AssetBuilder is a library for automatically scanning asset files and generating Java code that does the asset loading/disposing.

Previously, whenever you update assets for your libGDX project, you might also need to update your code that did asset load/reference/dispose work. For example, when you add a TextureAtlas to your project, you might need to add the following code:

public class AssetBundle {

    protected AssetManager assetManager;
    
    // The new added TextureAtlas
    public TextureAtlas newAtlas;
    
    // you might also want to add a field that reference the TextureRegion in TextureAtlas
    public TextureRegion newRegion1;
    public TextureRegion newRegion2;

    public void loadAsset() {
        assetManager.load("new_atlas.atlas", TextureAtlas.class);
        // ...
        // after the AssetManager actually loads the new TextureAtlas
        newAtlas = assetManager.get("new_atlas.atlas", TextureAtlas.class);
        newRegion1 = newAtlas.findRegion("newRegion1");
        newRegion2 = newAtlas.findRegion("newRegion2");
    }

}

This can be even boring when the TextureAtlas contains a lot of TextureRegions or when you have to add/update/remove a lot of assets.

However, with AssetBuilder, you only need to press the hotkey inside your IDE and the plugin will generate the code for you within less than 1 second. See an example code generated by AssetBuilder inside the tests folder here.

Code Structure

The library folder contains the library code, while the plugins folder contains plugin project for each IDE. Plugin projects depends on the library code. Currently there is only a Intellij IDEA plugin for libGDX gradle-based projects. However, you can easily create plugins based on the library code.

Note that the library scans and resolves asset files based on file extension, e.g., by default it resolves "libgdx.atlas" as a TextureAtlas asset then generate all the TextureRegion field for you,and it resolves "hello.particle" as a ParticleEffect asset, this can be adjusted in AssetBuilderOptions.json mentioned below.

Usage

There is already a installable IDEA plugin zip inside the Intellij IDEA plugin project folder, i.e., AssetBuilderForIDEA.zip, you can build the plugin project youself or you can directly install this zip to IDEA.

To use the plugin, open your gradle-based libGDX project, select your project and press ctrl+alt+1 which is the default hotkey for the IDEA plugin, then a balloon tooltip should appear and shows the result. The first time plugin is run, it will generate Java code under core project, and the package name and class name is com/gametravel/assets/gen/AssetBundle.java, it will also create a file named AssetBuilderOptions.json inside which you can adjust the plugin options for current libGDX project.

Using the code generated by AssetBuilder is quite easy and a lot like AssetManager except you don't have to manually load each asset:

public class AssetBuilderTest extends ApplicationAdapter {
    static AssetBundle asset;
    private SpriteBatch spriteBatch;

    @Override
    public void create() {
        spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch();
        // get instance of AssetBundle
        asset = AssetBundle.getInstance();
        // you can call asset.update() or asset.finishLoading() just like what you did with AssetManager
        asset.finishLoading();
    }

    @Override
    public void render() {
        Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0.2f, 0.2f, 0.2f, 1f);
        Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
        // directly use the newRegion1 field..
        spriteBatch.draw(asset.newRegion1, 20f, 20f);
    }

    @Override
    public void dispose() {
        super.dispose();
        // remember to dispose the AssetBundle instance
        asset.dispose();
    }
}

Current Status

Currently the library supports automatic loading/dispose of Shader/SpineBinary/SpineJson/BitmapFont/Music/ParticleEffect/Sound/Texture/TextureAtlas assets. Model/Pixmap/Skin are not yet supported because I wasn't using these asset type when creating this tool.

I created this tool mainly to avoid typing the same boring asset loading/disposing code for every libGDX project, especially those protype projects whose assets changed a lot. You might don't wanna load all assets at once in a large project, which is not yet supported by this tool, but you can fork and modify the tool, for example, you can put the assets loaded in menu screen in folder asset_pack_menu and game level pack1 assets in folder asset_pack_level_pack1 then udpated the code to handle this and generate AssetBundleMenu.java and AssetBundleLevelPack1.java, so you can load/dispose them separately.

Note that the code especially those generates AssetBundle code is quite hard-coded because I wanted to finish the tool ASAP.

And the following are what AssetBuilder does for each kind of assets:

For Shader, it generates field for ShaderProgram;

For SpineBinaray and SpineJson, it generates field for SkeletonData and AnimationStateData, you can modfify the code to generate more fields, like com.esotericsoftware.spine.Animation;

For BitmapFont, Music, Sound, ParticleEffect, Texture, it will generate corresponding fields, note that the tool defaultly distinguish Music and Sound by duration of audio assets, if duration is less than 5 seconds, the asset is classified as Sound, otherwise Music, and the library didn't resolve duration well when you use custom extension for audio files (Too lazy to fix this XD);

For TextureAtlas, it will generate TextureAtlas field and a lot of TextureRegion fields. It also avoids generating TextureRegion fields of those for other assets, e.g., if it found a TextureRegion goblin_arm is used for a SpineJson asset, then the goblin_arm field will not be generated.

License

Copyright 2014 Daniel Chow (zhouhang283295087@gmail.com)

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Credit

The AssetBuilder uses the following libraries:

MP3SPI - http://www.javazoom.net/mp3spi/mp3spi.html

Spine libGDX runtime - https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes

jorbis - http://www.jcraft.com/jorbis/