I created this topic to get to know who’s using (or interested in using) MonoGame.Extended for their game projects. Let us know who you are, what your working on and post a screenshot if you have one
I’ll start.
My name is Dylan Wilson and I’m the creator of MonoGame.Extended. I love creating game development tools and my goal is to help other game developers as much as possible. I have 3 kids, a wife and a full-time job so my spare time is fairly limited. The spare time I do have is almost always dedicated to working on MonoGame.Extended and other game development tools.
I’m currently working on a little space game demo for MonoGame.Extended because I think it’s makes sense to create a game development library if your doing it in the context of making an actual game.
Hi! My name is Rafael Almeida and I’m an enthusiast programmer. I use games engines since a long time (more than 3 years), in especially the RPG Maker, but I never finished a game, I just focused on programmation. My adventure don’t restrict only to games, I have a wide experience with web.
From november to today, me and my friend formed a team to create games. We choose the MonoGame because we want something new, we don’t want engines anymore. The team name is Phantom Ignition, and I created a dev blog to post the advances that we do in the games: http://phantom-ignition.blogspot.com.br/ (it’s very simple, we don’t worked well on it).
The current game that we are creating is “Super Pete, The Pirate”, an action platformer game. The code is open source, we choose this for other people learn too. The most recent updates are these gifs:
Begin of the battle system (the walking in the end is the “dead” animation ):
Pixel colision based on frames: http://i.imgur.com/odk7D3p.gif
I’m Michael, professional developer for a while, I always want to create games but didn’t get the right “kick” (tried SDL in 2004/2005, didn’t make it) then I decide to move from modding games to make my own and discover XNA then MonoGame as well as C# language which just give me the chance I have wait so long :).
I don’t use MogoGame.Extended yet but I’ll try it soon, as I talk about in this suggestion, I is more than welcome to have more high-level layer(s) in addition to what XNA offer (too much low-level IMHO, look at effects for example).
I think I’ll give it a shot sooner or later by making basic 3D helpers for lights, shadow and material.
It doesn’t have to be a state of the art full DX12 capable code and even DX9 only feature “engine” would be good to have as cute textures and nice models can achieve great results.
It would also help by having at least something that’s work “out of the box” without spending/wasting days to learn thing many have learnt before, using by making some kind of engine, then move on/disappear/die/whatever.
I’ve created a grid library which might be helpful in MonoGame.Extended context, as it helps building grid based games (board game mostly) without having to redo screen coordinates calculation.
You can take a look at the project, very “drafty” for now and without doc at all, but I have made a little Tic Tac Toe example to show how to use it.
It also includes a maze code and a Growing-Tree algorithm implementation (based on Jamie Buck work on maze).
I’ve also started to make my own controls framework, with the goal to make something useful for most of the games and not a full “window manager” like NeoForce Controls library.
Beside that’s I have many game projects I would like to make.
Great. Let me know if you have any trouble getting started with MonoGame.Extended.
MonoGame.Extended doesn’t really do 3D. We are currently focused on making good 2D library. 3D might come in the distant future, possibly as a different library.
Cool. We are always considering new features to the library. Raise an issue on our github issues page and we can talk about it.
My name is Lucas. I’m a student at a university in Canada studying Computer Science / Software Engineering. I’m currently 22 years old, but have been programming since I was 12 years old out of self-interest and self-discipline. I originally learned how to code in Visual Basic 6 from reading and contributing to a open source project called Mirage Source and it derivatives such as Konfuse Engine / Elysium Engine. At one point, around age 15, I attempted a port of Mirage Source from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic.NET with some success but it kinda collapsed and over time I lost my backed up copy of the code. From then I learned C#, found XNA, started university and overall learned a lot about programming, computer science and software engineering in general.
Hello, my Name is Bastian. I have been jumping from language to language hoping to find something that clicked. I started with PHP when I was 11 years old, and has since tried Objective-C, Java, Javascript and recently Visual Basic. Last week I decided to try out C# and finally found the language that made it click in my head, the other languages also makes much more sense, since there are much in common! It might also be because of Visual Basic, that it made sense in my head?
I have searched for a way to implement Tiled tilemaps in MonoGame and found this excellent framework! I am wanting to use it for a Pokemon clone, with monster capture/fighting, rock paper scissor mechanic and all the bells and whistles!
I hope you take kind care of me, and help me where I need it!
Whenever I hear someone tell the story of how they got into programming it always goes one of two ways. Either they started with web technologies and moved towards desktop tech or the other way around. For me it was the other way around
In any case, I’m glad you’ve found your way to C#. It’s a very nice language. There’s definitely some benefits to having a wide exposure to a variety of different languages so I wouldn’t worry too much about it clicking. After a while, you’ll get more comfortable with the idea that a language is just a tool to build something awesome.
Thank-you. We’ve been working hard to make the library better. The Tiled maps feature is definitely one of the more popular ones and has had a lot of improvements. We’ll be doing another release of the library at some point but if you want to take advantage of the latest changes I recommend building from source with MonoGame 3.5.
Last but not least, welcome to the community I’m looking forward to seeing some screenshots of your Pokemon clone posted here on the forums!
Hi - I’ve not been working long with MonoGame - approx. a week or so. My game (which I started in Jan) was based on SDL 2.0 but written in C#. Having ported the basics so that it now runs, I was delighted to come across MonoGame.Extended as I was about to embark on porting my event-based InputHandler from SDL only to find you’ve written one already - saved me a job! In addition, as my game uses Tiled, I was thinking about a custom ContentHandler for TMX files only to find you’ve already written one - another job saved!
One question though, my current C# Tiled classes are based on Tiled 0.15.1 which I need for Hex TMX maps. What version does MonoGame.Extended support?
Welcome to the community. We created MonoGame.Extended for exactly that reason, to save people from having to do everything themselves. I’m glad it’s serving it’s purpose
Currently only Orthogonal and Isometric maps are supported. However, I don’t think it would be a huge job to add Hex to the current code. If you’re interested in adding this functionality it would be really appreciated.
MonoGame.Extended is fairly easy to build from source. I’d be more than happy to help you get up and running. I’ve raise a new issue on github so we can discuss it further.
I may well do that - I already have code that loads and renders the hex map using MonoGame and it would be helpful to be able to use the content pipeline for my maps. Currently I don’t support “pointy-top” hexes and I haven’t ported the polygon rendering for the hex grid yet but it’s functional at least.
One reason I switched from SDL to MonoGame because it was becoming clear I was going to need to produce my own GUI library (or uplift a FOSS one) and I’m hoping to mix WFP/MonoGame to do the UI elements - menus, dialogs, toolbars etc. Microsoft buying Xamarin was probably the clincher.
One thing to note - Tiled treats “staggered” differently from “hex” orientation…
You can get MonoGame working with WPF to make tools, level editors and stuff like that. Here’s a video of one I did a while back.
Using WPF inside your game window on the other hand is quite a different story. The empty keys guys are doing something along those lines.
Personally I don’t feel like WPF is the right technology for game UI’s. In MonoGame.Extended we are working on something similar to the one found in LibGDX using scene graphs as the base. This makes it easier to create UI’s out of sprites and animations.
Microsoft buying Xamarin certainly feels like a good thing. My theory is that they’ll roll Xamarin tech into Visual Studio which should make things less expensive to get on platforms like Android and iOS. However, I think this is still a while away before it hits the market.
Yep. I’m aware of that. The code above was written before “hex” orientation was even a thing.
Seems legit
I prefer to go by my user-name, but I have been using monogame for some time now. Migrated from xna you might say.
I have no computer related education at all, so I’ve learned everything I know from my desk at home, but that works just fine for my needs, it seems…
So I make games as well as I can and strive for quality, but I am definately a USER-level-person of monogame. I have very little knowledge of how it all comes together, and what makes for a good library etc…
As a home-brew-programmer though, I have noticed the ‘grind’ in setting up tilemaps,and a scrollable viewport, menu navigation, user input, same old same old…
I’m just concerned extensions might be so difficult to use, for some reason. -I mean the methods and tools already in monogame are definately very generic. Thus the “from scratch” feeling for every game, building from the ground up…
Is it not more complicated to use more specialized libraries? -Like you have to comply with a certain set of overloads, or use very particular syntax, or accept return-data in a particular way…? and learning to understand new data types perhaps, if there are many of them…
Is it in fact so easy to use your extension, that learning it doesnt exceed the trouble saved
What level of developer is your target-group for this, I guess would be the QUESTION here…
Well from my POV, I hate re-inventing the wheel - particularly if someone has provided me with a nice round one . I’ve found the stuff in this library immediately usable because, primarily, it already includes stuff I was planning to write myself. There’s always a feeling of “not-invented-here” when using other people’s APIs but for me, the time-saving aspects outweigh that by a considerable margin. A cursory glance has provided me with event-driven input, Viewports and Tiled support built into the content pipeline (these were all on my need-to-do list)
At the end of day, it’s open source and you can modify it to your own tastes. I’m currently adding Hex map support to it for my own requirements - if it’s deemed a robust implementation no doubt it can be merged into the master development branch and offered to anyone else that needs it.
As for the target audience - if you’re using MonoGame, I see no reason why you wouldn’t also use this if it meets some of your needs.
Documentation comes in many forms. We’ve only just started building up a wiki which is a good place to start. However, we also have other forms of documentation. There’s a handful of demos built right into the github repo. The good thing about these is that they are live examples of the latest code and features so they don’t get out of date as easily.
You’re always welcome to ask questions in our various places including these forums, stack overflow, github issues and of course our live gitter chat.
Installation is intended to be as easy as possible. If you’re familiar with how NuGet packages work and you’re running the latest tech (Visual Studio 2015) everything should just work out of the box.
However, given that MonoGame 3.5 has just been released and we’ve recently updated our develop branch to work with it, I recommend building from source until our next official release.
):
I’m looking forward to seeing some screenshots of your Pokemon clone posted here on the forums!
