   Accessing game content quickly with XNA?
  I havn't done very much with XNA but from what I've read, the only way I can read custom data at runtime and work with the 360 is to do this:"Solution: wrap your XML data in <XnaContent> and <Asset> tags. Add the XML file to C# Express, go to the properties for this file and set "XNA Framework Content" to true, then choose the "XML Content Importer" and "No Processing Required". Finally, implement a ContentTypeWriter and ContentTypeReader for your custom type."My question is, would it kill my framerate if I did a significant amount of small reads and writes to the XML per frame?   
  Why would you be reading/writing content each frame? Normally, that's something you do when your level loads (or, spread out over a long time period if your game streams content).   ;  It's not true that you need to use XML Content importing and processing on the 360, that's just one (potentially convenient) way of doing it.  On the 360 you have full access to the File I/O stuff, so you can read in data in whatever format you'd like.  The XmlSerializer stuff is also available, if you'd like.  When deploying you just have to make sure that anything you need on the 360 is in the output folder for your project (bin\Xbox 360\Debug or bin\Xbox 360\Release) when you deploy it if you want it to get copied to the 360.However one important thing to note is that you can't write to files in the folder where your game executable lives.  If you want to write to data, you need to use the StorageContainer class to request space on the HDD or Memory Card to store files.Reading and writing to a file on your main thread will certainly hurt performance, since these operations are not quick at all.  It would probably be best if you could read everything into some sort of managed structure in memory, and then do all your modifications to that.  Then when you need to, you can save it to the storage device.  Otherwise, you would probably need to use a separate thread for your read and writes so that they don't block rendering and updating.   ;  Thanks for clearing things up. I'm trying to stream content in, maybe it will perform better if I only perform the reading and writing every 10 frames or something? I don't know what the best solution would be. I guess I could store more information in memory than I was planning on. What I wanted to do was mainly store and retrieve physics properties for hundreds of thousands of objects as needed. I guess I'll have to load as many as I can into memory and figure out a different way to stream content than what I was planning. No harm though, I'm still at the planning stage anyhow.   