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.