• Runtimes

  • Spine FNA Runtime?

    anglais

Hi all,
I'm one of the main contributors to the (open source) FlatRedBall game engine. FlatRedBall currently uses MonoGame under the hood but builds a large stack of tooling and solutions to things like collision management, tilemap loading, scene graph management and much more. We also primarily focus on 2d pixelart games.

We have just begun wrapping the MonoGame runtime to be supported natively within our engine, but we've also been working on supporting FNA instead of MonoGame in our engine. FNA is also based on the XNA API like MonoGame so it should be syntactically identical but I don't know if it will "Just Work" with Spine.

Here are the key reasons we're exploring FNA:

  • C# support on console through Native AOT
  • Active development compared to MonoGame which means faster bug resolution
  • Improved performance
  • From-file load support for file types that otherwise require content pipeline (faster builds, simpler projects)

Does Esoteric have any plans to create or support an FNA runtime at any point in the future?

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    profexorgeek we currently do not have any plans to create an FNA runtime, however, we'd be open for contributions in that area. I believe last time I checked, spine-monogame sources can be dropped into any FNA game and "just work"? Possibly save for the shader.

      I've been talking to our lead contributor and he also believes it should mostly just work with some possible minor relinking. I didn't realize the MG runtime was just code you embed and not a .dll or something - he's doing all the eng work!

      I can update this thread once we figure out the actual level of effort to get FNA working. It's a secondary priority for us so it may be awhile.

      Once we test, it could be useful for your [potential] customers to see FNA on the runtimes page, even if it just links to MonoGame so they know it's possible if not directly tested and supported.

      Agreed, it'd be great to hear how to goes!

      @profexorgeek Very cool, thanks in advance for your efforts!

      @profexorgeek
      Hi bro!
      I'm using only FNA for develop game, for now the runtime of spine monogame work without change.
      FNA is really better than monogame.
      I'm working in game engine, the video is old but It's just to show you that spine-monogame runtime it works for FNA

      Hi @eprime, thanks for confirming!

      In that video you shared, which part is Spine? Those look like just sprites and meshes so I wasn't sure which objects were Spine animations.

        profexorgeek
        all the graphic objects you see are of Spine2D, the only animated are plants. (they are only fast test object)
        the no spine2d object are only the support object, like text, 3d gizmo and grid

          My engine use Spine2D in a 3D world :-)

          We have successfully gotten Spine integrated with the FlatRedBall game engine in both MonoGame and FNA!

          The specific things we had to do for FNA support were:

          • Copy the MonoGame runtime csproj
          • Download FNA and link to the FNA csproj instead of the MonoGame nuget
          • Compile the .fx shader with fxc.exe and load the resulting .fbx file (since FNA doesn't have a content pipeline)

          Some bonus links and content...

          Our implementation requirements are in this github issue:
          vchelaru/FlatRedBall1320

          The root of our Spine documentation is here, we have several docs with more detail on how to integrate with the rest of our engine:
          https://docs.flatredball.com/flatredball/spine

          This is Spine rendering in FlatRedBall FNA .NET7:

          Here is some basic perf testing with a large number of entities:

          CC @Nate, @Mario and @Harald

          Awesome! 🥳