MonoGame 3.8 Released

MonoGame, the spiritual successor to Microsoft’s XNA game framework, just released MonoGame 3.8 after more than a year in development. Major new features of MonoGame including .NET core support, NuGet installation and more. Details of the release from the MonoGame What’s New post:

We now support .NET Core in addition to .NET 4.5 target frameworks. This brings us up to date with the latest improvements in the .NET ecosystem and allow for exciting new features like .NET Core Runtime and much easier distribution of your games for Windows, macOS and Linux.

With this release MonoGame has moved away from traditional installers and has opted for using NuGet for all distribution of assemblies and tools. This also includes the new Visual Studio templates which are a VS extension.

We now have templates for both Windows and macOS versions of Visual Studio 2019 as well as templates for the .NET Core CLI tools.

Protobuild served us well in helping avoid manual synchronization of all our different platform projects. With the new SDK-style projects supported in .NET Core, VS2017, and VS2019 we can now easily maintain the projects and solutions in the repo.

The MonoGame.Framework.Portable and MonoGame.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Portable are no longer supported. This is mainly because Microsoft changed the assembly replacement rules needed to make them work in the new project system. We now recommend using MonoGame.Framework.DesktopGL and MonoGame.Framework.Content.Pipeline and disable the PrivateAssets to avoid copying any dependent assemblies.

An example on how to set it up can be found in the templates with “MonoGame NetStandard Library” and “MonoGame Pipeline Extension” templates respectively.

We’ve added a script and made fixes so that MGFXC can run on Mac and Linux under Wine. For more information checkout the setting up the development environment for macOS and Ubuntu

This is a top level summary of the major changes in MonoGame 3.8, but for complete details be sure to check out the change log or for existing developers check out the migration guide. If you are new to XNA/MonoGame and are looking to learn more be sure to check out our complete tutorial series available here. Learn more about the 3.8 release in the video below.

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