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This wiki provides a conceptual overview of the Ultraviolet Framework.

Complete reference documentation is also available.

What is Ultraviolet?

Ultraviolet is a cross-platform, .NET game development framework written in C# and released under the MIT License. It is heavily inspired by Microsoft's XNA Framework, and is intended to be easy for XNA developers to quickly pick up and start using. However, unlike MonoGame and similar projects, Ultraviolet is not intended to be a drop-in replacement for XNA. Its current implementation is written on top of SDL2 and OpenGL, but its modular design makes it (relatively) easy to re-implement using other technologies if it becomes necessary to do so in the future.

At present, Ultraviolet officially supports Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS.

Some core features of the Ultraviolet Framework:

• A runtime content pipeline: Easily load game assets using Ultraviolet's content pipeline. Unlike XNA, Ultraviolet's content pipeline operates at runtime, meaning no special Visual Studio projects are required to make it work. Content preprocessing is supported in order to increase efficiency and decrease load times.

• High-level 2D rendering abstractions: Familiar classes like SpriteBatch allow you to efficiently render large numbers of 2D sprites. Ultraviolet includes built-in support for texture atlases and XML-driven sprite sheets.

• High-level 3D rendering abstractions: Coming in a future release.

• Low-level rendering functionality: In addition to the abstractions described above, Ultraviolet's graphics subsystem allows you to push polygons directly to the graphics device, giving you complete control.

• A powerful text formatting and layout engine: Do more than draw plain strings of text. Ultraviolet's text formatting engine allows you to change your text's font, style, and color on the fly. The layout engine allows you to easily position and align text wherever you need it.

• XML-driven object loader for easy content creation: Ultraviolet's object loader allows you to easily create complicated hierarchies of objects from simple XML files. This is more than just an XML serializer—because it is integrated with Ultraviolet, it has direct knowledge of your game's content assets and object lists, making it possible to reference them in a simple, flexible, and readable way.

You can get started using Ultraviolet by adding the assemblies to your project with NuGet.

Known Issues

• The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\CodeSharing\Microsoft.CodeSharing.CSharp.targets" was not found...

This issue has been fixed in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1.

As of version 1.3, Ultraviolet makes use of Shared Projects in order to share code between its Desktop and Android builds (and potentially a future iOS build). This error means that Visual Studio is not configured to understand this project type, and as a result, Ultraviolet will not load or compile correctly. If you encounter this error, please consult [this blog post] for potential workarounds. If you're using Visual Studio 2013, make sure you're using the latest update. If you continue to have issues, try installing the [Shared Project Reference Manager] extension.

• Building the Samples

If you encounter errors when attempting to build Ultraviolet Framework Samples.sln, make sure that you've previously built the corresponding configuration (i.e. Debug, Release, or Signed) of TwistedLogik.Ultraviolet.sln. The first sample project runs a script which copies the latest versions of the Ultraviolet assemblies from the Binaries folder to the Ultraviolet Framework Samples\Dependencies folder, and this script will fail if they don't exist.

In general, a good first step is running msbuild or xbuild on the Ultraviolet.proj project file in the root directory of the repository. This will build the entire suite of assemblies appropriate for the platform on which it is being run.

• General Compatibility

Ultraviolet is still in the early stages of its development, and as such it has not yet been fully tested on a wide range of hardware. If you encounter compatibility issues on your machine, please register an issue on GitHub so we can try to address it!