I have tried to get my head around the content processor and textures, but I am a bit confused... I have 2 scenarios:
One is a model that contains a texture, the importer loads the xml and passes the texture filename to the processor, but I can only get a TextureContent, which seems to be a compile time reference to a texture, but this doesn't help me populate the Texture2D bit of my model.
The 2nd scenario is I want to piggyback of the texture processor to create a spritemap object from a texture file, the spritemap is basically a model which contains a texture and sprite width/height.
The thing that keeps getting me stumped is these ExternalReference and TextureContent, as the model, lets say:
public class SpriteMap
{
public Texture2D Texture { get; private set; }
public int SpriteWidth { get; private set; }
public int SpriteHeight { get; private set; }
public SpriteMap(Texture2D texture, int spriteWidth, int spriteHeight)
{
this.texture = texture;
this.spriteWidth = spriteWidth;
this.spriteHeight = spriteHeight;
}
}
Then I have a content processor like so:
[ContentProcessor(DisplayName = "TextureToSpriteMapProcessor")]
public class TextureToSpriteMapProcessor : ContentProcessor<Texture2D, ISpriteMap>
{
[DisplayName("Sprite Width")]
[DefaultValue(64)]
[Description("The size of each sprite's width within the sprite map.")]
public virtual int SpriteWidth { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Sprite Height")]
[DefaultValue(64)]
[Description("The size of each sprite's height within the sprite map.")]
public virtual int SpriteHeight { get; set; }
public override ISpriteMap Process(Texture2D input, ContentProcessorContext context)
{ return new SpriteMap(input, SpriteWidth, SpriteHeight); }
}
Now it complains that the processor is given a TextureContent, but that isn't a texture... but for some reason a TextureContent seems to magically turn into a Texture when it is loaded via the contentManager... so I am a bit baffled as to how I can get a texture in this instance. As both scenarios are fairly similar I am sure if I solve one I will solve them both, but ideally I want to be able to go:
contentManager.Load<ISpriteMap>("someTextureAsset");
If anyone can explain how to make this seemingly magic process work, I will give you much praise!
My main problem here was that I was trying to use the same model on both sides, the texture content is the compile time representation of the texture from my current understanding. So when I am in the compile-time domain of the Importer/Processor I can only work with these references and content data.
So to solve my problem I had to revert back to using TextureContent and not Texture2D, then make a model SpriteMapContent which contained the references to the textures in question and the other data required for the model. Then write a content reader/writer to govern how the data was put together in the run-time domain.
This similar post I made was what made it clearer to me where I was going wrong and what I needed to do to solve the problem.