Board Meeting Minutes

By: MonoGame Foundation Jul 10, 2024

Attendee's

  • Dean Ellis - President
  • Dominique Louis - Treasurer
  • Tom Spilman - Banking Matters
  • Marko Jeremic - Board Chairman
  • Thomas Altenburger - Board Member

Agenda

  • LinkedIn presence.
  • The continuation of Sprite Font rendering work and improvements.
  • Review of Bounty PR's.
  • MonoGame "next" input discussion.
  • Just get it released already.

Outcomes

With the team so focused on delivering and trying to keep everyone happy, this month was more of a catchup meeting to ensure everyone is on Target. We hear the communities drive for a release as soon as possible and the Foundation are working hard to make that a reality.

MonoGame Presence

It was noted that MonoGame does not have a presence on LinkedIn, as most other open-source projects do. So it was decided that one of the Foundation board should get that setup, that being the case the choice was obvious and it was tasked to the member who could not make this meeting. That will show them.

SpriteFont rendering

There has been an open regression issue regarding Sprite Font rendering quality, so Harry has been tasked with getting this resolved before the next release.

Shiver me timbers, bounties progress

The team are hard at work (as time allows) on the Bounties they are undertaking, some public, some less so (because they just needed it done), all moving at a pace, these include:

  • A PR to improve the cross-platform project template, it si "almost" complete, but for testing
  • The new and improved Content Pipeline is almost complete (very excited for this)
  • The GDK / DirectX 12 bounty is almost complete, and against all odds, will also include a Windows platform update.

Additionally, the team feel the Foundation needs to be more aggressive with bounties and getting them over the finish line, not to say firey hot coals are on the table, but certainly a more focused approach to making releases.

Getting a release out

I bet that got your attention.....

We listen and hear the community chatter about getting a new release out and the team has discussed many options for achieving this, including "just shipping" the current state of development as a preview, but all roads have difficulties and require a lot of attention.

While "just shipping" might be an option, we want to make the next release as impactful as we can, along with supporting content to release alongside it, the current targets include:

  • The improved content pipeline system, which will make managing content in projects far simpler and more efficient.
  • The new cross-platform texture compression system which will vastly improve the Mac/Linux situation.
  • MGFXC updates and linking.

With these complete, you should see significant improvements with MonoGame as a whole.

Additionaly, the team have discussed making a bounty to implement an automated "preview" release pipeline, which should give developers easier access to early releases, instead of the cumbersome GitHub packages route (shudder). More on this later.

Bounty tracker

All bounties are still tracked primarily from the Bounties GitHub issue. Each bounty has its own issue to keep communication open (subject to NDA requirements).

Upcoming bounties will be posted to a new "RoadMap" page soon to be published on the documentation site, stay tuned to the "Announcements" channel on discord for the latest.

Rush to the finish (or at least the first checkpoint)

So much is going on behind the scenes and with the new bounties, the community is helping to further accelerate the MonoGame Framework delivery. We will always need more help and more time that all of the board has available to connect the dots, but we are doing the best we can with what we have.

As the last section states, do not just comment on how MonoGame is doing, join in, apply for bounties as they appear and together, the community can make MonoGame the free place to make games that it should be.

Support

  • Financially - several tiers and options available for Github, PayPal and Patreon.
  • The MonoGame Store - MonoGame branded gear and merchandise.

Get Involved

  • Code, we accept Pull Requests.
  • Help in the Community discord and beyond (we also love blog posts).
  • Bounties, Fix bugs and add features faster as well as get paid for your work :)

Onwards and Upwards

The MonoGame Foundation team