FNA VSCode Template

Start new FNA projects with Nez quickly and easily with handy setup scripts, a versatile boilerplate project, and convenient Visual Studio Code integration.

Features

• Super simple setup scripts that downloads and installs Nez, FNA and its native libraries for you
• Boilerplate project already included -- no need to wrestle with MSBuild configurations or writing yet another Game1 class
• Visual Studio Code tasks for building and running your game, compiling T4 templates, cleaning/restoring your project, compiling .fx files and building content with the MonoGame Pipeline tool
• In-editor debugging support with the Mono Debugger

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio (recommended to use Visual Studio Code because it has some custom tasks but either will work fine)
• Mono Debugger Extension (required for macOS debugging)
• MonoGame (required for compiling content with the Pipeline tool)
• (optional) .NET Core (required for compiling T4 templates)
• (optional) Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010) (required for building effects, you can use Wine to run this)
• (windows only) 7zip (if intending to use fnalibs, the filetype is unsupported for windows and requires 7zip to be installed to decompress/unzip)
• (windows only) Build tools for Visual Studio (these build tools are required for all Visual Studio Code build tasks. if you intend to use the full Visual Studio, these are already included. be sure to include .NET Core Build Tools in the installation)

Setup Instructions

1. Download and unzip the ZIP archive (don't clone the repo!)
2. Run ./getFNA.sh (macOS) or ./getFNA.ps1 (windows) to download the latest Nez, FNA and fnalibs to the directory. You can run this script again if you want to update either FNA or the fnalibs at a later point.
3. Open the root folder that contains the .sln file in Visual Studio Code or the .sln file directly in Visual Studio. Note that only Visual Studio Code has an effect builder command.

That's it! Now you're ready to build and run the base project. If you get missing DLL errors (pointing at SDL) when running in Visual Studio copy the FNA libs into your /usr/local/lib folder. With Visual Studio Code, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH is set automatically so it won't run into the DLL not found error. Nez is setup as a submodule so you can update it in the normal fashion.

When developing, raw content (files not processed by the Pipeline tool) should be placed in the Content folders subfolders and anything that needs processing should go in the CompiledContent folder and added to the Pipeline tool.

The setup process will also init a git repo for you with Nez added as a submodule.

If you want to see the output of Debug.* calls in the VS Code Debug Console, you have to install a listener by adding this somewhere in your code (Game1 by default has one for you): System.Diagnostics.Debug.Listeners.Add(new System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener(System.Console.Out)); Pixel art games should also uncomment a line in the Game1.cs file setting the FNA_OPENGL_BACKBUFFER_SCALE_NEAREST environment variable when using FNA.

Build Tasks

• Restore Project: Restores the .csproj. Run it again whenever you change the .csproj file.
• Restore and Rebuild Nez: Fetches the latest version of Nez from GitHub, restores and rebuilds Nez
• Build (Debug/Release): Builds the project with the specified configuration but does not run it. This also runs MGCB.exe, copies over everything in the Content and CompiledContent subdirectories and the fnalibs.
• Build and Run (Debug/Release): Builds and runs the project. On MacOS, it runs the output with Mono. On Windows, it runs the output with .NET Framework.
• Clean Project: Cleans the output directories and all their subdirectories.
• Build Effects: Runs fxc.exe on all of the .fx files found in the Content/ subdirectories and outputs corresponding .fxb files that can be loaded through the Content Manager at runtime.
• Build Content: Runs good old MGCB.exe on the Content.mgcb file
• Force Build Content: Force builds the content (MGCB.exe -r)
• Open Pipeline Tool: Opens the MonoGame Pipeline tool
• Process T4 Templates: Processes any T4 templates found in the T4Templates folder. Note that the install script will attempt to install the t4 command line program which requires the dotnet command line program to be installed. The install command it will run is dotnet tool install -g dotnet-t4.

License and Credits

FNA VSCode Template is released under the Microsoft Public License. Many thanks to Andrew Russell for his FNA Template, from which I learned a lot (and borrowed a little).