The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Good framework for developing games in C#
Mr Ray
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
I'm recently unemployed, hopefully soon to be employed again, but have reached the stage where I feel like I need some kind of programming task to keep my skills sharp. And what better way to do that than to develop a silly little indie game? I've experimented with XNA in the past, but it looks like the most recent version of the framework was released in 2010, and its no longer being supported. I'd like something a little more up-to-date. The game I'm planning to develop would only really need to consist of 2D sprites, so something like Unity would be overkill. I also don't want to reinvent the wheel and make my own "engine" if there's something better out there more suited to the task (like XNA but something still being supported). Given this is going to be seen by pretty much nobody besides myself I could always go ahead with XNA anyway, but I'd like to say I've worked with something a bit more modern. Any suggestions? I'm also open to learning a new language if necessary, but something at least broadly similar to C# / Java would be nice.
Mr Ray on
0
Posts
Axiom/Ogre3D
Tao
JMonkeyEngine (Java)
There's also Unity3D and the Unreal Engine (does c# scripting rather than being used as an engine on this level though).
Pick the ones that feel like a match for what you're looking for.
Personally I'd probably stick with XNA for something simple.
It is... extremely good for someone who is approaching games from a programmers point of view.
MonoGame's biggest weakness is that like XNA, it lacks proper PC GUI support, so if you are focusing on the PC, expect a gruesome road of hacking out PC UI idioms, or integrating some other major C# or C++ libs to get simple things like "a button" or "a button on top of another button"
I have written literally thousands of lines of code dedicated to basic mouse click interactions. This can get frustrating if all you want is a basic menu driven game.
Despite this, MonoGame is utterly ideal for 2D console/phone games.
If you're a 2D guy and a programming guy I would stay away from Unity unless you have someone who is going to pump out art assets for you.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
so it's a little silly to use only Tao
Things like Ogre really bother me because they just seem so decrepit... in general you should always be wary of something really old that wraps a decade old C++ lib that just wraps an even older C lib... that amount of abstraction can be dangerous
The nice thing about MonoGame/XNA/Tao is it's (mostly) a purely C# solution and obeys many C#/.NET standards, so if you are familiar with that domain it's a snug fit with many modern comforts.
I could recommend Angel-Engine which is based in C++ and has a lot of spiritual similarities to XNA
The advantage to going with a pure C++ engine is when you come up against that hard ass problem that XNA can't solve, you have almost 20 years of accumulated C++ libs to draw on..
so instead of writing menus from scratch, you can just import Qt or whatever... you can technically do that in C#, but the integration is way more annoying
The downside is you have to learn C++
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
https://github.com/MattRix/Futile
Futile basically makes 2D in Unity super simple with a code-based approach similar to how Flash implemented things since a lot of people seem to think Unity is overkill or too much workaround to implement 2D.
The biggest advantage to using Unity is the multi-platform support, and if you're already familiar with XNA, then Futile shouldn't be too difficult to get.
Also, doesn't it lack a content pipeline?
I have projects active made purely on W8/VS2012
It requires you to make a WP8 project to get your pipeline project, and any time you add art assets, you take the build product and dump it in your main project
The MonoGame pipeline is coming. The bleeding edge version already has it, it's just not fully supported yet
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other