State of skeleton animation in monogame

Graphics
1

Hi

I’m a long-time developer who’s dabbled in game development several times for the last 15 years. I want to get back into it and am keen on a code-first approach, as one of my main motivations is to keep coding as I’ve moved into the cloud architect / tech lead role where I don’t get to touch much code myself anymore professionally…

I am a lousy artist and would like to focus on coding, hence I hope to pick up animations and graphic assets from the various providers out there.

The game will be top-down low-poly 3D - similar to XCom, Crown of Solasta etc. And hence I would like to use skeleton animations to avoid having to mess too much about with getting different enemies to do various actions.

Searching for Monogame and 3d animations most seem to be very old (2017ish) responses and then MonoSkelly which uses it’s own format (so hard to import from a generic asset) and seems fairly basic (nothing wrong with that. It’s free and open source).

But I can see a few 3d games on the list of games that’s been made with monogame, and which I assume must have skeletons.

Is MonoSkelly still the only/best way of doing 3d skeleton animations?
Or am I completely off the bus, and should be looking at a different/better/modern way of doing animations than skeletons?

Best Regards Dan

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It’s great to see your enthusiasm for getting back into game development with a code-first approach. While MonoSkelly is an option for handling 3D skeleton animations in MonoGame, there are alternative and more modern solutions you might want to consider.

  1. MonoGame.Extended:
  • This is an extension library for MonoGame that includes various utilities, and it supports 3D features. It might not provide a full-fledged skeletal animation system out of the box, but it can be a good starting point for building upon.
  1. AssimpNet:
  • The Assimp library (Open Asset Import Library) is a powerful tool for importing various 3D model formats. The AssimpNet wrapper allows you to use Assimp with C#. You can use this to load skeletal animations along with the 3D models in your MonoGame project.
  1. Stride (formerly Xenko):
  • If you’re open to exploring alternatives, Stride is a modern open-source game engine that supports C#. It comes with robust 3D capabilities, including a skeletal animation system. It might provide a more comprehensive solution for your 3D game development needs.
  1. Blender Exporters:
  • Consider using Blender for creating your 3D models and animations. Blender has robust support for skeletal animations, and there are exporters available that can convert Blender animations into formats compatible with MonoGame.