MonoGame Takes Tentative Steps into 3D : MonoGame 2.1 Announced

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Hey everyone

Welcome to another release of MonoGame 2.1.  We have been hard at work trying to make MonoGame bigger and better.  We have some new functionality which includes our first steps to 3D support as well as bug fixes, optimizations and more XNA 4.0 support.

We have to give a big thank you to all the people that provided feedback, bug fixes and especially the people that wrote samples that allowed us to focus on specific bugs.

Dominique Louis does not have his name in the official press releases but he has been the coordinator of the project and doing one hell of job keeping us all working to our common goal.  Please give him a shout at https://twitter.com/#!/SoftSavage

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MonoGame Goes Multi-platform: MonoGame 2.0 Announced

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Hello everyone

I am pleased to be the one, on behalf of the MonoGame team, to announce to the world that MonoGame 2.0 has been released today. Here is the official release announcement below:

MonoGame is an open source implementation of the XNA APIs that allows developers to build 2D games that run on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code base, or reusing existing XNA code that runs on Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7.

MonoGame 2.0 release is a major evolution of the platform. We went from only supporting the iPhone to becoming a cross-platform stack that now also runs on Android, Mac, Linux and Windows. To help developers get started, more than twenty individual samples and more than five complete starter kits are shipped with this release.

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MonoGame goes Linux!

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MonoGame is now available on Linux.  A big thanks goes out to Andre for all his efforts to make the port available.

Now you no longer have to learn XNA (2D only for now) programming on Windows.  Instead you can use your favorite operating system.

MonoGame is now available on 5 different platforms: Mac OSX, iPhone, Android, Linux and  MonoGame even offers a version for Windows as well.

Check out the samples that are available: Linux Samples

MonoGame and MonoGame-Live

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Well we have made more progress on the Networking package and an update is in order. 

Multiplayer now works for Mac, Windows (MonoGame only), iOS and Android via local networking and we have successfully connected to peers using these different operating systems.  You can also test this out yourselves using the Peer2Peer sample code found in the git repository.

Now for the exciting part.  Myself and technomage have been working on getting multiplayer working over the internet.  Right now we are calling it MonoGame-Live (subject to change in the future) and it consists of an introduction Master/Server component that also supports NAT-Punch through using the Lidgren Network library.  Last night we have successfully connected multiple peers using the server from multiple operating systems.  There are still some glitches to workout but progress has been made.

The source is already in the git master and can be found here: Peer2PeerMasterServer

Your input would be greatly appreciated if you are interested in maybe hosting your own gaming server. 

You can join us on the MonoGame irc or the MonoGame discussion list.

MonoGame and the Framework.Net package for multi-player games

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Hello everyone.  Sorry for no updates lately but have been busy with life challenges and in my spare time a little hacking on MonoGame for the Mac OSX.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we got the Framework.Net package usable in MonoGame and there are two samples out there.  We implemented the package using the Lidgren Network library.  There are still a few problems but we now have the Peer 2 Peer sample from Microsoft up and running across local lan networks.

What this means for you as game developers is that you can write your multi-player games on other platforms using the same code as you write now with XNA.

One caveat is Profiles.  I still have not figured out how to implement this yet.  Right now there is a hard coded Profile and no way to sign-in via the Guide but it is coming.  If any of you have any ideas to discuss on this please let us know.

You will still use SystemLink in your code for connection type but because the Window’s XNA implementation uses their own proprietary protocol this means that we still can not interact with a Window’s game.  That is unfortunate but unless they are willing to share their networking protocol we are stuck with connecting with all the other systems except for them. 

There is work being done on building the same functionality into the iOS and Android ports and should be available soon.  So that means you will be able to have multi-player games connecting from all the technologies that MonoGame supports.

We are looking for testers as well as people who are experienced with the networking side of things to help us implement the rest.  Since I only have one windows machine, running under parallels I can not test how a real XNA program interacts with SystemLink network due to the one user profile signed in restriction.

One thing in particular is the interaction when the Gamer is ready, for an example take a look at the NetworkStateManagement sample.  Not really sure how to implement that without being able to see a real session in action.  So if you have any ideas of how it should work give us a shout.

MonoGame is using MonoMacGameView

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As the title says MonoGame is using MonoMac’s MonoMacGameView to drive their cross platform XNA gaming development platform.

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MonoMacGameView now part of MonoMac

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Hello everyone.  Have not been updating lately but hopefully will catch up this weekend with a lot of content.

We now have a MonoMacGameView as part of the add-in which you can find as part of the MonoMac.OpenGL namespace.  You will have to compile from source to as it did not make it into the MonoMac 1.0 add-in.

I also wrote a sample using the MonoMacGameView called MonoMacGameWindow which you can find as part of the samples here.

Hope you find it useful and I can’t wait to see what everyone does with it.  If there are any questions on how it is used please let me know here or you can find me on the monomac irc list.

OpenGL FullScreen Sample

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There is now a new sample in the MonoMac samples directory.

With this sample comes a lot of new support and fixes for drawing and switching to Fullscreen and Window.  One of the main enhancements is the support for CVDisplayLink to help in animating your OpenGL graphics.

You can access the new sample by obtaining the MonoMac source from github or downloading the supplied sample file here GLFullScreen.

 

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OpenGL, GLU and the way forward

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I just started a thread on the MonoMac forum list about the inclusion of GLU in MonoMac.

If you are an OpenGL guru on Apple could you please weigh in with your thoughts either on the forum mailing list or here with your comments.

Here is the thread I started labeled [MonoMac] OpenGL, GLU and way forward.

Hello everyone

Geoff and I were discussing the use of GLU on the monomac irc this
morning and we both came to a stand still on the way forward.

These are some of the issues that came up.

#1 – Does it work in lion? (this can not be discussed because of NDA)
#2 – Does it work _accelerated_ in lion? (this can not be discussed
because of NDA)
#3 – Is it deprecated in lion (this can not be discussed because of NDA)
#4 – Can we just update the samples to work in 10.6 and not worry about
this?
#5 – Go ahead and include a GLU binding but mark it as [Obsolete] but
still usable.
#6 – All the reading I have done says most of Glu can be replaced with
OpenGL 3.x. Apple is still on 2.1 or something like that so that makes
it a little harder to replace some of the functionality.

I am not an OpenGL person at all and as a matter of fact this is my
first introduction to it nor is Geoff an OpenGL-ist so we are going to
have to rely on everyone’s opinion here.

Just as an exercise I went out to good ‘ole google and tried searching
for some replacements for Glu in the GLFullScreen example.

Glu.Perspective:
I found a replacement for Perspective and that is Frustrum. Ok that was
fine and even tested that out with success.

Sphere drawing with gluSphere and Quadratic
The only thing I found were discussions that said use gluSphere or write
your own.

Should it be necessary to have everyone write their own when it already
exists and is riddled throughout sample after sample including OpenGL
site samples?

All you OpenGL people please weight in and give your thoughts to this
subject so that we can continue in the most direct and proficient way
that will benefit you.

Kenneth

MonoMac and OpenGL

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OpenGL has landed into the MonoMac code base as of last night.

Here is the blurb from the MonoMac team explaining what was done to accomplish this.

MonoMac provides an API compatible interface to the OpenTK GL.* functions. This is accomplished by forking a few files from OpenTK and removing their delegate / context infrastructure and just doing direct pinvokes to OpenGL.framework.

Unsupported extensions and methods have been commented out to avoid runtime exceptions.

With the exception of OpenTK/Graphics/OpenGL/* the rest of the files are a direct copy from OpenTK with the namespaces changed.

This was forked from OpenTK r3066, by Kenneth Pouncey.

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