FNA and FAudio get a 20.08 release, with FNA3D and Vulkan getting closer

Game porter and software developer Ethan Lee announced the 20.08 releases of both of FNA and FAudio, as work continues on the newer FNA3D.

What are they? FNA is an accuracy-focused XNA4 reimplementation for open platforms with it being used by a ton of games including the likes of: Celeste, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Full Metal Furies, Owlboy and a plenty more. While FAudio is accuracy-focused XAudio reimplementation for open platforms, which is used for a number of games and also by the Wine / Proton compatibility layers.

For FNA, it was quite a quiet release as the majority of their work is going into bringing up FNA3D which will soon be merged in with FNA directly. They simply upgraded to the new FAudio, removed some dllmaps for iOS/tvOS due to macOS ARM and removed some dead code elsewhere in 'ModelReader' which 'should mildly improve load performance'.

Slightly more exciting is the FAudio release, as it now has support for XAudio2.9-compatible reverb further expanding it's audio capabilities. On top of that, they're also now using GStreamer instead of the FFmpeg backend for WMA decoding, which should help more games with Wine and Proton.

On the subject of the upcoming FNA3D, the new 3D Graphics Library for FNA, Ethan Lee mentioned that while work is going well, Vulkan support is 'still really really tough'. They're looking for developers to help bring up their Vulkan support especially with 'threaded Vulkan and render graphs, command reordering, stuff like that' which you can help out with by joining their Discord. Sounds like Vulkan support is close though!

See FNA on GitHub and FAudio on GitHub.