🖥️ Downloading FlatRedBall

Prerequisites

1 - Visual Studio 2022 or Newer

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ Although it is possible to make games without Visual Studio or Rider, doing so requires advanced knowledge of MSBuild. We recommend downloading and installing Visual Studio Community which is free.

{% hint style="info" %} Mac and Linux users can use FlatRedBall, but in a code-only environment. The FlatRedBall Editor requires Windows. {% endhint %}

At a minimum you need to install .NET desktop development.

2 - XNA 4.0 Redistributable

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27598 Although this is not required to build and run FlatRedBall games, it is required to use Gum, which is the preferred FlatRedBall UI tool.

3 - .NET SDK

FlatRedBall projects are built with .NET 8 or newer. If you are using Visual Studio then you do not need to explicitly install .NET 8. If you are using a different IDE such as Visual Studio Code, then you need to install .NET SDK 8:

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

You must also install the .NET 6 SDK even if you have .NET 8 installed since the FlatRedBall Editor relies on this version for loading projects. This may change in a future version of FlatRedBall:

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/6.0

Newer Versions of Visual Studio (as of version 17.5.1) install .NET SDK 7.0 or newer which have a bug preventing projects from being loaded in the FlatRedBall Editor. Therefore, you need to manually install .NET 6 SDK.

4 - Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013

This dependency is required to build shader files. If you are certain that you will not be using any custom shaders or post processing, then you can skip this installation. However, we recommend installing this to avoid confusing errors if you do end up using any shaders.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784

Downloading FlatRedBall

The most common approach to making FlatRedBall games is to use the FlatRedBall Editor. The Editor can be downloaded from a pre-built .zip file, or it can be built from source. New users should download the pre-built .zip file.

Downloading and Running FlatRedBall

1. Download the latest zip file from https://files.flatredball.com/content/FrbXnaTemplates/DailyBuild/FRBDK.zip.

   1. Alternatively, the FlatRedBall Editor (no additional tools) prebuilt can be downloaded from Github. This is not recommended for new users, but experienced users can replace the FlatRedball Glue folder with the contents from the built files: https://github.com/vchelaru/FlatRedBall/actions

2. (Optional) Unblock the ZIP file. This will prevent the windows protected your PC warning.
   

   1. Right-click the ZIP file and chose Properties
   2. Check-mark the Unblock option and Click Apply
   3. Close the Properties window\

3. Unzip the file after downloading

   

   Extract the FRBDK.zip file

4. Go to the folder where the .zip file unzipped to (by default called FRBDK)

5. Open the Run FlatRedBall.bat file (double click it)

If you see the Windows protected your PC dialog, click More info -> Run Anyway

The FlatRedBall Editor should appear.