XNA Game Studio

One of Microsoft's latest creations is XNA Game Studio, this is a tool kit that can help you make games for Windows and XBox 360.



Whilst watching a presentation on what this is, I was struck by a thought that it could be useful outside the game arena. For example can it be useful to help manage my film assets?



For example ever wondered what shaders use a particular bitmap texture or if a scene links to a specific external character or prop file? What do you do if you want to send things to others? How do you know if you need to send a particular file? If I make an improvement to a particular model, how do I know which files need re-rendering with that item? How many times is a particular texture used?

The information is there in the files and it can be checked by opening them or analysing them but as the number of files increases that's going to be a problem.

XNA Build should be able to help and the examples shown on the slide show provide an insight into finding obsolete files and dependencies between files.

Question: What kind of media asset mangement do you use? Please reply in comments.

Links:


http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/


http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203894.aspx