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I am writing a game for a competition and we must create games that run directly off of a CD, without installing any components on the computer. MonoGame looked like a good candidate because it's cross platform and I would like to use C# , but I haven't been able to find whether it requires installation of anything. Does anyone know if it can, and if it can't are there any alternatives?

Thanks

Oztaco
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  • It's probably doable if you have all dependent DLL's on the CD but I doubt many people have tried this. You may have to test it yourself. – craftworkgames Dec 25 '13 at 10:02

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I tried to use MonoGame with two small projects (2D and 3D, in July 2013) and I can say the following:

  • My games didn't work on all Windows machines - on some they were just crashing somewhere in videocalls
  • The games were not easily portable to other platforms. I tried to build my game for the Mac, but didn't manage to because of Xamarin Studio/MonoDevelop refusing to open/build my project. There were some very obscure recipes on the internet but the whole situation with the platform support made me decide not to bother.
  • There is no content pipeline processor in MonoGame. You need to have XNA Game Studio installed to compile your assets, with some additional steps/quirks.

That said, the question arises: why not just use XNA?

So after that I decided to switch to C++ with Gameplay3D or SDL2 for games, and am really really happy with this decision so far.

ezolotko
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  • That's disappointing. Are there any other frameworks/languages you would recommend that are about as easy to use as XNA? I can't use it because I have to support Mac and Linux in case they decide to use either to test the game – Oztaco Jan 02 '14 at 00:17
  • @leaf68 I would highly recommend [Gameplay3D](http://gameplay3d.org) library. It is very well written and just works on all the platforms including mobiles. I tested it with my projects on Windows, MacOS, and iOS, everything works from the first kick. About the ease of use - usually the difficulties we experience in gamedev (especially 3D) are caused by lack of theoretical background. For that, I would recommend reading this [perfect book](http://www.amazon.com/Math-Primer-Graphics-Development-Edition/dp/1568817231). – ezolotko Jan 02 '14 at 01:54