There seems to be low activity on github, but there has been no release since 2017. What’s going on?
Several commits per month is now called ‘dead’?
Interesting.
Also you can always go with the dev-brunch. It’s quite stable afaik.
And you can always grab an issue and help developing if you want a faster release 
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Part of maintainers are busy with life stuff, and the other part, like myself, are busy getting some major features up and running: MonoGame inside your web browser
Besides the maintainers, there usually isn’t that many people in community who contribute to the source code so it just seems that way, but stuff is going on behind the scenes.
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A multi platform open source game framework that easy to compile from the source is hard to die IMHO, even if it dies some genius will pick it up and continue the development.
I think the main advantage of MG is that i’ts a framework and not heavily attached to an editor and it’s very code centric.
Theres a newly open source game engine with a very cool editor just like Unity and they just open the source recently and the community is asking how to use the engine without the editor; I find it ironic : - D X
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mmmmm this sounds yummy…
hahahahahahahahha
Good [yet bad] news, I am free now [a job ended]… and my focus is now, web development and gamedev! Writing may steal a day a week though… give me a few days to adjust… expect a tonne load from me soon!
I too worry about MG going the way of some other projects… but I shake a finger at those who dare to let it die!
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the community and network around monogame seems dead. I’ve tried to find some simple shader tutorials for my 3d project (with some lighting and reflection), and i can’t find one single example that works. All i keep find is “Unity…Unity…Unity”… - And ofc. a bunch of old XNA stuff, that also can’t compile in the Monogame pipeline 
- I call that dead.
I believe a big problem with MonoGame is the lack of concentration on good documentation, especially for those just starting out in game development. Without such documentation, the product simply won;t grow beyond experienced people or those with the natural talent to figure things out on their own.
The other issue is the lack of an easy-to-implement interface library. If you cannot design and implement a complex menu system easily then the games people will be able to develop will be quite limited.
If the MonoGame developers were to concentrate on these two issues, instead of new features, I believe you will see a large spike on MonoGame development.
For now though, it will simply remain in the hands of a core group of developers…
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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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That is why I started making tutorials for it
I will do more with HLSL soon, but that one should give you the basics
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
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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
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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 “this” game 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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