I'm currently writing a program in C# with the XNA framework. It is absolutely necessary for the game's images and text assets to be visible by the end user in the form of PNG files, so I can't use the content pipeline.
How would I go about using graphics and text in my XNA game without it?
You don't need the content pipeline.
MonoGame, for example, allows you to use LoadContent<Texture2D> and specify an image name of a file that's just a simple PNG in your Content directory. This is what I do for all my projects (since MonoGame has difficult/flakey? support of the content pipeline today), and because I don't care about "protecting" my assets by converting them into XN* format.
From what I remember of "vanilla" or MS XNA, this worked there too.
Content directory, and that textures that you load in this fashion do not have pre-multiplied alphas, so this will need to be done manually. See my answer here for a method that does this.
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Commented
Jan 21, 2013 at 22:57
BlendState to Non-Premultiplied. See my question here: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/44696/…
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Use Texture.FromStream to load the texture at runtime. This is a little tricky because of premultiplied alpha as referred to in ashes999 answer. Here is a great explanation from David Gouveia on how to do it correctly
