Is monogame dead?

The xna web site had a big button on its forum that said Education with tutorials documentation ect.
I said it long ago that it should be on the mg.net page bar.

That said some complaints are just the user being lazy or they just dont know how to do a search…

I mean there is this thing called google. “monogame shader with lighting”

Which takes me right back to the missing button for Education.

Since the full shader code for what he asked for has been posted by numerous people countless times thru out this forum alone its even built into basic effect well lighting is at least.
This is not including random blog posts all over the internet and entire websites that have dedicated step by step tutorials and video how too’s.

So this if anything is a problem of not having a super simple reference area like Education was on the xna site.

We’re not focused on new features, we’re focused on fixing bugs. There’s only 2 or 3 active core developers most of the time and Tom is often busy with work on the console versions of MonoGame. We would love to improve documentation and the website, but we only have so much free time.

It would be great to get more community contributions in the docs area or even just suggestions in the issue tracker for where to put sample projects on the website. All of the docs are open source in the MG repo and anyone can contribute.

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There are great libraries out there. MonoGame explicitly does not implement high level functionality like that because it does not want to force one way of doing things on users.

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What about a collaborative wiki for documentation?

I think that a zone that is user driven for documentation is missing for MonoGame. Because of this absence, some people use the forum as a way to supply this. To put an example, the recurring “recommend me a UI” thread. Most people use this not to know the features of the libraries, but because it’s really really hard to get a simple list of the UI libraries available. You just get lots of threads with creators recommending their UI (which is ok) and linking to their forum thread, which is also a mess because you can’t edit your posts, so you have to surf 100 messages to know the last version or all the features. This should go also into the wiki.

Can you recommend me a UI library? That’s a wiki link
What are the features of UI library XYZ? That’s a wiki link
Where do I learn shaders with lots of examples? Oh, you better believe that’s a wiki link.

Having a forum which is “tagged” (and you depend on users putting the correct tags) is also not helping. Cathegorized forums are much better for development because you force the user to post it in the correct place. If you want to learn about graphics, you go to the graphics section. Right now 90% of the posts dealing with graphics are not tagged as graphics. And the fact that you can’t edit your first post to update the features of your library or present a list of all the videos of your tutorial is insulting for a developer forum made after 1996.

just my 2c

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I started using MonoGame recently (~6 month ago) for a hobby project.
My problem is the opposite : there are too many tutorials, too many things to try and toy around with.
And when I don’t find exactly what I want out of the box, generic OpenGL/DirectX/etc… resources usually translate quite well to MonoGame.

I sure wish there were a lot more commits and activity. Slow but not dead…

I understand the issue you are describing as it regards to resources and time devoted to the care for MonoGame.

However, I believe I volunteered to help with the development of documentation a while back. However, what I would be interested in doing is taking the API and posting documentation for each class and its properties and methods with examples on how to use each. In fact, this type of documetation appears to be lacking with every Open Source graphics engine available. The result is that people who would like to try their hands at game development have no way of learning the fundamentals.

For example, it has taken me months of research and experimentation to build a credible hexagonal map-board that is similar in style to that which John Tiller Software uses with their historical combat simulations. This type of effort would no doubt discourage many people from pursuing such development.

Instead of using the existing site for such work it may be better to set up a new WordPress or a new Wiki site where the style can be fleshed and developed for such documentation. Each API segment would simply be a post or a page to a menu for example.

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@BrianBergh

That is why I started making tutorials for it :slight_smile:
I will do more with HLSL soon, but that one should give you the basics :slight_smile:

If you have any questions about it just ask in the comment section and I will be happy to respond.

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hi @SolitudeEnt .

Great tutorial covering the basics, i already know the basics in pixels shaders (at least for 2d graphics). Im working on a 3D game, and i was more referering to 3D shaders, for a bit more advanced lighting (and reflections) than what the basic shader (BasicEffect) has to offer. There are many examples out there, but none of them fit into Monogame, and if you are new to 3D as i am, whats a simple task for some people, seems very complicated to me. I want to play with custom lighting and shadows, but i can’t find any working examples. I have also been looking for examples showing the basics when applying shaders to meshes (3d Objects in general). Im am trying to understand whats best practice and how to apply several shaders to my model at the same time. - Eg. light and shadow, and techniques on how to actually apply several different shaders. And how to apply a shader to just one object (make my 3d model glow/emit light) etc. So far i haven’t been able to find any good examples to good practices, how to actually do it. - I can find some old examples in XNA but thy too doesn’t work in Monogame :frowning:

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shaders work almost the exact same between 2D and 3D. the only difference is you have a vertex shader before the pixelshader. But for most simple stuff that vertex shader is just passing the vertexs to the pixel shader.

Also all HLSL shaders work the same, so finding an example outside of monogame still works.

You apply multiple shaders by creating a render target, then rendering 1 shader at a time to the render target. Make sure that you do them in the order they are written to be applied and you should be fine.

All XNA Shaders still work in Monogame… you just have to change out the shader version (you can see the pixel shader verison in my 2D shader, and the vertexshader version is the same but with the vertex shader version).

I think that trying to start game dev’ing with the complicated stuff is unwise (you are trying to start at step 50 of 100, rather than starting at step 1), but its all out there to be learned I guess.

when I want to search something about MonoGame, usually I will search “xna xxx”, and also are old stuffs, but for my 2D game, I think it’s Basically enough, love coding in MonoGame/XNA, the framework is nice :slight_smile:

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That is the main reason we are bound to monogame.

We are the creators, the builders, the thinkers
not the people who add some models and ** behaviours** to a world and call it a game.
We are the people to create stuff, not to assemble things.
We call “thisgame development, not “filling spaces of GameObjects to make them alive”.
And… That is monogame!
:-}

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For anyone looking for MonoGame resources, @SimonDarksideJ has a nice repo mirroring the XNA education library:

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Here are also some good repos for game developers in general:


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It’s certainly not dead. PRs are being requested regularly to MonoGame, but those PRs are addressed only when the maintainers are available.

This topic is almost a year old.

I think maintainers should delegate more decision making to contributors, at least for documentation additions and changes. I see there are multiple documentation PRs lying around at MonoGame’s repository, some of them are years old:

Other than that, I stumbled upon this thread now, and I start to realize why I’ve been called a “concern troll” by one of the MonoGame’s contributors… They might be (unconsciously) pushing away new people who are genuinely interested in MonoGame’s future. I recommend to assume positive intentions first and foremost.

Its best to start from

two Net 6-7 samples that are updated by simondarkside… im not sure why the android one cant use the core dll, my sample can. it has to link all the files which is hard to maintain but i did it the same way as the desktop versions, all using shared code and linked assets:

also I put all the targets in the same sln .

net6 core dlls… So rather can get confused by older samples, the templates, and tutorials, i would start with these.

These are the official samples that contain the following:

the other ones I think are out of date.

and this:
also this is only 7 days old i think GitHub - AvaloniaInside/AvaloniaInside.MonoGame: Integration of MonoGame for Avalonia its been open since 2017. finally it been MVP’d. its not easy if you are using xaml and expect to copy paste all taht effortlessly to avalonia, but this shows renewed life. sponsor this guy please… also he has a docking ide id love to have…if its actually was working

Consider sponsor via github so he can fix the issues, also in the docking thing… MG in avalonia this has been in discussion for years. WPF isnt dead but is not multiplatform. Maui has no linux so thsi seems like the way … besides ImgUI… or other , its based on Reactive as well but you dont have to use that. i dont like MVVM so much but its done that way.

if you cant contribute , sponsor… !!! so few people are qualified because of the 11 platfroms and legacy. Teh consoles, its not just the phones and the boxes. There is no alternative. really… outside of a bloated game engine.

the new sponsor system has a way that people can see you gave at least something per month or one time. a PR with like a spelling fix is just an annoyance and they merge all the stuff furiously in a batch…not as it comes in…to minimize code churn and version madness … even an obvious fix can break stuff… like workarounds, and you can cherry pick from unmerged PRs…to your fork or your own code.

Monogame doesnt even have a modern N thread game loop or usable timers. you make your own. it biggest issue is the opengl / shader transpiling and and I think best to let them focus on that. And be happy its not constantly changing/ mutating and bloating up.

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It’s more done than dead. Like Windows Forms, it’s not dead it’s done.

We’ve have a brilliant framework that works enabling anyone to make any game they want from the ground up in C#. What more can you ask for?

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As mentioned before , it seems done at the basic level, but I think there are a lot of things that can be improved.
Like audio for example, it lacks a lot of functionality, at this moment is pretty basic I would say, though you can use 3rd party libraries to cover this area
2D is pretty good, 3d is quite basic and tedious to work with , perhaps some implementations for 3d can really help make things easier.
Another thing that can really help is a set of shaders that can make 3d look better with little effort, not sure if this should be included in the framework itself but this could help a lot of people make games look better.

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One is certain: MonoGame’s maintainers want to preserve backwards compatibility, because MonoGame is used by plenty. However, not all have previous experience with XNA (which MonoGame is based on), so this creates a potential discrepancy of different expectations that would be nice to resolve somehow.

Therefore, if people want something more out of MonoGame… I think it’s time for someone to fork MonoGame, rename the project, with an organic development philosophy, while making a real game with real needs with such a framework. Otherwise, there’s a chance that it’s going to end up being not as useful or difficult to configure for specific use cases.

If not, MonoGame maintainers have to make a leap of faith and make key decisions for the project, like not trying to replicate XNA or be a spiritual successor of XNA. There exist another project for this purpose, which is FNA… But again, it’s totally up to them to make this decision, but it’s very unlikely, because I feel like maintainers of MonoGame are satisfied with project’s current level of success.

According to my observations and the decision making process so far while interacting with this community, I don’t see any other options.