i'm curious: how was your programming journey with MG?

[rahil627]

hi, i’m new here.

i’m curious to hear from some more experienced people the path y’all took while making stuff.

For example, as a new person, i am thinking i would have to start with Nez. And then if i don’t like that for some reason, i’d have to select and assemble a few pieces from Extended (entity (maybe ecs), collisions, scene, gui (imgui?), feature-ful debug console, etc.), and then go from there.

A side question: is everyone using ECS, or do some of you have simpler entity systems, like just basic composition?

But i wonder, how did everyone else go about this? Did you start from scratch because you are a great programmer? Did you start with Nez for your first game, then create your own engine for the second? What were some road blocks in the journey? Bad times? Good times?

Is everyone using bits of Extended, or did everyone basically create their own “engine”? If your engine is open-source, please do link! i like reading code!

Anyway, just curious.

[ZachIsAGardner]

my experience with programming before trying monogame was mostly unity and web development. i learned a little bit of gamemaker and godot also. i feel uncomfortable investing a lot of time into profit driven engines and i feel like godot isn’t quite mature enough, although i’m very excited about it.

i am making a 2D pixel art platformer and i’m just using vanilla monogame. it has felt great to write my own tools for my project with monogame successfully doing most of the boring stuff for me.

monogame works well to pull up a screen and give me the really basic tools to draw stuff and play sounds that works in a cross-platform way, which is all i really wanted.

monogame’s default wizard-thing for bringing in assets, like sprites and sound effects, seems totally bizarre to me. but since all it does is write to the “content.mgcb” file i ended up just writing a little node.js script that automatically scans my assets folder and writes to that file instead of dealing with that manually.

monogame’s built in song playing functionality was also disapointing. as it is now there’s no way to have partial loops in songs or to play songs from an arbitrary position. it was a huge pain, but i ended up writing my own song playing functionality that accomplishes this. i have a post here detailing that: i have a solution (i think) for songs with partial loops and other cool stuff - #3 by HopefulToad

i’m working on windows and exporting to linux is only slightly a pain and exporting to mac is extremely annoying. but i believe that has to do more with mac than it does monogame.

i guess i could also say the slow activity with monogame as a project has me feeling a little nervous, i’d be really happy to see like a patreon for the dev team to go up and to see more community stuff.

so in summary, as i someone who was disapointed with other established engines and really likes c# i’ve found great relief in working with the simple tools that monogame provides. i’m no genius, but i’m a pretty competent programmer and i was able to write my own tilemap editor and other nifty tools that make working on my game a joy.

i have been working on finishing my first game after working on it full-time for a few months, with before working on it every once and a while as well as having a full time job for about a year. monogame has served me well for the most part, but i’m curious about other solutions that are our there. but who knows maybe i’ll just come back to monogame for game 2

[Martenfur]

Basically started by making my own gamemaker-like engine and snowballed from there. https://github.com/Martenfur/Monofoxe

[rahil627]

@ZachIsAGardner

just writing a little node.js script that automatically scans my assets folder and writes to that file instead of dealing with that manually.

this might be worth sharing! make it completely non-gui

@ZachIsAGardner

there’s no way to have partial loops in songs or to play songs from an arbitrary position.

that does sound like an overlooked common feature in the api… but maybe can just update it / send a pull request, like add an overloaded function?

@ZachIsAGardner

i’m working on windows and exporting to linux is only slightly a pain and exporting to mac is extremely annoying. but i believe that has to do more with mac than it does monogame.

yeah, i don’t expect Unity/Unreal level publishing from any other framework… but you’re using OpenGL right? Not actually 3 different renderers for 3 different platforms?

@ZachIsAGardner

i guess i could also say the slow activity with monogame as a project has me feeling a little nervous, i’d be really happy to see like a patreon for the dev team to go up and to see more community stuff.

;( They should be sponsored by Microsoft honestly… but i’m personally not worried about it being abandoned or anything. It’s already lasted a decade now (…? the original xbox)! Simple frameworks are way more stable than complex ones, and can last a long long time! Hopefully the shift from mono to .net.core or whatever was smooth…?

@ZachIsAGardner

so in summary, as i someone who was disapointed with other established engines and really likes c# i’ve found great relief in working with the simple tools that monogame provides. i’m no genius, but i’m a pretty competent programmer and i was able to write my own tilemap editor and other nifty tools that make working on my game a joy.

wow congrats on almost finishing that game!!! it’s always the last 5%

[ZachIsAGardner]

@rahil627

this might be worth sharing! make it completely non-gui

i’d be happy to share it once i get the chance!

@rahil627

yeah, i don’t expect Unity/Unreal level publishing from any other framework… but you’re using OpenGL right? Not actually 3 different renderers for 3 different platforms?

yeah! it’s just one project that exports to whatever platform you want based on an argument to a build command.

[rahil627]

ahhhh nice! Then yeah, that sounds like the problem of other platforms… probably Xcode! That thing is hot garbage!

i took a peek at your sound code, and wow, that looks really complex. All that work… just for some sound functions? Hopefully most of it was copy-pasta of the original class?? I feel like the sounds component is always threaded (i mean, it has to be… right? to have audio and graphics work concurrently?), but luckily i’ve never had to use threads either… sorry, can’t help you there.

@Martenfur :o wow, thanks for sharing! looks like ive got some home-work to do(!), reading this, haha

update:
@Martenfur i skimmed through your engine, MonoFoxe, and yessss!!, that’s pretty much what i had in mind!! This isn’t as terrible of a task than i thought! wow… For some reason i felt it was a gargantuan thing, but after reading through your code, i feel like, this is much much much simpler than understanding a big engine. And better yet, everything can be customized to our own liking! Yes yes yes. I now believe assembling my own engine is the way to go. Yay!

i was a little surprised that you had to write your own 2D shapes drawing functions though, and even further, your own 2D primitive drawing below that…?? not hard, but, didn’t expect MG to be so… bare.

reading through your ECS was a breeze too. I sorta understand that now… although, should every Entity have a map (dictionary) and list, or should there just be one static dictionary?

only thing missing really, is collisions then? Or maybe i missed it in the math class somewhere…

overall, i feel pretty relieved now. thanks! As long as i don’t have to write scene/layer/camera, i think i’ll be ok. I imagine those would be near impossible to write dependency-free, and probably just need a separate 2D and 3D version… (although i’m def avoiding 3d, lol)

[ZachIsAGardner]

i added a reply to this post about the same problem for those curious about how i never manually add content files to my game

Automatically add files to MGCB file?

I started working on a tool for this kind of job: Content Crawler Tool Oh cool thanks for sharing! I’ll take a look as soon as I get a chance. We’re coming up on a milestone and I’m not scheduled to do more asset work until after, so it might take a couple of weeks. But as soon as I’m back on asset pipeline I’ll mess around with it and get back to you in the linked thread with any feedback.

[Martenfur]

@ZachIsAGardner

i added a reply to this post about the same problem for those curious about how i never manually add content files to my game

So basically, a worse version of what I wrote. GitHub - Martenfur/Nopipeline: A Monogame Content Pipeline enhancer.

[Martenfur]

@rahil627

reading through your ECS was a breeze too. I sorta understand that now… although, should every Entity have a map (dictionary) and list, or should there just be one static dictionary?

It’s done as a bit of an optimization. Sometimes you need to iterate through all components and sometimes search them using a key. And note that it’s not a ECS, it’s a EC which is miles simpler than an actual, cache-optimized ECS.

@rahil627

For some reason i felt it was a gargantuan thing, but after reading through your code, i feel like, this is much much much simpler than understanding a big engine.

I still spent 1.5 years to release v1.0, so beware. And I intentionally kept everything dead simple to use and understand, unlike some other moongame-based thingamabobs. You can simply take what’s there, in fact, I do recommend taking an existing engine and either just using it, or expanding it.

@rahil627

i was a little surprised that you had to write your own 2D shapes drawing functions though, and even further, your own 2D primitive drawing below that…?? not hard, but, didn’t expect MG to be so… bare.

Monogame is literally Draw and Update loop and crappy content manager, that’s it.

[rahil627]

@Martenfur

So basically, a worse version of what I wrote. https://github.com/Martenfur/NoPipeline

LOL, that’s harsh… But this is exactly why i prodded Zach about it. It’s just one of those things that makes sense, at the least adding it to the tutorial as a non-gui option, and at the most, choosing one open-source implementation to replace it. I mean, if one can use MG, one doesn’t need a GUI there, do they? Unless it’s actually really useful. I’ll def give that tool a try tho… I’m in no position to say anything… But i already sense that many people have created their own wheel, and to me personally, that wheel is not fun to make! Game-play, yes, please. Automatic asset/resource importer…

and lol, Martenfur, you got me. I just throw out that word (ecs) without ever really knowing what it means… Well then, maybe that’s why it was so easy to understand!! I love it! I was gonna go with composition until i learn the hard way

oh yeah, makes sense about optimization, i think… so you have the option to choose hash(map) or list implementation (and it doesn’t cost much to have both, so why not!), whenever you want… nice!

@Martenfur

I still spent 1.5 years to release v1.0, so beware.

i’m afraid again, halp!

@Martenfur

Monogame is literally Draw and Update loop and crappy content manager, that’s it.

LOL. That should be it’s tag-line. Actually… that would really help ward off people coming here thinking that it is more than that. I’ve always thought of MonoGame as just SpriteBatch. Maybe NoGame? But that’s the beauty of it, no? This way, there’s nothing anyone can complain about, because you wrote the game engine part… (except the content manager thing…).

[Martenfur]

@rahil627

if one can use MG, one doesn’t need a GUI there, do they? Unless it’s actually really useful. I’ll def give that tool a try tho…

No, the default pipeline tool is crap and has zero reasons to exist. On top of being a pain to use, it’s buggy as all hell. That thing crashed on me so many times I lost count.

[Martenfur]

@rahil627

I’ve always thought of MonoGame as just SpriteBatch.

Yeeeeeah, spritebatch is also not that great tbh. It’s not straight up bad, but has a ton of room for improvement (that will never happen). You can take a look at Monofoxe’s VertexBatch that is based on spritebatch, but has more features and a nicer api.

[ZachIsAGardner]

@Martenfur

So basically, a worse version of what I wrote. https://github.com/Martenfur/NoPipeline

it’s one small javascript file that does exactly what i need it to.

i think it’s important to share simple “i did this in an hour” solutions alongside the more comprehensive ones

[rahil627]

LOL Martenfur… well okay then, i’m convinced! I’ll just start with Zack’s script; Then, if that for some reason isn’t enough, I’ll go with yours. I’m a simple man: I like simple–perhaps the same reason i came to MG!: simplicity.

i also realized, just quickly looking at MickGuyvr’s “Content Crawler” and Zach’s script, how… how to say… robotic(?) C# is. I look at Content Crawler and i think: Microsoft naming conventions, classes, namespaces, lines with just a bracket (??), interfaces, exceptions, project files, visual studio, etc. Then i look at Zach’s javascript, and i think: . Scripting languages certainly have their place. (just not javascript tho )

yeah, i just checked https://github.com/aloisdeniel/awesome-monogame#pipeline and found Martenfur’s tool… Maybe can add yours there too? Or does everyone in the C# world actually use NuGet?

[Martenfur]

@rahil627

Or does everyone in the C# world actually use NuGet?

Of course. Nugets are the way to go.

@rahil627

lines with just a bracket (??)

As it should be. Opening braces on left on the same line are heresy.

@rahil627

I’ll just start with Zack’s script;

His seems to be very restricted in what and how it can process, gonna have troubles with custom resource types.

@rahil627

like simple–perhaps the same reason i came to MG!: simplicity.

Well, gonna disappoint, this is not what monogame is about. It’s about freedom and control over what your game does.

[ZachIsAGardner]

@Martenfur

His seems to be very restricted in what and how it can process, gonna have troubles with custom resource types.

it’s true, the way i did it is restrictive and will likely need some tweaking. i shared it mostly as inspiration as one way to do it. it wasn’t really meant to be a catch-all solution

what martenfur has done seems cool, and will prolly work out of the box.

[HopefulToad]

I’m a largely self-taught programmer, and I started because of my interest in making my own games, not because I wanted a job at a company. I’ve started quite a few projects over the past years, but never got close to finishing one until my most recent game that I’m working on. I suffer from Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, so I haven’t used any of the popular extensions to MonoGame. Instead, I’ve created my own class library with useful objects and functions that I can reuse with multiple projects. My class library isn’t really an engine, and I won’t be open-sourcing it as that would require me to document every public part of the API and also hold the source to a standard that I otherwise wouldn’t need to. Also, it’s tuned to my specific needs and not to generalized, wide use cases.

I don’t use Entity-Component. My style of programming is more barbaric, I suppose: simply create a new class type for each type of object I might need. Sometimes with several levels of inheritance!

@ZachIsAGardner

i have a post here detailing that:

FYI, you linked to my response in your topic and not to your original post.

@Martenfur

Monogame is literally Draw and Update loop and crappy content manager, that’s it.

Well, it also handles input and sound. I’m personally glad it doesn’t railroad me into a specific game design style, instead giving me more freedom than something like Unity would.

[Martenfur]

@HopefulToad

and sound

Nice joke.

[HopefulToad]

@Martenfur

Nice joke.

MonoGame’s built-in sound handling may not be up to your standards, but it does exist, and is sufficient for some use cases.

[Martenfur]

It’s not just up to the standards, it barely works.