Should i use xna

For a complete list see the Unity webpage, but some things you would have to implement from scratch or find libraries for:. Unity also has a big and organized asset store with many free plugins available, that cover a lot of frequent requirements like AI or procedural content generation.

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Learn more. Asked 9 years, 2 months ago. Active 7 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 6k times. Developers adopting MonoGame are usually people who worked with XNA and found it easier to just remain in this ecosystem. That is the case for Axiom Verge developer Thomas Happ. By the time the next generation of consoles released, XNA had been abandoned, but Monogame came in to take its place, and it had support for PlayStation 4. MonoGame's primary strength is its flexibility.

Being a framework rather than a game engine in itself, it lets developers write their own engines and make something that will fit their needs precisely, giving them great autonomy. It includes a whole asset processing pipeline which you can use unchanged to load textures, sounds, fonts, and so on, but can also be easily modified for custom things, like loading custom level data or localising text and the like.

MonoGame essentially provides an ecosystem to work from without holding your hand the entire time and lets you build your own tools. MonoGame lets me code in C , and gives me some nice basic games framework functions content processing, sprite drawing, music and audio, input , which is all the jumping off point I need. So while the option of using one of the many various and doubtless excellent Unity-based tools for content creation exists, I'd rather use my own, as I've grown quite comfortable maybe even skilled?

Spine is probably a superior tool for 2D animation, but I'm really prolific with my own animation tool dubbed Skellingtons as of late , which I created in and have iterated on for over a decade. While you can customise MonoGame so it fits your needs, the framework is particularly recommended for developers of 2D projects. MonoGame is deeply rooted in cross-platform development -- remember how it started as a project to help porting games to mobile? And while it's also intrinsically linked to Windows platforms, it has now evolved way beyond XNA's remit.

But when Sony first approached us to release Mercenary Kings on PS4, we needed a solution for our game to work on that system. We had to turn to MonoGame to gain the multi-platform support we needed. MonoGame doesn't just provide that multi-platform support -- it's also quite good at it, Flying Oak Games founder Thomas Altenburger continues.

The sponsors of the framework -- SickHead Games for instance -- are also very active in making MonoGame compliant with any new platform arising, which makes it a very relevant choice of open source tech. As Altenburger just touched upon, MonoGame is open source, adding even more flexibility to an already extremely versatile engine.

It "provides a fine grain of control over what is computed," he says. Happ adds: "Because all of the code is open source, if it doesn't do something you want, you can just change it. It isn't locked behind some corporation so there's no danger that it will disappear the way XNA did. Framework or Microsoft. These namespaces are actually a total rewrite of the original XNA libraries and are named the same for consistency purposes.

After the Game class constructor, you'll see a collection of methods that serve as your entry points into the game loop. Before digging into those, a brief explanation of the game loop is in order. A frame is a single pass through the game loop Figure 3 , consisting of one call each to the Update and Draw methods more on these shortly.

This means that the Update and Draw methods of your game loop are being called around times per second, depending on platform. Of course, it's also possible for your game to run slower if you have a lot of intense calculations in your Update method, or you're trying to put too many things on the screen at once in your Draw method.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to increase the frame rate beyond the target within MonoGame. It's a known fact that the more stuff you have on-screen in your game, the slower it will get. So how do you get around this? One way to improve your frame rate, if your game requires a large number of things to be drawn on-screen at once, is to divide them up into two groups and draw each group every other frame.

For example: drawing items A, C, E, G on the even frames and B, D, F, H on the odd frames greatly reduces the load per frame, and at 60 frames per second, your players won't be able to tell. Before jumping in and modifying the project, there are a couple terms that were introduced above that could use some further explanation.

GameComponent: Located in the Microsoft. Framework namespace, the GameComponent class allows you to divide up your code into relevant modules and keep them from cluttering up the main Game class file. A game component must be registered with your game by adding it to the Game. Components collection. Doing this allows the Update and Initialize methods of the component to be called by the corresponding method of the Game class. DrawableGameComponent: Also located in the Microsoft.

Framework namespace, the DrawableGameComponent class works just like the GameComponent class, with the addition of support for the Draw method. Although using the GameComponent and DrawableGameComponent classes can provide some organizational and efficiency benefits for your code, they're not required when making a game.

Custom classes work just as well, although you lose some of the built-in plumbing that you get with the components. It's really about personal preference at this point, as there is no right or wrong approach. Since you already have an active game project, it's time to add some code to it. As such, this is the perfect time to introduce you to another class: the SpriteFont.

It's pretty easy to put an image of some static text on the screen and I'll handle drawing images shortly , but if you want to draw text on your screen programmatically, you need a SpriteFont. A SpriteFont is composed of two files.

The second file is a single graphic image containing each character of a font, rendered at the size you specified in the XML file. The image is loaded by MonoGame in the LoadContent method and then sliced up into individual two-dimensional images known as sprites , which can then be used to display text on screen via the DrawString method of the SpriteBatch object.

Unfortunately, because this isn't XNA and the content pipeline in MonoGame is still in development, there are a few manual steps you'll need to perform in order to create and add any SpriteFonts to your game. Editor's note: Codeplex and its archive has been shut down as of July 21, Search GitHub instead. There's no executable release available, so you need to open and build the source code. It's a Visual Studio project, but it will build in later versions of Visual Studio without any problems.

Once you've built the content compiler, you'll need to feed it a SpriteFont definition file, which looks like the following XML snippet:. You can use the text editor of your choice to create this file, but make sure to give it a.

It's a good idea to use the name and size of the font i. Once you compile the SpriteFont , you'll have an. XNB file. You add this to your MonoGame project in the Content folder. Follow these steps for the best results:. Inside the Game1. Add the following block of code just before the call to base. Draw gameTime :. You'll also pass in the text string you want to draw, a Vector2D location expressed as X,Y coordinates , and the color of the text. Feel free to experiment with different screen coordinates and colors.

That's all you need to do to add text onscreen in your game. Hit F5 to run and you'll see a CornflowerBlue screen with your text at the location you specified, as in Figure 5. In order to move your text around, you'll create some variables to store the screen position of the text and the speed at which you wish to move it.

Start by adding these lines at the class level, just under your SpriteFont declaration, since they will be used by the Update and Draw methods, and declaring them inside those methods would just cause the value to reset.

Notice the Vector2. Zero in the snippet above? That's a shorthand way of instantiating with a value of 0, 0. Next, you'll take the current position and add the speed multiplied by the game timer.

This gives you a nice, smooth animation based on a consistent timer, rather than something more unpredictable like raw CPU speed. Put this code right after the previous two lines. With those boundaries in place, you can now add the code to adjust the direction and speed of the text as it moves around the screen.

Whenever your text position exceeds either the X or Y boundaries, your speed is flipped between positive and negative and your position is adjusted accordingly. The last step is to look in the Draw method and change your DrawString method to use your new textXY variable, instead of the hardcoded 0,0 values, like so:. With that, you're done with this set of changes, and your Game class should look like Listing 1. Hit F5 and give it a run.

Adding a 2D sprite image to your game is as simple as right-clicking the Content folder in your Solution Explorer and picking Add Existing Item. Browse to the image you wish to use. For best results, grab a. PNG file with a transparent background, such as the soccerball. After you add the image to your solution this article assumes that you'll be using the soccer ball image , add the following line of code at the class level, where you defined the SpriteFont :.

A Texture2D type is used to store a two-dimensional graphic also known as a Sprite which you will pass to the Draw method of your SpriteBatch object. Now that you have a variable to hold it, load the image by adding the following line in your LoadContent method:. This loads the image into your GPU and reloads it in the event of a device reset so it will be ready for use by your game. At this point, with the image loaded into your soccer ball variable, you're one line of code away from seeing it onscreen.

Add the following line to the Draw method, inside the spriteBatch block:. Meme Match Veggie Snake Skirmish. This topic is closed to new replies. Nagle So what's going on with the "Metaverse"? GDNet Lounge. CelticSir Ai hunting targets in 3D space Artificial Intelligence. Neural networks from beggining Artificial Intelligence. GeneralJist Am I a producer? Games Career Development. TimCS 0.

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