I have started looking at XNA, which I’ve been longing to do for quite some time now. My friend Jens came over to guide me some of the basics, and after a little configuration, we happily loaded random textures by pressing space.

Gettings started with XNA

Although XNA has much to offer, I’m glad if I could even get so far as to create a crappy game that no one will ever download. Jens, however, has created quite a few games for XNA as kobingo. Make sure to check them out, especially the nice Painting Party app!

Jens has also created a nice XNA framework that helps you get started quickly. I think it looks absolutely amazing, but still think that I’d benefit from reading a tutorial or two before just using a framework on top of XNA. Game projects are quite different from the software I usually create, so I’d better read something before I get my hands dirty.

I chose to start my XNA journey with a Microsoft tutorial that shows you how you get a small 2D game up and running, with a bouncing sprite. You can check it out here. I will then check out some more tutorials with 3D models and a more advanced functionality, before I continue my “which-I-thought-would-be-trivial” project.

My first util: Batch load assets from a folder

After playing around with XNA for a while, I quickly realized how tedious it is to load assets manually, especially if the project uses a lot of images, sounds, textures etc. I therefore decided to create a util that loads all assets from a folder with one single call.

The function below is a ContentManager extension that can load all asset files in a folder and parse them into any asset types. The extension requires that the specified folder is relative to the Content.RootDirectory folder.

public static Dictionary<String, T> LoadContent<T>(this ContentManager contentManager, string contentFolder)
{
   //Load directory info, abort if none
   DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(contentManager.RootDirectory + "\\" + contentFolder);
   if (!dir.Exists) 
   {
      throw new DirectoryNotFoundException();
   }

   //Init the resulting list
   Dictionary<String, T> result = new Dictionary<String, T>();

   //Load all files that matches the file filter
   FileInfo[] files = dir.GetFiles("*.*");
   foreach (FileInfo file in files)
   {
      string key = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(file.Name);
      result[key] = contentManager.Load<T>(contentManager.RootDirectory + "/" + contentFolder + "/" + key);
   }
   
   //Return the result
   return result;
}

The function can, for instance, be used by the main Game class like this:

var textures = Content.LoadContent<Texture2D>("Textures");
var models = Content.LoadContent<Model>("Models");
var songs = Content.LoadContent<Song>("Songs");

The method returns a dictionary, so if you want to access the “warrior” model in the models dictionary, you just have to access it as such:

var warriorModel = models["warrior"];

Hope it helps!