Introducing MonoVision

Not following the Twitter or Discord accounts? Well, you may have missed the past few months of updates. I’ve settled back into a weekly release cycle and have been hard at work on what will eventually become Pixel Vision 8 v1.1.0. This is a big step forward, and I thought for this pre-announcement, I’d focus on the new foundation I’ve put in place for PV8 to use moving forward.

A few years back I switch the codebase over to MonoGame from Unity. Recently I began experimenting with creating a custom build of MonoGame, stripped down to its SDL2 core and only including what Pixel Vision 8 needs to run. I quietly introduced MonoVision, my optimized version of MonoGame designed specifically for Pixel Vision 8, in the preview release of v1.0.9.

While this is still a work in progress, I’ve already stripped out thousands of lines of code. The goal is to make PV8 run as close to SDL2 as I can with C#. Hoping this will help unlock the bandwidth we need to get PV8 running on a Raspberry Pi. While I haven’t had the time to test the new builds on the Pi yet, I’m already seeing significant performance increases thanks to the new render and MonoVision.

I haven’t talked much about this work because I wanted to make sure it was a bit more stable before shining a light on it. I’m hoping to have a stable build of v1.1.0 to release into the main branch by next month. In the meantime, you can check out the weekly builds on GitHub, and please help file bugs when you find them. Once I get all the tools back in, I’ll audit the issues and get to work on cleaning them all up.

Oh, one last thing. The new releases will now have some extra disks to go along with each build. There will be API Examples, Art Packs, sample games, and I updated the old Demoscene disk to the new APIs. That means you'll have some projects to play around with to help get you started.

Hope you enjoy!