Please help me decide how to figure out XNA's ContentPipeline

Question

I have read this link : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb464156.aspx

They said : "... the XNA Framework Redistributable file does not contain the Content Pipeline Build Runtime. Building content at run time is supported only when XNA Game Studio has been installed on the Windows-based development computer."

Actually, before I know of that, I have already used a lot of content pipeline to help me read out my game's assets. And because of that, I am now very headache to confront the publish's problem "The application requires that the assemblies Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline 3.1.0.0 be installed ....."

So I would like to find some ways that can help me solve this without convertion of my pipelines. So that I don't need to rewrite it all in new classes that manually load assets for me.

Regard, DDTmanSP

Answer 1

You can still use the content pipeline for loading content on machines which do not have the XNA Framework installed. You just cannot "build" the content on their machine.

When you compile your project, the content pipeline builds your content and converts it into a form that can easily read in at the game's runtime.

The only time this might be a problem is if you made a level editor that depended on the content pipeline for building the content at runtime.