Overview of Building GnollHack with .NET MAUI

Overview

You build the .NET MAUI version of GnollHack with a two-step process. This is because we are keeping the Xamarin.Forms version of GnollHack for compatibility reasons and we are sharing code between both architectures. This allows us to maintain both Xamarin.Forms and .NET MAUI versions of GnollHack at the same time.

1. Build Native Libraries and Core Assets (GnollHack.sln)

Building the native solution compiles the C core game engine and prepares the translated UI files.

Prerequisites

Check appropriate build instructions for prerequisites.

Building

1. Start Visual Studio Community 2026.
2. Open GnollHack.sln located in the win\win32\vs directory.
3. Select the Android+Windows configuration (or another configuration that matches your target platform).
4. Rebuild the solution.

This builds the necessary native libraries (e.g., gnollhackwin.dll for Windows, libgnollhackdroid.so for Android, etc.) and copies them along with the core assets to the respective platform folders of the GnollHackM project. This also runs makedefsdroid, which converts the shared XAML files from GnollHackX to GnollHackM format. You must repeat this step whenever you change code in the native C core or modify XAML files in the GnollHackX folder.

2. Build GnollHackM

GnollHackM is the .NET MAUI version of GnollHack.

Prerequisites

• Install .NET SDK 10.0 from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/10.0
• Install .NET MAUI 10.0 workload using dotnet workload install maui in PowerShell
• Install Visual Studio 2026 for .NET MAUI Development

Building

1. Start Visual Studio Community 2026.
2. Open GnollHackM.sln that is located in the win\win32\xpl\GnollHackM directory.
3. Build GnollHackM, which is the .NET MAUI version of GnollHack, using appropriate build instructions.

This builds the .NET MAUI version of the game. You need to repeat this step whenever you change things in XAML or the managed C# code.

Remarks

Changing Solution Configuration

If you change the solution configuration between Debug and Release, you need to rebuild both GnollHack solution and GnollHackM solution with the appropriate solution configuration. This is because you need appropriately built libraries for the GnollHackM solution from the GnollHack solution. So, you need to:

1. Build the GnollHack solution first.
2. Then, build the GnollHackM solution.