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MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games

70 pointsby azhenleytoday at 2:16 AM38 commentsview on HN

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Nitiontoday at 7:50 AM

If Microsoft hadn't killed XNA (what MonoGame is based on) a decade ago, they could be packaging it with Copilot right now as the ideal code-first AI-assisted game engine. Easy to use, easy to test, no visual editor where AI will struggle like with Unity/Unreal/Godot.

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rimmontrieutoday at 8:49 AM

Java equivalent: https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx

mwkaufmatoday at 4:18 AM

For a more actively maintained XNA implementation, also worth looking at Ethan Lee's FNA: https://fna-xna.github.io/

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Bairfhionntoday at 8:42 AM

This is a weird coincidence.

Yesterday I looked into Monogame, FNA and Raylib. Just always surprises me how reading something somewhere makes people do similar things.

4pkjaitoday at 5:00 AM

I used MonoGame to port my XNA games to other platforms.

It’s really good, also it was very cool as a junior developer to see the code for the methods I used.

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makotech221today at 7:21 AM

Also check out Stride3d https://github.com/stride3d/stride, which is a more full featured engine built on (i believe) Monogame. Runs on .net 10

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oAlbetoday at 5:11 AM

If you are wondering about the capabilities, Stardew Valley was made in MonoGame.

I wonder how it compares, if at all, with Godot nowadays.

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zerrtoday at 8:16 AM

What would be a direct equivalent in C++?

pjmlptoday at 6:30 AM

It is kind of nice for indie games, unfortunately it is kind of stuck in what XNA 4.0 had as API surface.

And it used to be there was still some dependency on old XNA plugins for assets pipeline on Visual Studio.

No idea where this stands now.

However it was yet another example of community standing up for the anti-.NET sentiment at Windows/XBox teams, when the persons involved left XBox team, XNA was quickly replaced by DirectX TK.

"The billion dollar decision that launched XNA"

https://youtu.be/wJY8RhPHmUQ?is=jwDBVae8AhBH-ANB

https://walbourn.github.io/directxtk/

sodafountantoday at 6:19 AM

I used Monogame back when it was a proprietary framework called XNA developed at Microsoft.

You used to be able to use XNA to build Indie games for the Xbox 360, hard to believe, but this is going on 15 years ago at this point.

I built two indie games and made a couple of hundred bucks back when I was in High School. It's actually what got me into programming in the first place.

I'm happy to see that XNA became Monogame, it's one of the best frameworks I've ever used for gamedev.

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