MonoGame/MonoGame

Support ContentTypeWriter.ShouldCompressContent Correctly

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#6,194 opened on Feb 16, 2018

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 (4 comments) (0 reactions) (1 assignee)C# (3,071 forks)batch import
ContentPipelineHelp Wantedbughelp wantedscope: apiscope: content-pipeline

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Description

We're not correctly supporting ContentTypeWriter.ShouldCompressContent on:

I know that XNA skips compression on sound effects compressed with MSADPCM... not sure about texture content.

The idea behind this API is to avoid extra overhead of generic compression formats (XNA used LZX and MonoGame uses LZ4) on content that is already significantly compressed. Otherwise at content loading time you do alot of extra CPU work to decompress it to only gain a tiny percentage of space.

Ideally we would test different sound effect and texture XNBs with and without compression to decide if compression is worth it in those cases. Like i don't remember if a texture already in a DXT format gains all that much when LZ4 compressed as well. If we gain less than 10% or 20% disk space it is arguable that we shouldn't compress those XNBs.

Also we need to fix ContentWriter to correctly obey ShouldCompressContent which it does not:

https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/blob/develop/MonoGame.Framework.Content.Pipeline/Serialization/Compiler/ContentWriter.cs#L147

Contributor guide

Research direction
Investigate the three content writers (SoundEffectContentWriter, Texture2DContentWriter, TextureCubeWriter) to understand how they handle compression, and check the ContentWriter.ShouldCompressContent logic. Test compression ratios on various content types to decide if compression is beneficial.
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
game dev
Issue type
Bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
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Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Mostly clear
Prerequisites
C#MonoGame
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30