Given a fresh clean install of Windows 8 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Premium, is it possible to write a game only for Android from here without using licensed software?
I have XNA experience and was hoping to be able to use it to write an Android game.
What I did:
installed MonoGame 3.2
then discovered that I need “Mono for Android” if I want to create a “MonoGame Android” project
researched and found out that now this is called “Xamarin.Android”
installed Xamarin Starter Edition (the only one that is free)
Now when I create a “MonoGame Android” project, a window pops up telling me “Using Xamarin.Android with Visual Studio requires Business edition or higher”.
Any way around that? I just want to use Visual Studio to write a game targeted only for Android.
That is just a requirement of Xamarin’s products… Visual Studio integration is limited to the “Business” editions and above.
Your other option is to just do deployment and debugging from Xamarin.Studio on Windows. Even though it isn’t as nice as working in Visual Studio, it does work.
We don’t condone stealing of software here. It is a ironic position for people making games they want to sell to the public to take.
Right now, Xamarin Indie is 25 USD per month per platform instead of 300 USD per year. So it’s a great time to buy an Android subscription for a month to try things out.
As for working with Visual Studio, I have VS Express 2013 for Desktop and Xamarin Studio. I mostly program inside VS using an XNA project, and I add files as link to a MonoGame project in Xamarin Studio. That way I get to use Visual Studio for most things and usually only switch to Xamarin Studio to compile and run.
It’s not the easiest of setups but it works! (Don’t pirate!)
Now, is it possible to create a functional MonoGame-project with VS 2013 (Professional vs. Community Edition?) that runs on Android/iOS without installing anything related to Xamarin? Sorry, but I haven’'t yet catched the gist of the discussion.
@da_ace23, you need Xamarin to write Android apps in C# because it converts your code to native code on your target platform. Like @nanexcool said, it is dirt cheap to start development with an Indie License. That is what I use.
If you don’t want to do that, your best option is Java using Eclipse IDE.
Well I see, thank you very much for the clarification, I wasn’t really sure. The question was also part of a process to decide for an engine to realize our drafts - one idea was to use MonoGame and/or the Cocos-XNA/CocosSharp, but there are voices around arguing against using Xamarin. I assume it will be some kind of a tedious process over the weeks to come, but there is hope that there will be a result. Anyway, thank you again!
Well it looks like Microsoft has started a “Community” edition of Visual Studio 2013 which presumably allows plugins and therefore works with Xamarin.Android… “Download Visual Studio Community for a free, full-featured IDE with powerful coding productivity features, cross-platform mobile development tools for Windows, iOS and Android”: http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs
On top of great tools for building Universal Windows Applications,
Visual Studio 2015 offers the most complete cross-platform mobile
application development environment, with great solutions for C#, C++
and HTML/JavaScript development targeting iOS, Android, Windows and
more.
Using C# for Android and iOS will still require a Xamarin license, even with Visual Studio 2015. Microsoft will provide C++ support for Android and iOS. Xamarin have recently doubled the size of apps possible with their free Starter Edition however, so it may be possible to use this version with VS2013 Community or VS2015 but no-one has tried it yet that I have seen.
(edit) Actually, it looks as though I can use a starter license through Xamarin for my purposes. However, when I login choosing the starter package it says Business edition or higher is required. I thought this link was changing that, am I incorrect? (/end edit)
If not, I could just use Visual Studio 2013 Express & Monogame and just develop for windows without issue correct? I’m obviously new, and while overwhelming, I want to make sure my environment is setup correctly so that I’m not wasting too much time.
Starter edition has 64 kbyte size limit (if I remember correctly) and MonoGame may put you over that right away. I haven’t looked at the size limits since I use indie but I think that’s the case.
Yeah, I did a little digging on the Xamarin forums too and I don’t think they’ve implemented the changes yet since announcing them. For now I’ll just mess around with VS and Monogame/xna and get something working here. Should be easy to port once they update the license anyways right?
Yep… that is the point. Develop on one platform and port to the others without too much effort.
The thing to look out for are platform issues. Mouse vs. gamepad vs. touch. 1920x1080 vs. 480x320 (iPhone 3G) screen resolution. 6GB vs. 128MB memory. MonoGame can’t solve these issues for you automatically… you must write code and design your game to handle the extremes of target platforms you want to hit. And you should think about this early on.