Virtual Realm

XNA Toolkit - New Collection of XNA Tools by Nick G

Saturday, October 20 2007 - gse, xna

Nick Gravelyn has just released a small set of tools for the XNA Framework, he has called this tool set "XNA Toolkit". At the moment there are only two tools included in the set but it is a good start.

The first tool is a "Spritefont" File Generator that will assist you in creating those xml files to define your sprite fonts, and the second is a class generator that will wrap around your .fx files and generate the c# classes.

"Currently the two applications are the EffectClassGenerator and XNAFontCreator. XNAFontCreator is a small WinForms application I wrote to assist in generating those pesky .spritefont XML files. It lets you choose a font from a list, customize all the properties, and then of course saving and loading. The application also has a built in favorites list (saved as text file in the user’s My Documents folder) so you can easily remember fonts you like using.

The EffectClassGenerator is another nifty app. It works by you dragging in any .fx file. The application will then generate a C# class to wrap that effect file. It builds an enum to use for selecting techniques (no more string garbage when switching techniques) as well as use EffectParameters with properties to get and set values (no more string garbage when setting parameter values). It’s a very nice tool if you want to make sure you are keeping garbage low and avoiding typos when working with effects."