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I'm looking for a cross-platform game development framework. MonoGame looks easy to learn and fast to develop, but I see most of the games featured at their page do not work, or have a lot of bugs.

Can anyone explain if MonoGame is reliable for ios/droid professional mobile game development?

poupou
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xus
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  • September 2014 update: I recently installed it and I get a whole horrible list of DLL based errors. Take from that what you want. – user9993 Sep 07 '14 at 16:11

5 Answers5

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MonoGame currently has ( that we know of ) 28 games published on the iOS App Store, and 5 on the Android Market place and also some recently published games on the Mac App Store and Linux markets. If any of these titles are failing, please get in contact with the developers to confirm if the issue is MonoGame related or a bug within their game.

MonoGame is not perfect, but as already mentioned it is being actively developed and improved with everyone's help. 2 Sundays ago we did a presentation at the FOSDEM conference which outlined what we will be working on in the coming year. First off is ES 2.0 support in the MonoGame 2.5 release ( hopefully out in the next 2-3 weeks ). This will add shader support to all of our platforms. Then after that we will be focused on adding 3D and therefore our biggest release MonoGame 3.0.

You can see a video of our FOSDEM presentation here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLWE52mkii0 And a teaser video of how far we are along with 3D support here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEAdC-4gfHI - It is hhe MIX10 3D Reach demo running on MacOS X that we showed publically for the first time at FOSDEM 2012.

If you use twitter, follow our progress @MonoGameTeam. We tend to talk shop on irc.gnome.org or irc.gimp.org on the #MonoGame channel. We also try to answer questions in the monogame.codeplex.com discussion area.

I hope the above information helps.

D.

Dominique
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  • Would you be able to share here what you consider the best mono games? Thks – xus Feb 15 '12 at 18:23
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    Chicken story breaks at the third level, and many others that I tested from the monogsme webpage fail aswell. Even some links t the appstore are broken. It would be necessary to check that list because it can generate wrong ideas about the framework. – xus Feb 15 '12 at 18:23
  • I've not played all the games, but I've found the games by Digital Leprechaun LLC ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/digital-leprechaun-llc/id439942313 ), to be quite polished. Also if you have an iPad 2, look out for our first 3D game Infinite Flight ( http://flyingdevstudio.blogspot.com/p/games.html), a flight sim which is currently in beta and shaping up quite nicely. These guys contributed their changes back to us, and we are busily merging that into our develop3d branch. I hope the above helps. – Dominique Feb 21 '12 at 23:59
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This question was asked a long time ago, but deserves an update.

The MonoGame team has a showcase of popular indie games. At the time of writing that includes:

among others.

At the end of the day theory is interesting, but nothing beats the reality of seeing extremely successful indie games using the platform.

EDIT 27-Jan-2014

As of Jan 2014 Monogame has announced that they will be supporting PS4 but has made no such announcement for the XBox One.

EDIT 9-Sep-2014

Added several additional games. Also check out the #MonoGame hash tag on twitter.

EDIT 1-June-2017 Monogame has supported XBox One since last 2016.

EDIT 20-August-2020 Monogame supports Dot Net Core.

yogihosting
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Robert Anton Reese
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    This also goes to show that MonoGame is becoming more popular and most likely more reliable. As more developers use it the bugs are getting ironed out. – craftworkgames May 22 '13 at 05:24
  • We also recently announced Switch support and previous to that PSVita. Please see here for a more recent list of MG titles and the platforms they are available on - https://twitter.com/MonoGameTeam/status/889878650648133634 – Dominique Jul 25 '17 at 16:03
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Mono products (www.xamarin.com) are getting better and better with each version.

Currently I'm porting a 2d game from Windows Phone (XNA) to iphone and using ExEn (http://andrewrussell.net/exen/) and Monotouch (http://xamarin.com/monotouch) and it works really fine. (3d is unsupported right now)

I've done some test using monogame (http://monogame.codeplex.com) v2 and found some issues that I didnt find them using ExEn. With ExEn (almost) everything works out of the box. ExEn includes an excelent working example for Silverlight, iphone, android, etc. This example was my primary learning source.

Other positive point to ExEn is its develepor: Andrew Rusell (https://twitter.com/#!/_AndrewRussell), is XNA/DirectX MVP (http://andrewrussell.net/2011/10/look-at-me-im-an-mvp/)

What's wrong with ExEn? its developemnt appears to be stopped.

Monogame community and developers appears to be more active. They recently release a new version (v2.1) that I didnt test it. v2.1 includes our first steps to 3D support as well as bug fixes, optimizations and more XNA 4.0 support (http://cocoa-mono.org/archives/452/monogame-takes-tentative-steps-into-3d-monogame-2-1-announced/)

Personally I'll continue my porting using ExEn because everything is working up to now (and I almost finish it :) but for my next project I'll monogame 2.1 a try.

FlavorScape
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Vackup
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    ExEn development hasn't so much stopped as I went overseas for several weeks ;) – Andrew Russell Feb 29 '12 at 01:57
  • As I told you several times Andrew, I'm a big fan of ExEn!! :) – Vackup Apr 17 '12 at 15:17
  • hi Vackup, I'm also trying to port xna game to ios and droid, i've tried exen and it seems quite reliable, but there is a huge drawback, there is no support for any gesture. How did you solve this problem? – becool_max Aug 02 '12 at 15:18
  • You have 2 options: 1) implement gestures by yourself (or copy from Monogame). I copied gesture support from Monogame but it didt work (i didnt dedicate it much time but it's not hard, just follow compiler errors) 2) replace gestures by other function... ExEn recognices screen touchs – Vackup Aug 02 '12 at 22:25
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    It's important to note that ExEn is no longer being actively developed. By contrast, MonoGame is being actively developed and has an active community. This is crucial if long-term support is important to you. I have a game published in the App Store using ExEn, and although I was very happy with ExEn (Andrew did a wonderful job), it seems to have major issues with iOS 6, e.g., stability, improper rendering. In short: ExEn _was_ a solid choice, but as of September 2012, I recommend against using it for a new project. I'm in process of porting my ExEn game to MonoGame. – Michael Sep 24 '12 at 16:19
  • Based on the comments of Michael and Andrew Russel it was unclear to me if ExEn is still under development or not. [Andrew Russel wrote in March 2012 that he has no longer the time to develop ExEn](http://andrewrussell.net/2012/03/the-future-of-exen/). The [last commit to ExEn](http://exen.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets) took place in October 2012 @AndrewRussell I have read that you already tried crowdfunding and that it was not sufficient to keep you going. Based on [this crowdfunding success](http://kck.st/WutiWr) may be it is worth another shot? – surfmuggle May 14 '13 at 23:43
  • Just to be absolutely clear: I am not currently working on ExEn, have not worked on it in the recent past, and will not be working on it in the foreseeable future. I started ExEn when MonoGame was basically nothing - so I'm not going to get back into it now that they seem to be doing pretty well. (I wouldn't say no to crowd-funding other dev tools in the future, though.) – Andrew Russell May 15 '13 at 05:02
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I am just finishing a simultaneous/portable development project. For 4 of my 5 platforms I use Monogame as my render base (my 5th is HTML5 Canvas). You can see my results at http://unseenu.wikispaces.com/AnyGUI.

My experiences are thus:

The Good:

I started with the C#/JSIL version for Canvas since that was the biggest unknown. My first port after that was to OSX and Monogame.

The OSX port went very smoothly. I've already worked with Monogame before so it took me maybe a week to get my render layer ported.

After that it literally took a few hours to get the Windows OGL port running.

It took about 2 days to get the iOS port running. About half of that was dealing with build issues and the iOS tools. The other half was getting touch input working as that was my first mobile platform.

I'm working on Android right now, and its the first place I am seeing what seem to be Monogame portability issues. Clipping seems to be off. Other then that, it was a matter of hours getting it up and again most of that time ws getting the build environment right. Ive needed no code changes. (Though this clipping thing is an pen problem.)

The Bad:

I'm on OSX and the tools can be a bit funky. Biggest issue is that the Monogame support for Xamarin Studio/Monodevelop just doesn't work on the Mac. This is not as big an issue as it sounds though. The templates work all right, what is broken are the library references. So I just downloaded Monogame separately and I change the library References in each project to be those downloaded libraries after I create the project. One I learned to do that, I had few tool problems.

In general, C# handles version control pretty badly. Its very picky about library versions, in part because Microsoft did not want to worry about .NET backwards compatibility.

This shows up in trying to do multi-platform monogame stuff. I've had a lot of grief with that in the past. Even though the monogame API is identical, when you compile code against it that bakes a reference to the particular platform libraries for Monogame into your code. Its not so bad if thats application code, since applications need their own build for each platform anyway, but if you want intermediate libraries it means you need a separate build of each intermediate library for each platform, which is unacceptable.

My solution in this project has been to define my own interface that sits between my game and monogame so I can inject the actual monogame code through dependancy injection t run time. I'll be writing about this eventually on my site in more detail.

The other issue of course is that you need Xamarin Mono for iOS and Android to develop for those platforms and that costs some money.

SO the short answer is this. In general its a good API and the implementations are mostly faithful between platforms. The form it comes in and the tools you need to work with are still a bit rough and can give you some grief. In the end, thats not so different from every other game platform I've ever worked on.

user430788
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Yes... and no.

The core of 2.5.1 is pretty solid but there are still bugs lurking in various places. Most notably for me, TouchScreen is broken on iOS.

The team has pretty much abandoned the 2.5 line so these arent getting fixed. Instead all focus is on 3.0. I just convereted to 3.0 but it comes with some new requirements for assets that are currently giving me grief...

All in all I'd have to call it "Alpha Level" atm.

user430788
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    Just an update. I personally used MonoGame 3.0 to convert my WP7 3D game Polyhegrams over to WinRT/Windows 8 and apart from some minor hiccups it was very smooth. It even managed to place in the top ten of the game category of the Apptivate.ms contest ( http://apptivate.ms/semi-finals/2/games ) There is still some missing functionality and I have seen comments about various problems in iOS and Android but the community is very active and helps you to overcome most difficulties.Another game to look at is called Armed and was developed by one of the main contributors to MonoGame – RobCurr Dec 11 '12 at 20:00
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    I did finish my game and got the assets cooked. Monogame 3 is shaping up to be pretty decent. – user430788 Jan 25 '13 at 23:13
  • I'd just like to say Polyhegrams was awesome, I spent hours playing it. – fallaciousreasoning Aug 18 '16 at 06:03