GXView

Hi everyone!

Like most of XNA user, I used to work with compiled XNB resources. The content pipeline is a good thing because you can immediately see what’s wrong with your assets. However, it’s getting a little tougher when you need dynamic resources.

If you want to allow your users to add content to your app, then they must compile themselves their textures/models/shaders/whatsoever. And nothing is harder than making a 3D artist install Visual Studio.

This is where GXView becomes handy. At first, GXView (known as XNBViewer) was a simple tool to preview XNB files. Then I added the “save as” function, and it became possible to save an FBX file as XNB, or to get back a .png from an XNB texture.

After working on GXView for a while, I decided to directly embed all the functions game developpers tend to use when working on a game.

Current features:

• FBX and X Loader
• FBX/X to XNB converter
• Image loader
• Image to XNB and XNB to Image converter
• Texture resizer (none, linear and bicubic interpolation)
• SpriteFont XNB viewer
• Screen capture
• XML Simple editor

Soon to come (depending on my availability):

• Shader editor / compiler / previewer
• Heighmap editor
• Video capture
• Hexadecimal editor

GXView is still provided as a beta version, and I’m working to improve the existing functionnalities and implement new one. Any feedback will be appreciated