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.

使用Content Pipeline将art assets从file转成游戏可以维护的资源。

 

Most games use art in the form of models, meshes, sprites, textures, effects, terrains, animations and so on. Such art assets can be created in many different ways and stored in many different file formats. They tend to change frequently in the course of game development.

介绍常见的art。主要是模型，网格，精灵，纹理，效果，地形，动画等。

 

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.

内容管道相当于说把这些不同的art file都给整合到游戏中，开发人员不需要花时间去解决这些文件的转换问题，只需要在XNA提供的统一接口中访问和使用这些资源就可以了。这个也符合面向对象原则，就是实现依赖于抽象。

Purpose of the Content Pipeline

The XNA Framework Content Pipeline is designed to:

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

 内容管道的目的：

1.消除content的创建差别，也就是说content的开发人员可以使用自己的工具创建content.

2. 将content的创建和游戏引擎解耦。

3.同时提供一种定制。就是现有的content pipeline如果不符合我们的需求，可以自己来建立。

Basics of the Content Pipeline

Recognizing that DCC tools save content in many 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).

对一些标准的content，XNA直接提供importer和processor。

• Third parties also create custom importers and processors for XNA Game Studio to support additional formats.

第三方创建的针对其他content的importer和processor.

• 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 To: Write a Custom Importer and Processor).

当然，如果微软提供的importer和processor不能满足需求，我们自定义他们。

• 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.

 通过ContentManager来加载这些art asset.当然，我们可以配置这些asset需要用到的importer和processor.

Importers vs. Content Processors

• An importer takes art assets saved in a particular 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 particular custom processor can consume.
• A processor takes 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顾名思义，相当于文件加载器。processor负责处理由importer生成的对象。