Bastion’s Open Source Branch for MonoGame | Hacker News Reader

Bastion’s Open Source Branch for MonoGame

supergiantgames.com

Glad to see this post! As lead developer on the initial port of Bastion to MonoGame, I was very interested in that work being open-sourced eventually. The game industry in general doesn't have a very good understanding of open source concepts in general, and it's rare and exciting to see contributions, large or small. Since I was on the project, the Supergiant team has brought in a bunch more platforms and cleaned everything up, so it's even better than the original plan of just throwing everything over the wall.

They actually made the source code available a month or so ago, this post is just the first time they've announced it on their blog. I hope people in the MonoGame community have been integrating these changes back into the trunk since then! The changes to make better use of VBOs and avoid needless texture data copying will help many games run faster.

In general I've been an advocate of the MonoGame project; it fits a need that a lot of indie developers have, and it's built up a ton of momentum over the past year. I hope this leads to a lot more open-source game development tools.

I found out via some prodding on Twitter that Supergiant is looking at making a pull request to the main project. I hope they do - their changes (from my limited look at it today) look fantastic overall, but - and, mind, not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth at all - it's often pretty difficult to integrate someone else's large-scale changes without cooperation on their end.

Because of the short timeframe of the project we did all sorts of horrible things (like develop everything in the Windows platform code rather than split off a new NaCl platform directory). Getting it to the point of integrating cleanly means that someone has done a lot of tedious thankless work.

I imagine it's still in their interests to be merged with the main trunk. Maintaining one's own separate branch isn't fun.

There has been a lot of interest from the Linux community on MonoGame since the last Humble Bundle, this is great they are sharing their port. I wrote up a blog entry on how to use MonoGame in Ubuntu, and you could use those instructions here also - http://www.sharms.org/blog/2012/06/getting-started-with-mono...

This is fantastic news; we've just recently been porting Wyv and Keep to mono, and studying SuperGiant's upgrades will definitely help!

What is the deal with mobile 3d support in MonoGame? Does that only exists in dev branches?

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