Content Pipeline Improvements

There are a couple of major improvements in the Content Pipeline, too. First, you can have multiple content projects associated with your main game project. This makes it easier for multiple artists or designers to work on the game at the same time, since you can split the content across multiple projects.

You could store and build all of the textures in a single content project. You can have all of the audio content built out of a second content project. You could also store platform-specific content in a single content project, and then build that content project only for the platform you need.

This makes it easy, for example, to have a game with shaders that can still draw and play on the Zune. The shaders would be included in the Windows- and Xbox-specific content projects in the solution, and the Zune-specific content project would contain art and data only for Zune.

Figure 2: Platform-specific content projects in Game Studio 3.0

The content pipeline also compresses all of the content .XNB files at build time. This is a lossless compression that decreases the deploy time for both Xbox 360 and Zune.

Furthermore, it decreases the load times by reading the compressed data out of storage and decompressing it as it loads. This is the default setting for Xbox 360 projects. You can control, by type, which .XNB files to compress.

This gives you more fine-grained control, if you need it, or you can switch it off completely to get a better idea of the size of your uncompressed content data.

We also include the latest .FBX importer updates from Autodesk. This includes new features such as richer material and shader support. Now you can successfully export and import models with multiple textures and multiple UV coordinates.

There is also much richer opaque data support from both Max and Maya. This presentation from GameFest 2008 given by Shawn Hargreaves shows you how rich it can be.