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 and Linux. Support for additional platforms will be forthcoming in future releases.

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.

The Ultraviolet Framework's source code is available on GitHub. If you're developing on Windows, and you just want to get started making games, you can use the installer provided as part of the latest release. It will ensure that you have the necessary DLLs and install Visual Studio templates for developing Ultraviolet applications.

Known Issues

• 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 Production) 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.

• 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!

Documentation

Reference Documentation

Overview

• Basic Concepts in Ultraviolet
• Matrices and Vectors

Sample Projects

• Sample 1 - Creating an Ultraviolet Application
• Sample 2 - Handling Input
• Sample 3 - Rendering Geometry
• Sample 4 - Content Management
• Sample 5 - Rendering Sprites
• Sample 6 - Rendering Text
• Sample 7 - Playing Music
• Sample 8 - Playing Sound Effects
• Sample 9 - Managing State with UI Screens
• Sample 10 - Asynchronous Content Loading
• Sample 11 - Game Pads
• Sample 12 - Ultraviolet Presentation Foundation

Advanced Topics

• Data
  • Data object registries
• Content
  • Content archives
  • Content substitution
  • Content preprocessing
  • Content metadata files
• Graphics
  • Generating fonts
  • Custom shaders and effects
  • Custom SpriteBatch implementations
• Android
  • Working with Ultraviolet on Android
• Ultraviolet Presentation Foundation
  • UPF Layout Cycle
  • UPF Layout Containers
  • UPF Elements
  • Ultraviolet Markup Language
  • Ultraviolet Style Sheets
  • Dependency properties
  • Routed events

Project Road Map

What follows is a tentative road map for the next several major revisions of Ultraviolet. This list is subject to change at any time. Items which have been struck through are basically complete, though they may not yet be part of an official release.

• Ultraviolet 1.0
  • Miscellaneous
    • First release
• Ultraviolet 1.1
  • Miscellaneous
    • Android support
    • Performance improvements
    • Design assembly (i.e. TypeConverter implementations) for Nucleus
    • Design assembly (i.e. TypeConverter implementations) for Ultraviolet
  • Input
    • New input device: GamePad
    • New input device: TouchPad
  • Graphics
    • Support for Direct State Access (DSA)
    • Better support for East Asian character sets in SpriteFont
• Ultraviolet 1.2
  • UI
    • Ultraviolet Presentation Foundation (UPF)
• Ultraviolet 1.3
  • Graphics
    • Improved 3D rendering support
    • Model class or equivalent
    • Support for model instancing
    • Support for skeletal animation
  • Signed distance field fonts