It appears MonoGame is about as close to XNA 4.0 Refresh as ever and soon they’ll be moving away from XNA and going into MonoGame 5.0
So, I haven’t followed along with the community, but the most obvious choice to MonoGame 5.0++ besides XNA.NETworking is clearly inputs. Some of us are diehard kb/m users, while Nintendo makes bread from input devices, and Valve’s latest is a brick with no kb/m… X_x
Clearly I won’t be doing any work on 5.0, so, instead I’ll offer some advice to those who will be:
Make it able to use more than one mouse. Or whatever input. You should be able to setup four mice, four keyboards, and play a four player split-screen game.
Lesson: Consoles gave you four gamepads and they’ve owned split-screen / same-screen games ever since.
I don’t want to use a bunch of “Pound Sign” IF Statements, Enums, if/switch/whatever, try/catch/finally, what have you coding techniques just so the game doesn’t crash or stop customers from being able to buy/get the game.
Lesson: It’s tedious, easily makes code more difficult to read, and forces you to waste a lot of brain power, overall very time consuming.
It doesn’t emulate something. Last I recall the touch stuff does mouse stuff. I could be wrong, but the touch stuff should be touch stuff and the mouse stuff should be mouse stuff.
Lesson: What if I’m using both the mouse and touch??? Keep everything seperate.
Each input should be in the XNA/MonoGame framework/s Not some random library from who knows where.
Lesson: I bet your game has gamepad inputs, kb/m, maybe even all three? Touch, too? Wow, I’m impressed. Now how many of you added the Wii Remote to your game? If it’s in the framework, it’s in the game!
Nintendo DS had a second screen… Nintendo Wii U… Remote Play/Remote Desktop… I don’t think anyone is going to do anything about this or networking online so this is simply here for in the distant future when somebody gets really, really bored, or really, really wants their own screen.
Lesson: Watch a few YouTube videos, before long they’ll have an entire wall or walls of them… X_x
If for some reason you make keyboards, will you do something with my thumbs? Spacebar and Alt are amazing and all… Seperate ASDFG left hand and SemiColonLKJH right hand, think Switch Joy-Con detachability. Get rid of the arrow keys (Third Hand) and NumberPad(Fourth Hand).
Lesson: Keyboards mainly use your four fingers, while GamePads mainly use your thumbs? There are devices that are similar to this, but they don’t really understand that it’s suppose to be the left AND the right side of the keyboard…