Doing XNA in Delphi Prism - xna

Question

I have installed Delphi Prism and XNA Game Studio 3.0. I have managed to translate to Delphi Prism XNA Tutorial 1 "Displaying a 3D Model on the Screen" (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb197293.aspx).
Project compiles fine, but I cannot load a model. It looks like there is a new "contentproj" type in XNA that is not in Delphi Prism...
Any idea how to get it to work?

Answer 1

You could just manually build the content project using msbuild. It might not have the same integration where you can just add content and change settings in solution explorer ... but it'll do the trick :-)
here is more info about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2006/11/07/build-it-ahead-of-time.aspx

Answer 2

I have finally managed to get it to work via 1) building "*.contentproj" with MSBuild from command line, 2) coping the resulting "Content" directory as a subdirectory where my Delphi Prism executable is outputted.
It would be nice to have Delphi Prism recognizing *.contentproj automatically and build it automatically.

Answer 3

I haven't done any XNA stuff yet, but here is my best guess :-)
So, the Content Project type is a sub-project for a standard XNA project that just compiles the game content (textures, sound etc) as a nested compile process, correct?
So I would assume that there must be some reference to the sub-project in either the project file or the solution file, perhaps the best way would be to create a simple XMA proj in C# or VB and look at the generated meta-files (csproj, contentproj etc)
Edit:
Oh, I'm suggesting here that you manually create the contentproj file and insert the reference, once you know what they look like, I assume that VS will then allow you to add, delete your content etc
That then just leaves the question of how is the XNA content pipeline compile process is fired, if it doesn't "just happen" that might be a question for marc hoffman et al
Hope this helps a little, its just a guess.
Good to see you in StackOverFlow by the way.
Rgds Tim Jarvis.

Answer 4

According to my knowledge, Prism is only announced and not released. Hence the trial is not a final product. As a RO customer I expect an email come release, but not before except for the announcement of it. Frankly, I don't know that XNA support is finalized or even working yet. You might be premature in trying this, given that the official release of Prism is still almost a month away at the soonest.
I don't know what to tell you to do to fix your problems with XNA, but it would be wise to wait for Prism itself. Until Prism is released I would consider XNA support "pending".

Answer 5

System.reflection can be used to gain access to inner workings of XNA to create xnb files
method Game1.LoadContent;
var
importer : TextureImporter;
texContent : Texture2DContent;
cc : ContentCompiler;
fullPath : String;
fs : FileStream;
args : array[1..7] of System.Object;
begin
spriteBatch := new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);
importer := new TextureImporter;
texContent := importer.Import(’asset.png’, nil) as Texture2DContent;
var compilerType := typeOf(ContentCompiler);
cc := compilerType.GetConstructors(BindingFlags.NonPublic or BindingFlags.Instance)[0].Invoke(nil) as ContentCompiler;
var compileMethod := compilerType.GetMethod("Compile", BindingFlags.NonPublic or BindingFlags.Instance);
fullPath := ‘assestName.xnb’;
fs := File.Create(fullPath);
args[1] := fs;
args[2] := texContent;
args[3] := TargetPlatform.Windows;
args[4] := GraphicsProfile.Reach;
args[5] := true;
args[6] := fullPath;
args[7] := fullPath;
compileMethod.Invoke
(
cc,
args
);
//SpriteTexture := Content.Load(’assetName’);
end;