FNA VSCode Template

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

Features

• Super simple setup scripts that download and install 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, cleaning/restoring your project, and compiling .fx files!
• In-editor debugging support with the Mono Debugger.
• Supports Windows and macOS!

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio Code
  • C# Extension
  • Mono Debugger Extension (required for macOS debugging -- Windows can use clr instead)
• Mono (required for MacOS)
• Git
• 7-Zip (required for Windows to decompress fnalibs)
• Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010) (required for building effects -- on Mac, you can use Wine to run this)

Setup Instructions

1. Download and unzip the ZIP archive.
2. Copy+paste the resulting folder to your desired project directory.
3. Run ./getFNA.sh (macOS) or ./win_getFNA.ps1 (Windows PowerShell) to download the latest FNA and fnalibs to the directory. (You can run this script again if you want to update either FNA or the libraries at a later point.)
4. Rename project_name to your project's name (the folder and the csproj file)
5. Open the newly-renamed project folder (NOT the root folder!) in Visual Studio Code.
6. Do a Find+Replace for "project_name" (case sensitive!) to the new name of your project.
7. Run the "Restore Project" build task.

That's it! Now you're ready to build and run the base project!

Build Tasks

• Restore Project: Restores the .csproj. Run this before building for the first time, and run it again whenever you change the .csproj file.
• Build (Debug/Release): Builds the project with the specified configuration but does not run it. This also copies over everything in the Content/ subdirectory 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)

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).