Question

I am building a game with XNA, and I have a custom file format for my game’s levels. I want to load them and parse them myself, without using XNA’s content pipeline. I have this much working, and by adding the files to the Content project I can even edit them in Visual Studio (which I also want).

The Problem: I get a warning stating “Project item ‘item.lvl’ was not built with the XNA Framework Content Pipeline. Set its Build Action property to Compile to build it.”

I do not want XNA to Compile it, since I am doing my own parsing. How can I disable the warning?

Answer 1

Set the file’s Build Action to None, and then set it to Copy if newer. That will cause the file to be written to the proper output directory without putting it through the Content Pipeline.