Is there any way to use the pipeline programatically?

I want to make my game editable, it will be for windows / mac / linux only so I dont have to worry too much about some of the trip-ups, but I want to have a game editor. I am hoping there is some way to run stuff through the pipeline programatically so I dont have to ask people to hop over to the monogame pipeline program?

I have the same thing and I’m not using the MG Pipeline.

Loading my Textures directly with Filestreams,
For Fonts i’m converting fonts to bitmaps like sprite sheets and displaying the letters from it.
Loading sound files directly.

Using the pipeline gives you more performance tough, but shouldn’t be a problem for 2D games.

I am not making a 2D game though, so the performance added by the pipeline is helpful

You can run MGCB.exe programmatically to build content. The System.Diagnostics.Process class can do that. You just have to pass proper command line arguments. See http://www.monogame.net/documentation/?page=MGCB

Yes, you can hook up Pipeline directly in your program (tho only if you are targeting Desktop), to do it:

  1. Reference MonoGame.Framework.Content.Pipeline.dll located at: “C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\MonoGame\v3.0\Tools”
  2. Look at what MGCB is doing to compile content (it’s pretty much just a command line wrapper around the content pipeline): https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/blob/develop/Tools/MGCB/BuildContent.cs#L227