Awesome
.NET MAUI Space Shooter Game Etude
Built with DrawnUI for .NET MAUI
The Challenge
To create a simple yet heavily animated arcade cross-platform game, using .NET MAUI XAML with Skia drawn UI, showing all the advantages that .NET MAUI and SkiaSharp provide. The game runs on Android, Windows, iOS, and Mac (Catalyst), all from a single code base. Desktop versions support both mouse and keyboard.
Implementation
Driven by one of the awesome ICT MOO tutorials, much content to play with, knowing we can do it all with .NET MAUI.
Free Lottie animations quickly fulfilled the need for animated content.
DrawnUI was used to draw virtual controls on a Skia canvas.
Of Note
- Android is hardware-accelerated with GL
- iOS is hardware-accelerated with Apple Metal
- Windows is using skia3-pre nuget for hardware acceleration with Angle.
- Mac Catalyst is using stable skia2 nuget, running CPU only until a new skia3 preview is released.
Hardware accelerated versions run with FPS capped at display refresh rate.
Desktop versions present non-resizable windows, capturing keyboard input. They can be dragged among different displays adapting to new scale. Disabling the maximize button still needs to be implemented.
After updating to NET8 app window is not centering on Catalyst until fix is found.
Final Words
Attained FPS looks okay in Release builds and even on Debug. With an optimized design, especially in regards to control caching, we could imagine more games and fancy animations built with #dotnetmaui.
Lottie animations have proven themselves to be very useful to quickly implement animations.
Tried to make the garbage collector trigger as little as possible using Unity's suggested techniques. It still might have its small impact but we can hope for .NET MAUI someday to adopt a custom incremental GC-collector that Unity is using.
There is also still room for improvement on some platforms to marry game canvas update with sharing the UI thread with MAUI bindings and the user input to make updating more smooth. Actually thinking towards a dedicated GameCanvas to exist along with Canvas to sacrifice MAUI bindings for a smooth game experience.
When i have spare time would add examples of playing frames from a sprite sheet and separate image files (would be anotehr game) along with playing game music/sounds.
What's New
- Windows is using skia3-pre nuget for hardware acceleration, other platforms use stable skia2 nuget.
- Fixed loop bug that was randomly not removing inactive sprites.
Licencing
This code and the DrawnUI nuget are provided under the MIT license. ICT MOO space ships sprites come under the Apache 2.0 license.