Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a moment and give a report on some of the progress made so far in getting version 4.0 officially released.

Current Status​

If you take a look at the v4.0.0 Milestone page, you can see we are now at 55% completed

If you'd like to checkout the list of issues that have been worked through so far, you can view them here.

A lot of the remaining issues here could be closed with better documentation, which is going to come in the last leg of this sprint. However, with the current pace, the current deadline of end of June is looking good. If you'd like to get involved in helping resolve the backlog of issues, please do. Be sure to checkout the Contributing Guidelines and fee free to contact me on discord with any questions.

And with that status report out of the way, I wanted to touch on some other subjects

Repository Changes​

MonoGame.Extended is an extension of MonoGame. With this thought in mind, I have begun to restructure the project some, as many may have already noticed. The reason behind this is that I feel things in Monogame.Extended should be placed in logical places that match types they are working with in MonoGame. This keeps the source code structure similar to MonoGame which is beneficial for users working from source between both projects.

What do I mean by this though? Well, one example is the RectangleExtensions. Previously it was placed in MonoGame.Extended.Math However Rectangle in MonoGame exits in the root namespace, not in a Math namespace. So RectangleExtensions will be moved to the project root to match the similar structure. Some other changes, like TextureRegion2D is currently located in the MonoGame.Extended.TextureAtlases directory/namespace. At first, this seems like a logical fit, but a TextureRegion2D is a region of a Texture2D. Atlases just use them, you don't have to have an atlas to use a TextureRegion2D. So because they are more locally related to the Texture2D in MonoGame, they will be moved to a similar directory/namespace (MonoGame.Extended.Graphic).

In Conclusion​

I know no one like change, and changes like this may seem superfluous, but I do believe it will be a better user experience moving forward with 4.0. However, I do value community feedback, so please give me your thoughts and feedback on this in the comment section at the end of this document. We're halfway there to the 4.0.0 release.

It has been far too long since an official release was made of MonoGame.Extended. Issues have piled up on GitHub, and everyone just wants to import Tiled maps.

So let's change that!

Hello MonoGame Community​

Before moving further, I want to take a moment and introduce myself. Who is this person saying that MonoGame.Extended is back. Well, my name is Chris Whitley, also known as Aristurtle in the MonoGame Community. I have been working with MonoGame for several years and maintain other open source libraries for MonoGame. I am also a contributor to the main MonoGame repository as well.

Outside of working with MonoGame and doing game development, I am a full stack dotnet web developer.

Change of Responsibility​

The previous maintainer, Lucas Girouard-Stranks @lithiumtoast, has stepped down due to lack of time and interest in maintaining MonoGame.Extended. Moving forward, I will be taking over the craftworkgames organization on GitHub. This includes maintaining MonoGame.Extended.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact me on the MonoGame.Extended Discord Server

Roadmap​

Coming into MonoGame.Extended as a maintainer, the first priority is getting outstanding issues closed and a new release pushed. This means my current attention will be focused solely on that goal for now. New features that have been requested will be pushed back in favor of prioritizing outstanding issues.

I currently have a goal of resolving outstanding issue by the end of June 2024. You can follow the progress of this on the v4.0.0 Milestone page.

Acknowledgements​

MonoGame.Extended would not exist were it not for the original maintainer Dylan Wilson @dylanwilson80, Lucas Girouard-Stranks @lithiumtoast taking over, and the work done by countless community members over time. Thank you everyone for all that you have done for this project in the past, and I am honored to be the person leading this into the future. I look forward to working with you all to continue shaping this into the best extension library for MonoGame.