Why is xna dead

Anyone could develop for Windows and distribute their game however they liked, but if you wanted to develop for the Xbox , you needed to be part of a game studio and have a publishing deal with Microsoft.

Indie Games didn't exist on any next-gen consoles yet. Ever notice how every generation of console refers to itself as "next gen? The first version of XNA allowed you to make games with an unheard of low-cost Creators Club membership using C , and was widely credited with not only making the game development process substantially easier, but also opening the floodgates for Indie Game developers around the world.

The first version of XNA also introduced an extensible Content Pipeline that compiled a variety of image and audio formats, as well as 3D models and even XML data, to a native. XNB format at build time. Because the XNA Content Pipeline is extensible, support for converting new content types can easily be added. Unfortunately, at this time, MonoGame doesn't have its own content pipeline it's in development , but there are multiple workarounds available.

These workarounds are addressed in the first sample project later in this article. Version 2. With the 3. A point-release shipped a few months later that included API changes to add support for video playback, a better audio API, and more Xbox Live feature support, including Avatars. This project was renamed MonoGame with the 2.

The final major release of XNA, version 4, came out in and offered support for the newly released Windows Phone 7. A refresh was issued the next year, which added support for Windows Phone 7. By the release of Windows 8, XNA was no longer being actively developed and the product team had been dissolved. Shortly after, Microsoft announced that there would be no new versions of XNA after 4.

In , MonoGame 3. The most recent release of MonoGame, version 3. XNA allowed developers to use a shared codebase across multiple Microsoft platforms.

MonoDevelop carries that same goal of a shared codebase, but extends the reach into much larger assortment of platforms, including the latest generation of Microsoft operating systems, as seen in Table 1.

In the next section, you will learn exactly what you need to download to get started developing multi-platform games for MonoGame. In this section, you'll learn what you need to download to set up your development environment for using MonoGame on the supported platforms.

As mentioned before, there are a number of other platforms you can target when developing a game with MonoGame:. Once you have everything installed and configured, you're ready to create your first MonoGame project. This rest of this article focuses on the MonoGame Windows Project template, but the great thing about MonoGame and the Mono Framework is that virtually all of the same concepts will be applicable, regardless of platform. Give it a name like DemoGame and click the OK button.

Once your project has been created, take a look in the Solution Explorer window Figure 2 and find the following items:. You've created your first MonoGame project, so go ahead and give it a run by pressing the F5 key. Within a couple of seconds, you should be staring at a lovely cornflower blue screen.

It's not much to look at right now, but it's a good sign that all the bits and pieces are properly installed. If you hit the Escape key, the program will terminate and bring you back to Visual Studio. If you happen to have an Xbox or Xbox One controller plugged into your development computer, you can also hit the Back button to exit the game.

You might also get an error. Depending on what else you have installed, there's a small chance that you may run into an error the first time you try to run your code. People who have worked with XNA before should already have this file, as well as people who play a lot of games, but it was accidentally left out of the 3.

If you find yourself in this situation, don't panic, just download and run DXWebSetup. This will make sure that all of the DirectX files and drivers are up to date, and will add any missing files. Once you have the game project running, it's time to take a look at the various parts that are in play. Open the Game1. 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.

Microsoft needs to get its act together regarding the future of DirectX and Windows as a platform for development and running games. MonoGame is a collection of open source packages that run on.

NET or Mono. The game studio is needed to compile content into the. But for how long? In XNA, you can draw a sprite on the screen with just a few lines of code for each frame. It overrides the virtual method Game. Begin SpriteSortMode. BackToFront, BlendState.

AlphaBlend ; spriteBatch. Draw myTexture, spritePosition, Color. White ; spriteBatch. End ;. Gamasutra to Game Developer link redirects are currently experiencing issues. We're working to restore them ASAP! News It's official: XNA is dead Microsoft has confirmed that it does not plan to release future versions of the XNA development toolset, although thanks to the open source MonoGame, developers won't be left out in the cold.

Microsoft has confirmed that it does not plan to release future versions of the XNA development toolset. The company has now further explained the situation to Polygon, assuring developers that DirectX development will continue, but stating that XNA has received its last update. However, there are no plans for future versions of the XNA product. I remember being quite worried at competing with all of Microsoft's might remember, they really mattered back then.

However they never really loved their own platform, and this closure isn't really a surprise if you followed them closely like I did " "Microsoft have essentially turned their backs on 10, developers on one of the most promising gaming APIs available today," said Dominique Louis of MonoGame, the Open Source implementation of the XNA Framework. Essentially, with no movement on XNA for more than a year and the key Microsoft developers moving on to other projects, it was wishful thinking to expect anything but this.

One of these -- Skulls of the Shogun -- was even published by Microsoft, which has given its blessing.