Table of Contents

Setting up your OS for development on MacOS

This section provides a step-by-step guide for setting up your development environment on Mac.

To develop with MonoGame in C#, you will need to install the .NET SDK. As of MonoGame 3.8.2 the minimum supported version is .NET 8.

Install .NET 8 SDK

  1. Navigate to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0

  2. Download the .NET SDK Installer for your current platform of macOS

  3. Once the .pkg file finishes downloading, run it and follow the prompts to install the .NET SDK

    Download .NET For Windows

Install additional workloads

If you intend to also work with platforms such as Android or iOS, you will need to install the additional .NET workload templates for those platforms which include additional features and simulators to support those platforms. Just run the following commands from the terminal for the platforms below you wish to install.

    dotnet workload install android
Note

You can use dotnet workload search to detect any other available workloads you wish to use.

Apple Silicon Known Issues

For the time being, MonoGame requires that you install the x64 version of the .NET runtime if you are running on an Apple Silicon mac in order to be able to build content. It is also required that Rosetta is enabled.

  1. Navigate to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0
  2. Download the .NET Runtime Installer for macOS x64
  3. Once the .pkg file finishes downloading, run it and follow the prompts to install the .NET Runtime

Setup Wine For Effect Compilation

Effect (shader) compilation requires access to DirectX. This means it will not work natively on macOS and Linux systems, but it can be used through Wine.

MonoGame provides a setup script that can be executed to setup the Wine environment for Effect (shader) compilation.

  1. Install brew.sh

  2. Enter the following command:

    brew install wget p7zip curl && brew install --cask wine-stable

  3. Now that the prerequisites are installed, download the mgfxc_wine_setup.sh script and execute it by entering the following command in the terminal:

    wget -qO- https://monogame.net/downloads/net8_mgfxc_wine_setup.sh | bash

This will create new directory called .winemonogame in your home directory. If you ever wish to undo the setup this script performed, just simply delete that directory.

Next Steps

Choose from one of the two IDE options on macOS:

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