Gametools 1.5 Released!

Months after the initial release of gametools, I am very pleased to announce the release of the 1.5 version.

What changed? Not much, but a lot in the same time. The biggest modification was in the XNB support. Files are now parsed directly, not loaded in an XNA app to extract things. As a result, many limitations of the 1.0 version were fixed. (loading an asset on a different platform or with different profile for instance). It changed a lot the architecture of GXView. GXView is more stable, and a wider selection of XNB is viewable.

SpriteFont and Audio can now be previewed/extracted! And I expect to be able to load/extract 3D models and cubemaps really soon.

HMEdit can now generate normal maps (here above). So the tool is not only dedicated to landscape generation, but can help you to create good looking materials.

And ScreenBuddy can now batch-create thumbnails. (Useful to create thumbnails out of a folder containing images, or to generate websites thumbnails)

The licensing terms did not change, nor the download page. I want to warmly thank every donator. It really helped to keep this project alive, and I hope you will like this new version.

The download page: here

3 thoughts to “Gametools 1.5 Released!”

  1. Tried to open several xnb files and got “Cannot parse XNB files that use automatic serialization”… what that means?

  2. Hi CheloXL

    In an XNA project, you can add XML data that will be automatically deserialized in your own objects. In order to build the XNB, visual studio will require that you put your serializable classes in a separate library, so the xml can be processed prior to your real project, and the XNB produced do not contain any structure related information. So it is impossible to retrieve the original XML from the XNB without your classes.

    To sum up, you get this message when you try to open an XNB containing serialized data.

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