Content Pipeline and dependent files

[besopuzzz]

Can you tell me how to implement the construction of individual files? Let me give you an example: there is an atlas in which individual sprite regions are stored. When the atlas file is being built, separate sprites must be created and rebuilt (with a specific Importer and Proccessor). I looked at the ContentProcessor methods and found AddOutputFile() and addDependency() there. I think they will help me, but I don't even have a rough understanding of how these methods work.

[mrhelmut]

I am not sure about what you are trying to do, but following some of your messages it seems that you are trying to work with texture atlases, though not a way you're intended to work with.

Tell me if I understand it wrongly, but I feel like you are trying to give a spritesheet (a single image file containing multiple frames of sprites) to the MGCB, and wish that to be treated as if each of those frames can be loaded individually like Content.Load() would only load a single of those frame, am I correct?

This sounds like a misunderstanding of how spritesheet work and why they exist.

Spritesheets are expected to stay a single unique texture/file with a single Content.Load(), and then you would draw the appropriate frame by using a source rectangle with the proper SpriteBatch.Draw() overload.
This is more optimized because asking the GPU to change texture might be a costly operation impairing performances.

What you are likely looking into, is how to define those source rectangle and retrieve them at runtime, independently of how the texture is treated. A possible solution would be to simply put the rectangles position and size in a text file, and load that text file like a standard file and parse those rectangles. Some software export this for you, like Aseprite, which can export a spritesheet with a PNG containing all the frames, and a JSON file containing the rectangles. You would them load the PNG through MGCB, and the JSON manually. You could also look into MonoGame.Aseprite which propose importers and processors so that all of that is transparent to you (but before using it, I would suggest try doing it the manual way to assimilate the concept).

If I'm wrong and you are really looking into splitting a spritesheet into individual files, then MGCB is likely not what you are looking for and I would rather look into how to split PNGs.

[besopuzzz]

I understand perfectly how SpriteSheet works. I don't want to cut the PNG file into small sprites. Ideally, I wanted to analyze the atlas into sprites, serialize them into files and then load them in the game via ContentManager.Load(). Moreover, each Sprite would have a link to the atlas (and already in it access to a common texture).

Although if we talk about the initial problem, I wanted to load atlas sprites via ContentManager.Load() via the path "Atlases/AtlasLevel1_40", where Atlases/ is the folder with atlases, AtlasLevel1 is the atlas of level 1, _40 is the sprite index. But since ContentManager.Load() first checks for the presence of a file along the path "Atlases/AtlasLevel1_40", I will get an error. From this, I got the idea to create these sprites manually via MGCB. But I understand that MGCB is too stripped down and does not have the functionality to expand and use user parameters (besides .dll files), and I will not be able to solve my problem this way.

[mrhelmut]

I see. MGCB is merely a format converter and serializer. You could kind of bend it to your use case with some hacks, but I feel like the solution would be more convoluted than it has to be.

I would load AtlasLevel1 as a normal texture through MGCB, and then use System.IO to load and parse the _40 file.