CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xna-4.0
NDraskovic
NDraskovic

Reputation: 706

Loading files during run time in XNA 4.0

I made a content pipeline extension (using this tutorial) in XNA 4.0 game.

I altered some aspects, so it serves my need better, but the basic idea still applies. Now I want to go a step further and enable my game to be changed during run time. The file I am loading trough my content pipeline extension is very simple, it only contains decimal numbers, so I want to enable the user to change that file at will and reload it while the game is running (without recompiling as I had to do so far). This file is a very simplified version of level editor, meaning that it contains rows like:

1 1,5 1,78 -3,6

Here, the first number determines the object that will be drawn to the scene, and the other 3 numbers are coordinates where that object will be placed.

So, how can I change the file that contains these numbers so that the game loads it and redraws the scene accordingly?

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1016

Answers (2)

Jon
Jon

Reputation: 163

Considering you've created a custom content pipeline extension I presume you know how to load in data using streamreader? Where you could just empty your level data and load new data in by reading through the text file line by line?

The reason I mention this is because as far as I am aware it's not possible to load in data through the content pipeline during runtime especially because the xna redistribute does not contain the content pipeline.

Another option could be to change to using xml for the level file and use XElement which I quite recently found and this is my current method.

Here is a commented example of using StreamReader to load in simple level data from a .txt file. http://pastebin.com/fFXnziKv

Upvotes: 1

Fermin Silva
Fermin Silva

Reputation: 3377

In XNA 4, if you are using StorageContainer, you can do something like:

(...)
StorageContainer storageContainer = //get your container

Stream stream = storageContainer.OpenFile("Level.txt", FileMode.OpenOrCreate);
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream);

while (!sr.EndOfStream)
{
    String line = sr.ReadLine();
    //use line to do something meaningful
}
stream.Close();
storageContainer.Dispose();
(...)

From personal experience, if you go for raw TextReader, the only problem is to get the path of your Content folder, which can be relatively easy to retrieve (in Windows only!)

Upvotes: 0

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