Sample Overview
Manually combining sprite images into larger sheets works
well if you have just a few sprites, but it quickly becomes a burden as your
game grows larger. When you have hundreds of sprites, it can be laborious to
manually pack them all into a single sprite sheet texture, and then to remember
where you put each image so that you know what source rectangle to pass to
SpriteBatch.Draw in your game code.
This sample automates the process of creating sprite sheets
by using a custom content processor. You provide an XML file listing any number
of individual bitmap files, one per sprite. The processor reads all these
bitmaps, packs them into a single larger texture, and saves this new texture
along with information recording which source rectangle should be used for each
sprite. You can then look up your sprites by name, rather than having to
remember the specific coordinates for each image.
Downloads
