lithiumtoast
commented
1 month ago Heya @bayganik , thanks for the interest. I have been burnout recently and have been re-prioritizing what is important in my personal life. You need to understand that I have a regular day job of +40 hours a week in a completely different industry outside game-dev and any extra time outside of work has been on this project and adjacent projects out of my own enjoyment, curiosity, growth. I am trying to figure out what is sustainable for me moving forward.
I would love to continue this project, but beyond my personal burnout, I believe at this time the initial foundations of why I started this project no longer are 100% true.
With the recent injection of cash from indie studios like those who made Terraria to MonoGame/FNA/Godot, MonoGame and FNA now have real USD CASH RESOURCES to move things forward in a tangible way. This was a major problem for MonoGame because they were focused on making games and only updated and interacted with the community when they had time. FNA was somewhat better as they at least interacted with the community but IMO they were a bit harsh to differences of opinions (which is understable when you get to know them as individuals). Stemming from the Unity fiasco and a long history of healthy skepticism towards companies like Microsoft canning projects XNA, the "community" in indie game space has really taken off. MonoGame, FNA, even Godot have seen real great progress and the community is coming together and thriving, especially on Discord. The MonoGame.Extended project has had a successful handoff to a community member of MonoGame and I am very happy that project can continue on without me (to which was one of the original influences for this project).
At this time, I would like to redirect your attention and interest towards FNA (which I am sponsor for multiple years) which this project was forked from and the individual developers on the FNA project which have made their tools open source. These people have been building things on top of FNA and know the pitfalls of XNA deeply and intimately like the content-pipeline, the Effects as "shaders", and other nonsense the that stems from poor decisions made by Mircosoft a time ago. They are also experimenting with XNA-like things for a while now like https://github.com/MoonsideGames/MoonWorks. With recent cash influx, the discord community on FNA have been really thriving and more open to new people, beginners, experts, power users, or other "hackers" (in the original sense of the word).
Some of my original tinkering in this project has lead to a potential solution to an open bounty for FNA which I also have not been paying a lot of attention to either which I also regret. If am to work on any side project outside of work at this time, it would most likely helping FNA develop this technology further as they have the financing and deep people connections to Microsoft developers and SDL developers (which MonoGame also uses SDL).
So to answer your question in practical terms, at this time, yes this project is on hold. I have no short term foresight to work on Katabasis directly when FNA and the community are working on solving similar problems at the root of the problem to which I don't have to! Like a new shaders API!. I have full trust that these people are and will solve these dissatisfactions, or at very least allow for others to build solutions on top of FNA that will solve pain points that XNA originally introduced. Perhaps in the far future I may tackle the content-pipeline with fresh eyes and understanding at a later date in time for the MonoGame/XNA community.
Again, thanks for your interest, time, and understanding.
bayganik
is this framework going to continue? I like a lot of the concepts that it has. I started with XNA and never liked the content pipeline, so I moved away to Raylib.
I would very much enjoy redoing my game engine with a fresh look at Katabasis.
Please come back to this project :-)
Kamran