Content Pipeline assemblies

re: Content Pipeline assemblies

Metalov — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:54:02 GMT

Hi Shawn,

Just out of curiosity why did you (read XNA team,i realize I am just asking for an unofficial answer) choose fbx and not collada format?Is it because of commercial reasons or partnership?Or maybe because collada isn't really mature yet?

re: Content Pipeline assemblies

ShawnHargreaves — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:15:17 GMT

We didn't exactly "not" choose Collada format: we understood that there are many interesting formats out there (imagine how cool it would be if you could import directly from .max or .mb files, for instance!) so it was important to design a system that could support many different formats. This is the main reason for the separate importer stage, as this lets people develop importers for many different file formats, but have them all use the same standard object model and processors.

When it came to which importers we wrote ourselves to ship built in to the product, time was very limited, so we just had to pick whichever we thought would give us the biggest bang for our limited buck.

re: Content Pipeline assemblies

nuvem — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:30:22 GMT

Shawn, is there any other solution to the shared data type problem other than creating duplicate projects? What conflict prevents one from creating a single Xbox project that is also imported into the Windows pipeline extension project?

re: Content Pipeline assemblies

ShawnHargreaves — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 01:27:25 GMT

> What conflict prevents one from creating a single Xbox project that is also imported into the Windows pipeline extension project?

You cannot load and use an Xbox project on Windows (or vice versa). Projects are specific to a platform, and can only be used on the platform they were built for.

Fortunately, creating duplicate projects is trivially easy once you realize that you have to do this, thanks to the cross platform project management features in Game Studio.

re: Content Pipeline assemblies

Ari Velazquez — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:26:33 GMT

Just wanted to say that this diagram and your bullet points have made this entire framework make sense INSTANTLY. You should convince the team to include that image in every new XNA project that Visual Studio builds so everyone can see it right away.