XNA is dead. Long live XNA!

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So, as many of y'all have heard, Microsoft has killed off XNA and every game written in the framework is doomed.

Except that isn't the whole story.

If you don't know, XNA is a game development framework made by Microsoft to assist developers in quickly creating cross platform games. The name stands for: XNA'due south Not Acronymed. Writing a game in XNA enables information technology to run on Windows, XBOX, Windows Phone, and the [at present dead] Zune Hard disk drive. The only existent changes that need to be made are the controls and UI (unlike screen sizes). Even if y'all've never heard of XNA, chances are that you've played a game fabricated in it if you've ever used a Windows Phone. One such game is ARMED! - which now has a Windows eight version made in MonoGame. XNA was loved by a lot of people, and gained popularity considering it was an easy entry bespeak into second and 3D game development, and information technology was a good way to reuse code beyond platforms.

Enter: Windows "m-word" apps.

With the launch of Windows 8 and RT Microsoft has made a major shift to account for modern devices that have gunkhole-loads of sensors, and a variety of different input mediums. Try using Photoshop – or whatever traditional Windows application – with a touch screen and yous volition see exactly why Microsoft has made this tectonic shift. Forth with making apps more bear on-friendly, these new apps will run on both traditional x86 (Intel CPU's for example) and mobile ARM chips. Microsoft has also made all languages equal, and so whether you are writing your app in HTML/CSS/JS, XAML/C#, or even C++/XAML, you will exist targeting the aforementioned WinRT API'southward.

Here is a visual representation of the modern Windows platform equally it stands today:

Windows development stack

Something that bloggers, media, and the internet at big have chastised Microsoft for is the fact that information technology is not possible to write XNA games anymore. This is 100% right. However what many people forget is that XNA is still fully possible on Windows 8 as a desktop application. Yep, that won't console many people, but regardless, support hasn't magically vanished.

Secondly, and this is the most important point of this article: Information technology is still possible to make an XNA game or port your existing XNA game to a Windows Metro app. That game will run on both x86 and ARM devices. Microsoft has left us in the lurch – and somewhere deep deep down, I am sure they have a skilful reason – but all promise is non lost.

Enter: MonoGame.

Here'south a description of MonoGame from their website:

MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Our goal is to allow XNA developers on Xbox 360, Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS, Android, Mac Bone X, Linux and Windows 8 Metro. PlayStation Mobile development is currently in progress.

At a very high-level, what this wonderful agglomeration of people is doing is method-by-method recreating the XNA framework with compatibility for the aforementioned platforms. Then they create an implementation of each affair that XNA does in each platform. To avoid legal issues, no code has been disassembled from Microsoft's binaries.

Equally a developer with a bunch of Windows Phone apps written in XNA, this is quite a relief. I've been playing with MonoGame over the past few weeks and it really is as good equally it sounds. I timed myself getting Matchy to build and run and information technology took under 15 minutes. Of course, after getting it to run I withal had to alter a lot of the UI because of the larger display and varying resolutions. Another game I ported was Relaxify. One time over again, an nigh trouble-free feel in terms of porting. I did of course beefiness information technology upwards a lot for all these fancy new devices.

It is at this indicate, dear readers, that this stops beingness your boilerplate Windows Phone Key commodity. If you are non a developer, y'all may want to skip the rest and head straight down to the comments.

So how do y'all, the frustrated XNA developer, apply this? Easy:

The installer for MonoGame 3.0 Beta has simply been released and you can catch information technology from here: https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=monogame. If y'all are reading this at some betoken in the future, rather go to the MonoGame Codeplex site to get the latest version. If yous want to proceed upward to appointment with the changes (and you lot probably should), and so yous tin also clone the repository here.
Install it.

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In one case installed you can open up Visual Studio 2022 and the new templates volition be waiting for you.

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Once loaded the project will be pretty much every bit you lot expect, with a Game.cs file and a bunch of others. One notable feature is the XAML integration. So along with XNA rendering you can use standard XAML controls.

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At present something that seems to trip a lot of people upwardly, and is possibly the only large difference betwixt developing for standard XNA and MonoGame is content processing. Traditionally, along with your game projection there was a Content project where you added sounds, models, textures, etc. Upon edifice those assets were compiled into XNA'due south native .xnb format and so read through the ContentProcessor for use in the game. And all that was handled by Visual Studio 2022. Fast forward to today; Visual Studio 2022 has dropped this feature because it was a office of XNA.

The workaround is to have a separate content project:

Afterwards installing the XNA 4.0 SDK create a new Windows Game (iv.0).
Add any assets to the content project and build the solution.
Copy the resulting .xnb file/south from the bin to a new binder Content in bin\Debug\AppX\ of the MonoGame project.
Now just load content like you ever have.
Rejoice, for XNA lives!

As mentioned earlier, XNA is a really like shooting fish in a barrel way to get into game design. Four lines of lawmaking after setting upward MonoGame and the content project as explained higher up, we have a rotating 3D model imported from 3ds Max.

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Although in that location is no congenital in support for XNA in Visual Studio 2022, i crawly feature is an FBX model viewer. FBX is an Autodesk 3D model format which includes support for a agglomeration of handy things like embedded animations and textures. This is the model format of pick for using with XNA. Installing VS2012 makes it the default application for FBX files, and the viewer is a really welcome addition.

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So at that place you take it folks, XNA is alive and well, albeit unofficially. Something to keep in mind is that long-term you lot may want to venture out into C++ or Unity.

What do you retrieve of Microsoft'due south decision, and how has it effected your development? Sound off in the comments below!

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