MonoGame documentation

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Instead of adding more posts to the feature wishlist thread, I start a new one.

This is a vicious circle as no doc = not that’s much people coming and wishing to help = less doc = less people = … = ultimately death (pessimistic ? maybe, maybe not)

Also, a forum is not a documentation and can’t be use as such so using it temporarily/because it’s convenient/there is nothing better yet it’s just delaying indefinitely the issue until it’s too late (because people who knows will be overwhelmed by the huge task to do).

The other usual issue with forum comes from the “modern selfishness” of people (“help me I have my emergency, help help help (please)…”, 2 mins later “no one ? help me please !!!” etc then, sometimes, “problem solved” without any more useful info for the record, usually). Those people want their very own solution to their own issue but forgot the big word chosen for the forum “COMMUNITY” :(.

Another issue with doc is people thinking doing good by creating a doc here, a doc there (like this one, they’ll help, but instead of the good “divide and conquer”, here it’s just divert people everywhere but where they should go FIRST to find doc: MonoGame official website ! I saw some questions on usual forum like gamedev.stackexchange.com, it looks like some people don’t even know there is a forum here.

By the way it would be good to have a full documentation on shader, it could be done first by gathering all intel of the subject in the forum (any motivated people can do it, prepare a draft document which could be reviewed and corrected if needed by the team/people who knows).

I think mostly only involved people (Tom & KonajuGames) can do the doc, and if they don’t create it, no one could, almost.
In order to beat this issue, it could be possible for you to write very simple doc without even any full sentences, and let other doing the redacting (which is where most of the time used in making doc), a very good start would be a complete XNA → MonoGame (including shaders) like the great XNA 3.1->4.0 cheatsheet by Nelson Hurst.

To end, this is a little step by step for making doc, tell me what do you think about it:
-why using MonoGame: benefits and costs, for which kind of game, which platform, future plan …
-moving from XNA, checklist/cheatsheet
-compiling the game for platform … (each one would have its own part, tools needed, things to do, …)
-specific platform feature/lack of feature/limitations
-…

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Unless someone else suddenly steps up to do it… then yes only @KonajuGames and I can do the docs.

The problem is we’re both super busy with our own projects and priorities. So for now the docs will be how they are.

The only help that would be useful here is others writing docs too which i’m unconvinced will happen.

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Is there an official monogame wiki page?

I am just starting out with monogame (and game dev really), I am planning to integrate Tiled and Monogame.extended and might document the process for later referral and would like to share it somewhere more official.

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Is it this one, it’s from the github project page.

I think those link (wiki + doc + community forum, despite being redundant) should be included in the installer. It’s just unbelievable people ignore this forum and helpers who reply on all forums/websites all around didn’t really help at the end :(.

For starting, @Tom or @KonajuGames: what do you think about creating a public project to hold updated HLSL tutorials (+ any other code which use shaders) ?
As it is not a tutorial repost with fix, I think there would be no problem doing that, plus it’s to help people.

There are already too much shader fixing samples on the forum (I have seen one on the MS Bloom sample at least: here, here, here and here, and there are other post related to this particular sample alone) but they are all not as useful as others.
Having a single repository with fixed samples (MS Xbox creator club, RB Whitaker, Riemers, digitalerr0r, and maybe from some books too, like samples from 3D Graphics with XNA 4.0 from Sean James), in which samples can be reviewed by people who know, corrected if needed would be better IMHO, despite there will always be “help me right now plz plz plz with my common issue already fixed 1000 times everywhere but I don’t want to spend time reading the fix plz plz plz”.

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Is it this one, it’s from the github project page.

The first line says monogame does not use this wiki anymore.

Flashpunk (useflashpunk.net) has a nice easy doc section, easily access the packages then classes, and enough details for a semi experienced developer to understand what they need.

This mixed with a wiki page which would be more detail/tutorial focused that anyone can contribute to would be nice, I would happily edit things I comfortably gain experience in.