XNA for Windows 8 Metro

One of the sad things about the move to the new Windows 8 Metro platform is the way that XNA seems to have been left by the wayside, with no way forward for the platform and no workable alternative from Microsoft. I see this as a bit of an own goal really, just when people like Sony are releasing a suite that makes it easy for C# developers to create and deploy applications, and when Microsoft are looking for a way to get developers on board with the Windows 8 way of doing things, they seem to have pulled the plug on the best way to do this.

However, it is not all bad news. The people at MonoGame are beavering away on a solution that will let you leverage your XNA experience and make games for Windows 8 Metro. Following the instructions in this blog post I managed to get a screen full of Cornflower Blue on my Windows 8 system. The familiar Update and Draw methods are present and correct, along with all the XNA types that you know and love. At the moment getting content (fonts, textures and sounds) into your game is a bit of a faff, in that you have to make a Visual Studio 2010 project and use that to prepare the content for use in your Metro program. Having said that, it does work and, thanks to the dedication of the Mono team it looks like we will have an XNA trajectory on Windows 8 Metro. It is just a shame that it is not coming from Microsoft.

Comments

[Jules]

Absolutely - Way to Go those great guys in the MonoGame community.
I was waiting for the MonoGame 3.0 Release, which includes 3D XNA support for Metro, and I don't really understand the GitHub build process.

But this Blog looks simple enough to try out tonight. Hopefully the MonoGame team will make some level of Content Pipeline available to us simple minded developers.

Its unfortunate that we have to rely upon a small band of expert volunteers to resurect XNA. Microsoft should be ashamed, How do they expect Indie Developers to fill their Windows 8 Store ?

[Bil Simser]

Agreed. I feel that we're taking a step backwards with DirectX support. I was writing wrappers for it back in 1999 to make it easier to program against. Then XNA came along and made my work redundant. Now here we are back in 2012 and we're going back to a complicated interface with all kinds of ways to screw up the basics. Sure, we'll have C++ on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 for games but is it really worth it? XNA was a great creation and should continue on, I too am very glad MonoGame is coming along and picking this up and will support them for this.

[jsminch]

Microsoft has a framework that works across all three of it's platforms -- PC, Xbox & Phone. It's been pushing is as one of the ways for indy developers to populate it's phone marketplace and help it compete with iPhone & Droid. Now, when MS is finally coming up with a tablet-ready OS to compete with the iPad it makes sure that XNA games written for its phone won't be able to be easily ported over to its Win8 tablets. Who thought of this?

To the best of my knowledge, iPhones & iPads support the same frameworks as do Droid tablets and phones. Why the heck wouldn't Microsoft want to make sure that they do as well? You can't write XNA games for Windows 8 and you can't write WinRT games for Windows Phone (or Windows 7, etc.). Will Windows Phone 8 support XNA? WinRT? or both?

[Rob]

I tried to write games using DirectX but I gave up because I couldn't believe it could be made as difficult as it was. XNA is great, it gives you low level control without all the complexity that should not be there in the first place.

I really hope XNA keeps going in some form, I reckon it provides the best trajectory for those who want to explore programming in a gaming context.

[Jules]

This worked first Time, but Now keeps Crashing on Empty XNA projects

HRESULT: [0x887A0004], Module: [SharpDX.DXGI], ApiCode: [DXGI_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED/Unsupported], Message: The specified device interface or feature level is not supported on this system.

The runtime seems to be searching for Result.cs and MetroFrameworkView.cs'. under \Patrick\ Documents. I guess it was because I downloaded the Templates from Patrick Goodwins MonoGame setup Blog.

The instructions are not clear how to get this to work for our own uses