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I've been doing research on good tools to create games with, and I came across Monogame, Sharpx, and XNA. I have some questions regarding each:

  1. When I create a new windows project (which advertises that it uses DirectX 12), the code template looks like this:

    using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input;

I understand Monogame is a re-implementation of XNA, but where is the "re" part? This code shows Monogame using Microsoft's XNA, and doesn't even hint at the usage of DirectX 12.

  1. SharpDX has an advantage of using WinRT (so i've heard), but what exactly does that mean to me? I know that SharpDX is a layer that sits on top of DirectX to allow it to be used in C#, and naturally should use WinRT. What excuse does Monogame have not to use WinRT?

I feel I'm confused at something and want clarity. Keep in mind that I'm a total noob at this stuff, anything helps!

Eric
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    Monogame is cross-platform, also works on Linux and OSX. Platforms that don't have DirectX so unsurprising that you don't see it back easily. Nothing particularly complicated in supporting WinRT, it exposes DirectX the exact same way. The big advantage of COM's interface-based programming paradigm. Monogame supports it as well. Hiding the implementation details is the point of libraries like this. – Hans Passant Jun 18 '16 at 09:12

2 Answers2

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MonoGame is indeed a reimplementation of XNA. It uses Microsoft.Xna.Framework.* namespaces to preserve source code compatibility with XNA projects. MonoGame does not currently support DirectX 12 - the desktop version has DirectX 11 and OpenGL backends.

It provides simple, cross-platform classes for common game tasks (loading content, rendering, sound playback, etc.) and a pipeline for building runtime-optimized content files. MonoGame is really powerful for most projects and great for quick development, though not a fully featured game engine like Unity. Since it is modelled after XNA (discontinued a few years ago), most XNA samples/tutorials work just fine.

SharpDX is a low-level wrapper of DirectX types. You should go with it only if you want to get your hands dirty with low-level plumbing, which doesn't appear to be the case.

The DirectX implementation of MonoGame (used for classic Windows, UWP, and Windows 8 apps) internally uses SharpDX for communicating with DirectX. When it comes to WinRT, it is just an implementation detail of "modern" Windows app platform.

Petri Laarne
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Wikipedia has a few pages on the history of XNA. In short it is no longer supported. MonoGame extends it. SlimDX and SharpDX use their own DirectX wrappers and are basically copies of each other. Going by a recent post SlimDX future It will not be continued. I do not know MonoGame but am strong in SharpDX and it provides current support for DirectX 12. If you also want to use OpenGL, you could try ANX but I do not know it. The SharpDX guy also wrote a Collada class which is on GitHub and there is an Assimp class that is compatible. None of the above have an integrated physics system but PhysX for .Net works fine with SharpDX.

In summary if you only need Direct X for C# then SharpDX would be the most straight forward choice. If you think you might expand to other platforms, you might want to check out MonoGame or ANX but I can't vouch for either. None of the above mentioned are complete Game Engines (such as Unity or UE4) they simply allow the use of features such as DirectX that are not natively supported by Visual Studio C#.

tim
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