If you've been following the blog for any length of time, you know MonoGame is an official "Favorite Project." We also know allot of you like to play with it too. But it's felt something like a dead end road, especially for those who would like to write console games.
Well last week we got some great news, that Xbox One will soon get MonoGame support! Yes, those games you write in MonoGame might soon be running on the Xbox One. How cool is that !?
A Letter from Chris Charla: ID@Xbox Updates and GDC
This will be ID@Xbox’s third Game Developers Conference showing off amazing new games from independent developers in the ID@Xbox program. For us, it’s a great time to highlight new games, but also a place to connect with new developers and old friends and listen to their feedback about our program – what people are liking, and where we can do better.
We actually started ID@Xbox by going out on a listening tour that seemed huge at the time (more than 50 developers!), but today, with more than 1,400 studios creating games for Xbox One and Windows 10 via ID@Xbox, 50 seems like a pretty small number!
Our core principles haven’t changed though – make sure we deliver a huge variety of awesome games to players on Xbox One and Windows 10 by making it as easy as possible for independent developers to publish games on our platforms. The developers have certainly held up their end of the bargain! The list of unbelievably good games on Xbox One from independent developers is really too long to list. And we’re still listening, and we’re still working every day to make things better.
I’m excited today to announce a couple new things that grew directly out of developer feedback.
...
MonoGame Support
Microsoft’s XNA programming framework isn’t supported natively on Xbox One, but there’s an open source solution for developers called MonoGame. This news is a little overdue, but we’re stoked that MonoGame support will be coming to Xbox One soon, thanks to Tom Spilman and our friends at Sickhead Games.And we’re really excited to be able to welcome MonoGame with a bang, thanks to a partnership with another developer named Tom – Tom Happ. I met Tom at an indie dev event shortly after we confirmed that XNA was not natively supported on Xbox One, and I remember being super bummed that his game was not going to be able to come to Xbox One straight away. Well, today I’m stoked to be able to say that Tom’s game, Axiom Verge, is going to be one of the first games shipping on Xbox One using MonoGame. And hopefully that’s just the first of many!
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Not really related but the latest version of MonoGame, v3.5, also is just out...
MonoGame 3.5
We are very excited to announce MonoGame 3.5 is now available for download. Thanks to all the hard work from the community this is possibly one of the best releases so far.
- MonoGame 3.5 for VisualStudio
- MonoGame 3.5 for MacOS
- MonoGame 3.5 Pipeline GUI Tool for MacOS stand alone installer
- MonoGame 3.5 for Ubuntu
- MonoGame 3.5 for Linux
- MonoGame 3.5 Source Code On GitHub
- MonoGame 3.5 Assemblies on NuGet
We had tons of fixes and features in this release, but this is just a short summary of the major changes:
- Content Pipeline Integration for Xamarin Studio and MonoDevleop on Mac and Linux.
- Automatic inclusion of XNBs into your final project on Mac and Linux.
- Improved Mac and Linux installers.
- Assemblies are now installed locally on Mac and Linux just like they are on Windows.
- New cross-platform “Desktop” project where same binary and content will work on Windows, Linux and Mac desktops.
- Better Support for Xamarin.Mac and Xam.Mac.
- Apple TV support (requires to be built from source at the moment).
- Various sound system fixes.
- New GraphicsMetrics API.
- Optimizations to SpriteBatch performance and garbage generation.
- Many improvements to the Pipeline tool: added toolbar, new filtered output view, new templates, drag and drop, and more.
- New GamePad support for UWP.
- Mac and Linux now support Vorbis compressed music.
- Major refactor of texture support in content pipeline.
- Added 151 new unit tests.
- Big improvements to FBX and model content processing.
- Various fixes to XML serialization.
- MediaLibrary implementation for Windows platforms.
- Removed PlayStation Mobile platform.
- Added content pipeline extension template project.
- Support for binding multiple vertex buffers in a draw call.
- Fixed deadzone issues in GamePad support.
- OcclusionQuery support for DX platforms.
- Fixed incorrect z depth in SpriteBatch.
- Lots of OpenTK backend fixes.
- Much improved font processing.
- Added new VertexPosition vertex format.
- Better VS project template installation under Windows.
Note that we’re moving to a quarterly release schedule with 3.6 shipping in June. You can look at our milestones on GitHub to see the schedule of releases and our plans for the 3.6 release. ....
Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:
Follow @CH9
Follow @coding4fun
Follow @gduncan411
