Draw Rectangle with XNA

Question

I am working on game. I want to highlight a spot on the screen when something happens.

I created a class to do this for me, and found a bit of code to draw the rectangle:

static private Texture2D CreateRectangle(int width, int height, Color colori)
{
    Texture2D rectangleTexture = new Texture2D(game.GraphicsDevice, width, height, 1, TextureUsage.None,
    SurfaceFormat.Color);// create the rectangle texture, ,but it will have no color! lets fix that
    Color[] color = new Color[width * height];//set the color to the amount of pixels in the textures
    for (int i = 0; i < color.Length; i++)//loop through all the colors setting them to whatever values we want
    {
        color[i] = colori;
    }
    rectangleTexture.SetData(color);//set the color data on the texture
    return rectangleTexture;//return the texture
}

The problem is that the code above is called every update, (60 times a second), and it was not written with optimization in mind. It needs to be extremely fast (the code above freezes the game, which has only skeleton code right now).

Any suggestions?

Note: Any new code would be great (WireFrame/Fill are both fine). I would like to be able to specify color.

Answer 1

The SafeArea demo on the XNA Creators Club site has code to do specifically that.

You don't have to create the Texture every frame, just in LoadContent. A very stripped down version of the code from that demo:

public class RectangleOverlay : DrawableGameComponent
{
    SpriteBatch spriteBatch;
    Texture2D dummyTexture;
    Rectangle dummyRectangle;
    Color Colori;

    public RectangleOverlay(Rectangle rect, Color colori, Game game)
        : base(game)
    {
        // Choose a high number, so we will draw on top of other components.
        DrawOrder = 1000;
        dummyRectangle = rect;
        Colori = colori;
    }

    protected override void LoadContent()
    {
        spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);
        dummyTexture = new Texture2D(GraphicsDevice, 1, 1);
        dummyTexture.SetData(new Color[] { Color.White });
    }

    public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
    {
        spriteBatch.Begin();
        spriteBatch.Draw(dummyTexture, dummyRectangle, Colori);
        spriteBatch.End();
    }
}