XNa: Overview of the content Pipeline

Overview of the content Pipeline

Describes how the xNa game studio content pipeline lets you build art assets into your game automatically from the file formats in which they are maintained.

Use content pipeline to convert art assets from file to resources that can be maintained by the game.

 

Most games use art in the formModels,Meshes,Sprites,Textures,Effects,Terrains,AnimationsAnd so on. Such art assets can be created in your different ways and stored in your different file formats. They tend to change frequently in the course of game development.

This section describes common art. Mainly model, grid, Genie, texture, effect, terrain, animation, etc.

 

The content pipeline is designed to help you include such art assets in your game easily and automatically. for example, an artist working on a car model can add the resulting file to the xNa game studio game project, assign the model a name, and choose an importer and content processor for it. then a developer who wants to make the car drive can load it, by name, using a call to contentmanager. load. this simple flow enables the artist to focus on creating assets and the developer to focus on using them, without either having to spend time worrying about content transformation.

The content pipeline is equivalent to integrating these different art files into the game. Developers do not need to spend time solving the conversion problem of these files, you only need to access and use these resources in the unified interface provided by xNa. This is also in line with the object-oriented principle, that is, implementation relies on abstraction.

Purpose of the content Pipeline

The xNa framework content pipeline is designed:

• Enable game artists to use the digital content creation (DCC) tools of their choice.
• Provide a mechanic to decouple digital content's dependency on a particle game engine.
• Provide a simple, expandable content build system that meets the needs of both artists and developers.

Purpose:

1. Eliminate the difference in content creation. That is to say, content developers can use their own tools to create content.

2. decouple content creation from the game engine.

3. A customization is also provided. If the existing content pipeline does not meet our requirements, you can create it by yourself.

Basics of the content Pipeline

Recognizing that DCC tools save content in your different file formats, the xNa game studio content pipeline enables you build art assets into your game automatically from the file formats in which they are maintained. here's a high-level view of how it works.

• XNa game studio supplies standard importers and processors for a number of popular DCC file formats (see standard importers and processors ).

For some standard content, xNa directly provides importer and processor.

• Third parties also create custom importers and processors for xNa game studio to support additional formats.

Importer and processor created by a third party for other content.

• If you have enough information about a DCC File Format, you can write your own custom importer and processor for it using classes provided by the content pipeline class library (see How: write a custom importer and processor ).

Of course, if the importer and processor provided by Microsoft cannot meet the requirements, we will customize them.

• When you include an art asset file in your xNa game studio game project, you use its properties sheet to specify the appropriate importer and processor. thereafter, when you press F5 to build your game, the proper importer and processor for each asset is invoked automatically. the asset is built into your game in a form that can be loaded at run time on Windows or the Xbox 360 by using contentmanager. load.

Use contentmanager to load these art assets. Of course, we can configure importer and processor for these assets.

Importers vs. Content Processors

• AnImporterTakes art assets saved in a participating DCC File Format and converts them into objects in the xNa game studio content dom (Document Object Model) that standard content processors can consume, or into some other custom form that a particle m processor can consume.
• AProcessorTakes one specific type of imported art asset, such as a set of meshes, and compiles it into a managed code object that can be loaded and used by xNa game studio games on windows and the Xbox 360.

Importer, as its name implies, is equivalent to a file loader. Processor is responsible for processing objects generated by importer.