used development tools for indies and students. – Polygon

The company has entered into partnerships to bring GameMaker:Studio from YoYo Games, and MonoGame to the PS4 development ecosystem. – Gamasutra

This was a project that Dean, Dominique, Steve and I worked at with Sony for almost a year. Still it couldn’t have been possible without help from Xamarin and all of the developers that have used and contributed to MonoGame over the years.

If you are interested in publishing a MonoGame title on PlayStation 4 you first need to register with them and be accepted into their PS4 developer program. In a few short weeks we will be posting the information on how to access the MonoGame beta for PS4 thru their developer network forums.

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The New MonoGame.net

March 15, 2014 by Tom Spilman in News

Welcome to the new and improved MonoGame.net!

In late 2013 we noticed the website was getting slow and we had an unstoppable onslaught of spam bots.  Worse none of us knew how to fix it and it didn’t seem we were properly supporting the community.  We decided we had to remedy this situation and prepare ourselves for the future.

First we have moved hosting to DigitalOcean.  They really provide fantastic server hardware at very reasonable prices and so far their support and ease of use has been a tremendous help to this transition.  We really can’t recommend them enough.  If you are looking for hosting and don’t mind a little Linux command line hacking please click thru and give them a try.   Yes… that previous link gives us a small kick back if you sign up… just consider it a donation towards our new web hosting costs. 🙂

We were unhappy with the performance and general slowness of Drupal on the old site.  We looked at the top CMS systems available and decided that WordPress was our best choice.  Not only is it the most popular CMS out there, but it is easy to maintain and is updated frequently.

Finally for a long time now MonoGame has lacked a good community site.  The CodePlex forums were feeling old and lacked some modern features which would make for an improved community site.  We decided on using Discourse which is developed by the people that created StackOverflow/StackExchange.  Please let us know how you like it.

We want to first thank Xamarin who graciously hosted the site for the past 2 years.  Not only do they make a fantastic product, but without it MonoGame would not be running on iOS, Android, and PlayStation 4.  We also want to thank Joseph Hill who setup the previous site and did the fantastic site design.  This all came along at a critical time in MonoGame’s history and made us look good and helped us expand the community further than we imagined.

Please come discuss the new site with us and help build a better community around MonoGame in 2014!

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Kodu Game Lab available on Windows 8

March 13, 2014 by Tom Spilman in Games, News

kodu

Kodu Game Lab, by Microsoft Research Fuse Labs, has been available for Windows 8 for a little while now, but we’ve only just got the all clear to announce that the Windows 8 port was built using MonoGame!!

What is Kodu? Kodu lets kids create games on Windows and Xbox 360 via a simple visual programming language. Kodu can be used to teach creativity, problem solving, storytelling, as well as programming. Anyone can use Kodu to make a game, young children as well as adults with no design or programming skills.

If you have Windows 8, download it from here!

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TowerFall Ascension now available on PS4!

March 11, 2014 by Tom Spilman in Games, News

TowerFallThornwood

TowerFall Ascension is now available on the PS4 and was #BuiltWithMonoGame. It has also been getting some excellent reviews!!

This marks another landmark for MonoGame as it is the first MonoGame powered game on that console and If I’m not mistaken, we’ve beaten a Unity3D powered game to the PS4 too.

Credit where credit is due, Xamarin provide the awesome .NET compiler for the PS4.

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MonoGame FLOSS Weekly

March 7, 2014 by Tom Spilman in News

Capture_01

Earlier this week, MonoGame team members Tom Spilman and Dominique Louis got a chance to talk to Randall Schwartz and Guillermo Amaral on the @FLOSSWeekly podcast about MonoGame. Listen to it here!!

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