FlatRedBall is now making a big upgrade to .NET and MonoGame 3.8.1. This means the FlatRedBall Editor (aka Glue) and new game projects are on .NET 6. This upgrade brings along a lot of changes to FlatRedBall, so let’s dive in! Note that some of the changes below require creating a new .NET 6 project[…]
Recently a new version of the FlatRedBall Editor (aka Glue) was released with support for embedding a game window (and support for edit mode). Today the FlatRedBall Editor has been updated with many changes to make it easier to work with. Let’s take a look at some of the changes! New Game Toolbar The Game[…]
FlatRedBall Glue has always been a program for improving the speed of game development. The latest version includes a wizard which greatly simplifies new project setup. Previously, even as recent as a month ago, setting up a new project with levels, a player entity, collision, and tiled map files could take an experienced FlatRedBall user over[…]
The Dear ImGui open source library provides a cross-platform way to quickly make user interfaces. While it is not as pretty as interfaces made in Gum, it does allow for quick creation of powerful UIs for certain audiences. It has found significant usage for in-engine game development tools, even in high profile AAA games such as the[…]
One of the most common task in game development is stopping a game to make small changes, then restarting the game. Of course, doing this just one time is a fast process, but over the course of an entire game this can add up. The latest version of Glue focuses on speeding up the stop/tweak/restart cycle. This[…]
Introduction Many game types include collidable areas which deal damage over time to characters or enemies within the area. This type of behavior can be accomplished in Glue with a little setup. This post shows how to implement damage over time using standard entities. Damage Over Time vs. Simple Collision The simplest situation for damage[…]
The latest version of FlatRedBall, Glue, and the Tiled plugin include features to support a new approach for creating levels – using derived screens. Screen inheritance has been available in Glue for many years, but the latest set of features revive this functionality and make level creation easier than ever. Old vs. New Levels are[…]
Introduction The latest release of FlatRedBall, Gum, and Gum plugin in Glue includes support for FlatRedBall.Forms version 1.2. This version adds the following functionality: New StackPanel control New AddChild method for all FrameworkElements (allowing parent/child relationship to be created without accessing the Visual object) Support for same-named Gum runtime objects in different folders with the[…]
Although States have been available in Glue for a long time (about as long as Variables themselves), they have fallen out of style in modern FlatRedball development. Meanwhile the feature set for CSVs has continued to advance, and this file format has become the preferred way to define game data and to organize variables. If[…]
The AnimationEditor just got a big update this weekend with the release of version 3.0. Most FlatRedBall developers have used this tool to create Animation Chain files (.achx), but a number of productivity issues have been around for many years. Version 3.0 directly addresses these issues. Now you can create animations much faster than ever[…]