✔ ☕ General Conversation Thread

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Now, this may seam a funny time to make this thread… in light of the recent activities concerning the domain names…

Some background:
I came from my first forum before this [Was there over 5 years] and only other forum, into this forum, one thing that kept me on the forum in general to tide my time and experience with their coding language was a thread that just conversed in general things, it did get heated [Most users were ‘not mature’ in general but not the feeling I get here which is nice] but generally new ideas were sparked through it…

Some people span off random projects such as building Logic Gates with string and card board… that was memorable… and the only reason was because someone brought up the topic…

Some people went into building an 8Bit games console… now that was interesting… [Though we would probably do it with something like a Raspberry Pi these days]

For some people the thread acted as emotional support as they discussed some events in their life…

Some documented moves between homes, showcased and all shared their working spaces… just general socialising…

Just to point out, not everyone spoke English as a first language but everyone managed to partake in that conversation…

Someone even made a mini-game out of the thread post creating a points system for posting at certain times and using a key word… it kept posts coming in…

Some posted about their interests to find like minded individuals, some shared comic mischief and funny articles etc., of course sticking to the forum rules always applied, no religion debates or other bad topics that were just meant to create flame wars…

As of writing this post the current stats for that thread are:

49,604 Posts
1,362,404 Views
as of: 14th Sep 2007 03:57
[Roughly 14.89 posts per day]

Nearing 1000 pages with 50 posts per page views… it uses an old custom made forum system from over 10 years ago…

The point:
Anyway I was wondering if we could make this happen here, and an interesting topic to start off could be the team explaining what happened yesterday with the domain names, why has Microsoft taken ownership of them?

I understand that this forum uses an endless thread view but it is still possible to track and link back to post positions… so it can still work but generally the idea is to just follow the flow… if it will not work oh well…

I really miss that aspect of that forum but it is a dead end now with no progression as the hosts killed the platform. So here is me hoping…

If not, then this thread can die away…

I did try.

MrValentine
[ FTR: I am blind by the way, Hi :slight_smile: ]

Thanks for reading.

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I don’t get it, Microsoft owns Xamarin, the MG domains but not MG?

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Nothing nefarious… just something dumb.

Like 5 or 6 years ago MonoGame didn’t have a website… just the old Codeplex site: http://monogame.codeplex.com

The team at that time wanted a website, but someone had bought monogame.com and it wasn’t available and no one wanted to pay the bill to host the website. This was all mentioned to Xamarin and they provided the team a webserver and bought monogame.net for it.

For the last 4 years I’ve been asking Xamarin to transfer that domain to me so we could manage it ourselves. For various dumb reasons they never did transfer the ownership to us.

Then Microsoft bought Xamarin. At that point we asked again but were told that they couldn’t legally hand over an asset of Xamarin during the acquisition process.

What happened yesterday is that Xamarin handed over their domains to Microsoft to manage and they mistakenly cleared our nameservers in the process. It wasn’t on purpose… just a mistake.

So that is how Microsoft has control of the domain. All because we didn’t pay $10 to buy the domain. It was our dumb mistake to let this get to this point.

The good news is that Microsoft loves the MonoGame project. I expect I will get the domain eventually… just red tape to deal with.

Worst possible case we trademarked MonoGame two years ago… we can forcibly get the domain if we needed to.

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How about changing the name?
“Monogame” in french, means “to have a single wife”, which is kind of “meh” for a game framework.

Also, today in 2016 we can say the Mono project is slowly fading out, with .Net Core / .Net Standard.
So “Monogame” feels like it’s not relevant anymore.

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We discussed it a few years ago, but nothing seemed better than MonoGame.

We know… which is why we use MonoGame to hopefully put more emphasis on the Game part.

MonoGame was never Mono specific… it was an unfortunate prefix that made people think that. We like to think that we retcon-ed it to be mean “one” or “single” and not a monkey in Spanish.

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Thank you @Tom for the backstory, it explains some more…

I think some history might be required on the home page.

The last language I used was by a company, we know who was who and who did what [Well mostly] so it helped to connect with the product [as in MonoGame being a product] this made things clearer from an end user standpoint and we knew where we stood and where the product came from…

Perhaps this is something I value too much, or just from my experience which others may not have experienced…

If I can ever be useful to the team I would like to help, I already plan to put together some sort of donation soon, however my current situation is not able to allow for that…

If it helps I am learning ASP.NET now and I am just about 30% my way through a book on it…

I am also in the process of becoming a professional writer, I already had a 500~ page book published on technical documentation, which I had to pull from the store due to the aforementioned company killing the project…

I hope to work on my first game with MonoGame soon… I have a Casual Strategy game in the works, Concept and Design phase is almost complete… and as I love C# it will be pushed through with MonoGame as its core…

I am also working on a Game Engine with MonoGame at its core…

The only thing delaying me is Maths and Physics… among other things…

Regarding the name change… any name has positive and negative connotations in any language you come from…

Shītake Mushrooms Shii(椎)Take(茸) [pronounced Tak-eh], often incite laughter in the UK, especially when pronounced incorrectly :stuck_out_tongue:

In my mind MonoGame will sit on par with other major Game Dev Tools such as UE4 without the UI tools, but comparatively able to create compelling and complex games… perhaps not as visually stunning [As this depends on the developer and a highly funded dedicated graphics coding team]… I would really like to contribute to this vision where possible… I am learning Server stuff so perhaps I can help with Online capacities and create a free tool that helps Devs set up their own servers easily and just get on with making their game a good game…

This reminds me, @Tom Have you guys heard of MikeNet? it has a .Net DLL…

Thanks for reading, sorry it got elongated…

EDIT
This got me thinking… I might look to create a centric Documentation Server that uses a database to manage the documentation allowing for contributions to be made to it, not a Wiki style thing though, goodness; I hate those…

EDIT
We should probably mention www.monogame.rocks about now :stuck_out_tongue:
Can we get a list of domain names?

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Is this why I couldn’t connect the other day?

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Tom explained it already

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I mean, the other day, when I couldn’t find the monogame page… I thought it was just maintenance or something… But it was offline because of those issues above?

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Yes, but there is a new domain name www.monogame.rocks that Microsoft does not control so unless something at the DNS service happens… It should be good… There are a few other domain names too…

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How are you doing all this if you are blind? You must have an amazing mental model of your surroundings, and or excellent memory?.. Even other peoples code, you point out errors and offer suggestions… What magic is this?

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My short-term memory is horrible…

There are multitudes of levels in the Blind spectrum I am in a fuzzy one, and it is currently incurable sadly… this is a recent revelation, my vision has deteriorated recently… although I have had this condition since birth…

The magic is zooming in on a 27" touch screen about 30cm from my face probably…

But most of my point outs were gut instincts recently as I have been studying C# extensively as well as the .NET Framework… as of a year ago [C# twice, .NET once]

I am also studying through a good book on MonoGame where I have had to rework a lot of the code and circumvent using a DLL, it was not working using that method, kept getting platform issues or something concerning .NET Core… so I simply embed my game engine inside every project now and it has its own fully qualified namespace [Company Name, Project Name, System Section, Sub Section, Class {Speaking of which, I love namespace aliases} ], compiles well… kind of a bonus as the engine can both grow, expand and I have designed it in such a way that project specific code can easily be removed or isolated when I copy the code into a new project while keeping any enhancements I have made between every project in the engine framework… I am not a gitter or anything yet…

You might have noticed I have a no-nonsense attitude sometimes, there are a lot of reasons behind this… I don’t ever intend to come across as mean or anything untoward, it is just sometimes I just do not have the time… and typing is becoming difficult these days…

Mental Model, possibly… but if you were in front of my face, I cannot see your face without causing myself a headache, or scaring you into thinking I am about to kill you from giving you a long stare lol

If you notice any typos in my writing now, it is likely because I can no longer type so well anymore… I still persevere…

You yourself too subject yourself a lot to the forum, I think you have better memory than me as you point out a lot as well…

This forum is not very easy for me to use as zooming in on the page pushes the posting box down and I must… gosh never mind, I revert to using the broken zoom in Windows instead…

Lucca in Tuscany, tell us about you @monopalle did I get the location wrong?

I appreciate your statement :slight_smile:

You will probably hear more about me over the year ahead… I am at a low point at present in my life, but I hope to sort it out before summer 2017… visual side aside that is…

I am a very friendly open person, but let me know if I say too much… I do mumble on sometimes… eh…

YAY my book on Mathematics and Physics for Programmers arrived just now :slight_smile: looks promising provided I can actually put it to some use… expect a thread on it :slight_smile:

Thanks for reading…

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Well, I am currently working on a new “big” game… conceived as a 2d transylvania style engine, but could equally handle zelda-clones…

Levels have rooms.
Rooms have depth-layers.
Depth-layers have tile-maps.

So all depth-layers are playable…

Besides tilemaps, depth-layers also contain their own interactive terrainSprites, objectSprites, and doors to other rooms.

I just got my editor saving and loading levels from xml today… I wasted a lot of time brute-forcing the solutions instead of brewing tea and doing research… It is a warriors code.

There are so many ways to screw up XML saving and loading… One of my misguided attempts took 30 seconds to load a modest tile-map…

Anyways, I’m thinking of having a time-travel thing, either have 2 play-throughs 1000 years apart, or an actual dual-state world, where you alternate between time-frames… Either way, doing things in the past will change how things play out in the future, but not vice-versa.

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@monopalle Have you played Castlevania Symphony of the Night? go find some play through videos on YouTube, sounds like your game a lot minus the depth layers which I find intriguing!

XML is amazing, and you will want to master it for dealing with databases too.

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I haven’t played it, but I know it from AVGN among others… I did have metroid and zelda though, to name a few :slight_smile:

Yeah, xml is really nice… And I can easily load individual data-points into my code, and save values to file… But I had a hard time with more advanced operations, saving lists of items containing lists of items, containing lists of items, and then loading retrieving the data in a meaningful way took me a day combined, at least…

I ended up with an XML structure like this (psedo): I wanted the unique IDs for each item to be stored as a data-entry, but to get the for-loops working, I had to use Unique IDs as a catagory instead.

Rooms
    Room
      RoomIndex_0
            Layers
                Layer
                    LayerIndex_0
                       Tiles
                          Tile
                             TileIndex_0 
                             End
                         End
                       End
                    End
                  etc......   
             
      RoomIndex1
     etc.....
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@monopalle Ouch… I would look into more optimisation methods…

a quick search using the term multi level xml data storage

I found this which might be useful, at the bottom is some JAVA/JavaScript code…

http://www.siara.cc/csv_ml/Multi-level%20nested%20CSV%20TDV.pdf

I did not look at more results so take a good look through results…

I was thinking last night to upload some of my old experimentation videos solely for this thread, will look into it sometime…

Is .ini not available in MonoGame? not checked for it as of yet but curious is it is or not… was a very useful method for me in a previous language… although I will likely stick with XML from now on and possibly also JSON…

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@monopalle you should have a look at LiteDb, it’s well suited for complex structure, and handles references, haven’t tried but it looks well suited for handling game data

also, you must play Castlevania Symphony of the Night ( my favorite game of all time :slight_smile: )

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I played SotN 3 years ago. I couldn’t believe I had missed that masterpiece :slight_smile:

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The sad thing is, those great games on the PS One are locked to the Sony platform, Sony is the only thing preventing them from re-releasing those great games to modern platforms… this is a great shame…

There are so many great games from PS One that I would pay to play on a PC today…

And keep in mind, we are talking of games created 20 years ago now… I would pay for those over most games released today…

All my current projects are based on the PS One era in style or inspired by them…

How about you guys?

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Thanks guys, but I think it will do for now. I already have the room/layer/tile loader, so unless I get slow-down as the project grows, I’ll probably leave it…

So many other things to do. I’m really looking forward to the lighting… I’m planning pre-rendered directional and point-based terrain/object lights, and then a few dynamic lights.
-With the ability for tiles to be shadow-casting. This will be fun to implement using blend-states and render-targets.

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