ExEn Public Preview 1
ExEn Public Preview 2 is now available! Click here!
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As promised, here is ExEn Public Preview 1! [Update: Public Preview 2 is now available! If for some crazy reason you want the older version, click here.]
[Update: As a lot of people seem to be not reading the documentation and getting stuck with fonts: you need to build the XNA project first, to create the “.exenfont” files the ExEn projects require.]
ExEn is a port of XNA to Silverlight and iOS (and an Android version is in the works). It’s licensed under MS-PL (i.e.: open source) so you can start using it in your games right away, for free! See the included Documentation directory for information on getting started.
As described in earlier posts, ExEn is running behind schedule for various reasons, so this release is missing some features that will be in the final version. The most notable absence in this release is the Android port which, although it is making good progress, is not yet good enough for a public release.
(I tried to get a usable Android port ready in time, but it just didn’t happen. Sorry.)
Now, the lack of Android port here is a bit unfair to people who contributed small amounts (< $50) to the funding of ExEn, expecting to see an Android port today. To remedy that, everyone who contributed – any amount at all, on RocketHub or my own site, up until today – will be given access to the pre-release program (emails go out tomorrow). That way you will have immediate access to features as they are added, as well as the work-in-progress Android port.
For those of you who haven’t contributed to the funding of ExEn, I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait a bit longer. Such is the reality of a software project with a Bus Factor of 1. Sorry. If you like what you see in the preview, you can still join up to the pre-release program.
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Comments
Niklas
Awesome Andrew! Nice work!
Peter
Some codeparts look like copy&paste from reflector, eg the Matrix code. I don’t know if I like this.
Hernan
Great work!!!! and congratulations for your efford to get ExEN on time!
james
will it work with MonoTouch 4?
Gabor
Hi, congratulations for your work and effort.
I think we all should try to produce something similar and after we surely could appreciate the result…
I wish you good luck for continuing your work.
Andrew Russell
@Peter:
I haven’t copied code out of Reflector. Although I cannot vouch for the open-source projects that ExEn incorporates. There are only so many ways you can write a Matrix class, especially if it must be functionally identical. The algorithms themselves are well-known. That they are similar is unsurprising.
@James:
It should.
Anders
Do I need to get the fonts from somewhere?
Trying to run the CatGirls sample using the monotouch sln:
UIFont-exenfont.exenfont is missing
UIFont-exenfont.png is missing
UIFont-exenfont@2x.exenfont is missing
UIFont-exenfont@2x.png is missing
etc…
Andrew Russell
@Anders: You need to use ExEnFontShim to generate those files. You do this by building the XNA versions of the projects (using XNA Game Studio on Windows). Sorry, I think that bit of the documentation is perhaps not clear enough.
Anders
Ah, thanks for the clarification… Will do. Looking promising so far! 🙂
Mark
Hmm I seem to have problems loading fonts, is there anything I have to do to get the fonts to load? Basically have untouched spritefont files from XNA.
Andrew Russell
@Mark: Read the comment exchange with Anders, directly above your comment 🙂
Alex
Incredible! Looked at this a while back when I was just learning XNA. Glad to see you’ve stuck to schedule as best you could, even with all the hurdles in the road.
This seems like a really ambitious-but-smart project for one developer, and one that opens up possibilities for a wide community. I haven’t contributed yet, but I’ll make sure to soon, though it will have to be a modest contribution for now.
Andrew Russell
Thanks Alex 🙂
Matt
Stumbed across your project today, and I’m fascinated. I’d been ignoring XNA as I assumed that cross platform using the toolset would be impossible.
Could the iOS run Dark?
Anders
If I haven’t said it already… fantastic work Andrew! Hope to see some documentation in the near future! 🙂
Andrew Russell
@Matt: Dark may be too much for even the most recent iOS devices to handle. Also the rendering engine would have to be ported to OpenGL ES (via OpenTK – you’d still stay in C#), as ExEn currently doesn’t support the XNA 3D API.
@Anders: Thanks 🙂 And – well – there is some documentation in there. Hopefully I can clear up some of the points of confusion in time for the 1.0.
Mark
Haha Sorry Andrew, i’ll check that out later on it was late at night over here when I was staring at it. Didn’t even glance the other comments 😛
MrPhil
You should call it the Lottery Factor, is more positive and optimistic 🙂
Asgeir
Have you considered joining the MonoGame effort?
https://github.com/mono/MonoGame
Andrew Russell
@Asgeir: ExEn was originally a fork of MonoGame (which was XnaTouch at the time), because I found it was way too buggy for my liking. I’m a stickler for quality.
sohaib
Thanks andrew russell for your great job, i hope that will help us – users of iphone – to play x630 games in our device
Mr Andrew, i have a question, may i get the way to learn XNA language, i know that is hard to learn, but i’ll try my best
Thanks in advance 😉
Stefan
Great work!!!! A friend showed me your project yesterday and I really like it!
I have a question too, I am working on an XNA Windows Phone 7 2D game(eXtreme Rollercoaster) and I want to port it to the iOS. But I am using the Farseer Physics Engine 3.3.1 and
DrawIndexedPrimitives(..) with an AnisotropicWrap SamplerState for drawing some special objects in my game! Do you think ExEn can help me out?
Thank you!
Andrew Russell
@sohaib: Check out http://create.msdn.com/
@Stefan: ExEn doesn’t currently support those two features. However you could use OpenGL directly for that, and use ExEn for everything else.
gabor
Maybe not considered off topic: MonoTouch and MonoDroid is off line since more than 48 hours giving 504 Gateway timeout.
Wanted to run some performance tests on an actual iPad 2 device so I needed to buy MonoTouch as trial limited to emulator… It is not possible currently 🙁 We hang on Novell, which is a huge risk.
Niklas
I’m also curious where you can get Mono Touch from the Novell site gives a 504.
Andrew Russell
I noticed that earlier – trying to access the API documentation I need to actually use the tools!
Hopefully it’s just a transient error and not something to add to my extreme annoyance at Novell/Attachmate for the whole MonoTouch and Mono for Android debacle.
Fortunately Miguel and team have an alternative in the works: http://xamarin.com/
Mark
Hey Andrew, I remember seeing a video of Hardware rendering (think it was your marblets example video), is there a way to turn on hardware rendering in this preview?
Mark
Infact scratch that just seen that it’s an inbuilt feature of Silverlight, apologies Andrew.
JC
Now that Xamarin has made good on their promises and released iOS and Android ports are we going to be getting an update of the viability ExEn with this new platform?
Andrew Russell
@JC:
Those ports are MonoTouch and Mono for Android, as originally released by Novell. Xamarin got a licence for the IP. So the platform for ExEn doesn’t change – which is excellent news 🙂
Marcell
I was taking a peek to SL 5 beta and MS has included some XNA classes in it. This means ExEn most probably will have a namespaces/classes conflict in SL 5. For this reason I would like to know if you are going to release a version of ExEn for SL 5 or not.
Andrew Russell
@Marcell: Not at this stage. Possibly later.
patrick dengler
Having a hard time getting this off the ground; I am having the same fonts problem. You noted to build the XNA version of cats first. Opening that though yields that the content project is not there and “Error 1 The OutputPath property is not set for project ‘ExEnFontShim.csproj’. Please check to make sure that you have specified a valid combination of Configuration and Platform for this project. Configuration=’Debug’ Platform=’HPD’. This error may also appear if some other project is trying to follow a project-to-project reference to this project, this project has been unloaded or is not included in the solution, and the referencing project does not build using the same or an equivalent Configuration or Platform. CatGirls XNA
“
Andrew Russell
@Patrick: Not quite sure what you’re doing. Does that happen with the XNA solution? Have you tried it with Public Preview 2?