Tuesday, June 10, 2008

XNA Engine and ContentBuilder

Back in the days of XNA 1.0 I made a class to help me load content at runtime. The approach taken was to use the MSBuild engine to construct a Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine.Project containing all the content items and use it to build them. At the time, it was pretty cool. Then, along came XNA 2.0 and the ContentProcessorContext.BuildAsset() method, which made my ContentBuilder class totally useless. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to present and I'm attempting to build some sort of an XNA engine. I'd really like to be able to use an external tool (eg 3DS Max or Blender or a custom scene editor) to kick off the content build and then run the game directly (no VS builds!). And guess what... my existing ContentBuilder class is perfect for the task! At least, in my head it works beautifully.

Oh, and the engine features (some planned, some existing) are:
- Use JigLibX physics
- Use GraphiXNA rendering library
- Use XNAnimation library
- 3ds Max scene exporter
- C# scripts for controlling scene nodes (and other stuff)
- Editor for building the world and authoring scripts

Let me know if you have any feature suggestions or if your interested in checking it out once it's done.

3 comments:

Tim said...

I'd forgotten about this little patch of the net, Roonda!

roonda said...

How funny, so had I! How do those consistent bloggers find the time? It's preposterous.

Tim said...

you just put your fingers together and POST :P