Hi everyone! I’ve been working with a small team for a little while on making a SHMUP in XNA Gamestudio. Although the action is 2D, we are using 3D assets for some more dynamic graphics. When I decided recently to learn more about HLSL, I decided to follow a set of tutorials that are based around XNA Gamestudio, since they would be directly applicable to our project.
Anyways, since I was working in XNA, I started poking around our project to see how we are going about things right now. What I found is that we are currently importing our assets basically by creating a separate script module for each asset. We’re still fairly early on in the project, so there aren’t an overabundance of assets yet, but even by the time we finish our first prototype, I could definitely see the current ‘system’ (in which our programmer is adding each one manually) getting out of hand.
So, I was trying to think of how best to go about handling asset import. What I am thinking is that, if the model and texture files have a coherent naming convention, I could create a script that would load all of the information into an xml file that would be linked to the project. The script could then be run regularly when we’ve added assets and it could check the current list, make sure no files are missing, and then find newly added items and append them to the list.
Then, in the game code, I think we could have then a simple function to read the xml file to include all of the asset references.
I still need to do a lot of research to find out how I would actually go about doing the above, but I figured that by posting here, I would not only have a record of my initial thoughts, but also have the opportunity to get some advice on how best to go about it, or even if anyone has seen any good tutorials that would relate pretty closely.
Thank you for any feedback, comments, or even just reading the post and thinking to yourself “What a noob!”