Dynamically Loading Content & Multiplayer

Summary:

Tutorial(s) on how to accomplish multiplayer in XNA, and load resources dynamically

Dynamically Loading Content & Multiplayer

RLS0812 (guest) 25 Jul 2012 21:10

I have found your tutorials quite helpful on understanding how XNA works, however there are 2 things I am wondering about, that I have not been able to find in the tutorial series.

• The first one is: How would I dynamically load images into my project, instead of hard coding every single one? What I am working on has hundreds of images, some of which are added by the user.

• The second is: How would I program multiplayer into my project? My project is to be a 2D graphical MUD.

Help on these issues would be greatly appreciated - and thanks for the wonderful tutorial series you have.

Morbius (guest) 06 Aug 2012 16:09

I have to second both of those requests. They are core to something I'm looking into myself. I also second the last part, "thanks for the wonderful tutorial series you have".

rbwhitaker 06 Aug 2012 16:25

I agree. Both of these are good topics. In the tutorial set that I'm going to be making soon, about making a complete game from scratch, I intend on including a multiplayer component. All of these players will be on the same machine. (So no networking yet, though that's also worth some discussion.)

As far as your image loading is concerned, that gets a little tougher. XNA doesn't have that kind of stuff built in, so you'd need to do more work yourself to locate the images and get them loaded and turned into Texture2D objects, etc. But overall, a good idea for a tutorial.

Alternatively, if you know you're on a developer machine (usually not the case) you can actually cram the images through the content pipeline and get a Texture2D object like magic. That may also be worth a tutorial, but I suspect it will only be helpful in a few cases.

Anyway, good ideas. Keep 'em coming.

Morbius (guest) 08 Aug 2012 02:44

Thanks for the reply.

After a bit of looking around, there appears to be some options regarding the two requests…

1) Texture2D.FromFile Method

2) It appears XNA does have networking functions and a good tutorial for some of that would be great. For my project, I think I'm going to look into Lidgren.Network rather then use XNA.

rbwhitaker 08 Aug 2012 04:53

You know, I've seen that Texture2D.FromFile method before, but you may not actually be able to use it, depending on what you're wanting to do. I just Googled Texture2D.FromFile, and on the page I got in Microsoft's documentation, it said something to the effect of "this method is only available on Windows." So that would mean you can't use it if you want to put your game on the Xbox 360 or the Windows 7 Phone.

Additionally, I noticed that the stuff I found was for XNA 3.1. I looked at the documentation for XNA 4.0, and it appears to be missing. I also tried looking for it with Visual Studio's IntelliSense and couldn't find it there either. They may have removed that in XNA 4.0. What I do see is Texture2D.FromStream, which could be used to do the same thing, but I'm not sure what format it is expecting that stream to be in. So it may or may not work.

Anyway, you might be able to get it to work still. I didn't spend that much time trying to get to the bottom of it. I'm just letting you know what I found, too.

I've actually heard of lots of people using Lidgren, so that may be a good way to go. Let us know if it works out well.

But yeah, I've gotten enough requests for networking stuff over the years that it's definitely on my list of tutorials to make. At some point. :)

Morbius (guest) 09 Aug 2012 03:12

Yep, its definitely the stream version. Apparently the FromFile version was an older implementation. I think it even still works, just depreciated. But as the stream version is the supported way, I didn't bother to even test the file version.

using (Stream stream = File.OpenRead("cat.png"))
{
texture = Texture2D.FromStream(GraphicsDevice, stream);
}

Tested and works fine.

The FromFile version was only functional on one platform, but as I understand it, the stream version was implemented on all of them.