The next
release of the XNA Framework won't add anything dramatically new to
the content pipeline, but includes a lot of tweaks and bugfixes that
didn't make it in time for our first version. This update is mostly
about polishing what we already shipped, rather than attempting to
boldly go where no pipeline has gone before (but fear not: we have no
shortage of plans for going boldly in the future...)
I'm
particularly happy about how many of these changes were driven by
feedback from our users. If you are a regular on the forums, you will
probably recognize most of the things listed below. Never say we aren't
listening! And please keep the feedback coming.
So what exactly
has changed?
New content types
Runtime improvements
- Added a
ContentManager.ReadAsset method. This is interesting for subtle and
powerful reasons that deserve their own blog post. Stay tuned...
- Vertex
and index buffers created through the content pipeline can now be read
back using GetData. Note: I don't actually believe doing this is a good
idea! The best way to access mesh data for things like collision is to
pull it out into a specialized collision data structure in a custom
processor, rather than reading it back from the GPU at runtime. But hey.
You asked for it, you got it!
- Added
ContentManager.RootDirectory property
- Added
ContentReader.AssetName property
Build time improvements
- Null content builds are dramatically faster (when nothing has
changed, or when there is no content in a game library project)
- Building
textures is much faster
- You can now cancel content builds
part way through
- The clean command now works for content as
well as code
- If you set "Tools / Options / Projects and
Solutions / Build and Run / MSBuild project build output verbosity" to
anything above "Minimal", the content pipeline will now tell you exactly
why each asset is being rebuilt (useful for diagnosing incremental
rebuild problems)
- Added more constructor overloads to
ExternalReference, making it more convenient to use
A
breathtaking bundle of beneficial bugfixes
- Too many for
me to bother listing them all here
We also added some new
methods to the math classes. These aren't specifically part of the
content pipeline, but can be useful when writing processors. For
instance the new Matrix.Decompose method is particularly handy for
manipulating animation keyframe matrices.
And we added per pixel
lighting to BasicEffect. That has nothing at all to do with the
content pipeline, but I'm still going to mention it because I
like shiny things. High quality specular makes me a happy chappie.