Nick Gravelyn

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Sprite Sheet Packer Tool – XNA GS Example

October 7th, 2009 | 6 comments

Since I designed the Sprite Sheet Packer to be as agnostic as possible in regards to what you might use the output for, some people may not know how to read that file in for use in their XNA GS game. So here’s a quick run down.

First, add both the outputted PNG and TXT file to your content project. Right click on the TXT file and choose the Properties option. Find the “Build Action” property and set that to None and the “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy if Newer”. This will copy the text file to your outputted folder without trying to build it as content.

Next, we read in the file. Here’s a snippet from the downloadable sample that shows how that can be achieved:

Dictionary<string, Rectangle> spriteSourceRectangles =
   new Dictionary<string, Rectangle>();

// open a StreamReader to read the index
string path = Path.Combine(
   StorageContainer.TitleLocation,
   "Content\\Sprites.txt");
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(path))
{
   // while we're not done reading...
   while (!reader.EndOfStream)
   {
      // get a line
      string line = reader.ReadLine();

      // split at the equals sign
      string[] sides = line.Split('=');

      // trim the right side and split based on spaces
      string[] rectParts = sides[1].Trim().Split(' ');

      // create a rectangle from those parts
      Rectangle r = new Rectangle(
         int.Parse(rectParts[0]),
         int.Parse(rectParts[1]),
         int.Parse(rectParts[2]),
         int.Parse(rectParts[3]));

      // add the name and rectangle to the dictionary
      spriteSourceRectangles.Add(sides[0].Trim(), r);
   }
}

Pretty simple, right? Then you can just use the name of a sprite to get the source rectangle and draw that sprite. To see it in action, download the sample and give it a go.

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