How can I draw a texture line by line

Question

I wish to draw a texture to the screen line by line (horizontal lines). Can I do this in xna?

At first I wish to just start at the top of the texture, draw one single horizontal line of pixels and x no of milliseconds later draw the next line and so on until the texture is fully drawn. In the future I may want to draw these horizontal lines in any order.

Any ideas how best to achieve this?

Answer 1

You can just specify how much of the image you want to draw in the spriteBatch.Draw() method, like so: (Variable declaration is only for self-documentation)

height = Math.Max(height + 1, 500);
Rectangle destinationRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, 500, height);
Rectangle sourceRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, 500, height);
spriteBatch.Draw(my500x500Texture, destinationRect, sourceRect, Color.White);

All this does is draw one more pixel of the background texture every call until it reaches the full height of the image (500 in the example). Note that render speeds will be different on different machines, so you will likely want to base the draw height on the gametime to be more consistent.

To draw random one-line segments of the image, I would use one draw statement per line and draw each line like so:

lineY = 42;  // Figure this part out yourself, and loop this somehow
Rectangle destinationRect = new Rectangle(0, 0 + lineY, 500, 1);  // Drawing at (0,0)
Rectangle sourceRect = new Rectangle(0, lineY, 500, 1);
spriteBatch.Draw(my500x500Texture, destinationRect, sourceRect, Color.White);

Answer 2

use Texture2D.getData() to extract the colors array

then use this array to create a new Texture and add a pixel on each time increment

you should be able to modify the below to your need

var texture = new Content.Load<Texture2D>("file");
var colors = texture.GetData();

var colorsNew = new Color[texture.Width * texture.Height];

colorsNew[0] = colors[0]
texture.SetData(colorsNew);


//DRAW texture

//nextUpdate

colorsNew[1] = colors[1]
texture.SetData(colorsNew);


//DRAW texture

note this is untested and you may need to alter the order in which colorsNew is filled, but this should basically do what you require