After you’ve read about the Display Orientation features of FGF, a natural question to ask is “How do I draw and take input with a rotated display?” Fortunately FGF has some methods to help in this department that sit alongside the rotation methods and properties in the Application class.

Application.OrientedDisplaySize

If you need to draw something relative to the size of the screen, use the OrientedDisplaySize property of the Application class. This property differs from DisplaySize, which is used to change the actual size of the display, in that OrientatedDisplaySize reacts to the selected rotation of the display, set with the DisplayOrientation property.

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DisplaySize = new Vector2(272, 480);
DisplayOrientation = DisplayOrientation.Rotated;
 
Console.WriteLine(OrientedDisplaySize.ToString());

Because the display is set to be rotated (landscape on the Zune HD), the above code will actually print out a display size of (480, 272) rather than the standard (272, 480) size.

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New in the Focused Games Framework is the support for rotating and resizing the display on the fly. The main reason for this functionality is for mobile platforms like the Zune HD that support games in a landscape mode as well as a portrait mode. Supporting either in your game is made easy with FGF-you just need to know the right properties. In the standard display mode, the Zune HD has a display resolution of 272 pixels by 480 pixels. In landscape mode those two measurements are switched: 480 pixels by 272 pixels. While it is important to know the standard resolution, mucking about with a render target and backbuffer size is no longer necessary.

The one hitch? Your game class needs to inherit from FocusedGames.Xna.Application instead of Microsoft’s Game class. The following code block sets a Zune HD game up for landscape rendering.

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public class Game1 : Application
{
    public Game1()
    {
        // Set the display size and the rotation
        DisplaySize = new Vector2(272, 480);
        DisplayOrientation = DisplayOrientation.Rotated;
    }
 
    // ...
}

Note that to keep the device in portrait mode, you don’t need to change the value of DisplayOrientation but setting the DisplaySize property to the standard value is a good idea. Happy landscaping!

Beware that when you call TouchPanel.GetState twice within the game loop, what touch locations had a Pressed state the first time will have a Moved state the second time. Consider the following lines of code.

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TouchCollection touches = TouchPanel.GetState();
 
foreach (TouchLocation locale in touches)
{
    if (locale.State == TouchLocationState.Released && locale.Id == id1)
        id1 = -1;
    else if (locale.State == TouchLocationState.Pressed && id1 == -1)
        id1 = locale.Id;
    else if (locale.Id == id1)
        pos1 = locale.Position;
}
 
touches = TouchPanel.GetState();
 
foreach (TouchLocation locale in touches)
{
    // Can fail if the first time through it was Pressed.
    if (locale.Id == id1 && locale.State == TouchLocationState.Pressed)
    {
        // Do something important
    }
}

Note that it isn’t important that these are in the same file let alone the same method. You cannot rely on having access to the same state data everytime you call GetState within the game’s loop. So it will probably become important to put the touch code in a global location and store the states for the duration of the loop. For instance you can store the TouchCollection data in a static variable at the top of the Game’s Update method.

One of the first “games” I made for the Zune HD was a simple little application to test how accurate and quick the touch panel is. This How To gives you the code to get started with your own basic testing application.

After creating a Zune game with XNA 3.1, the first thing you need to do is define a basic particle struct to hold some data that we track as the user touches the screen. Specifically we need to track whether or not a particle is active (do we update it and draw it?), its position and its life (how long it has been there). I created this structure within the Game1 class but really it can go anywhere.

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My Zune HD (32gb Original) has arrived, and it is sweet. UI is fantastic, internet is reasonably fast and quality of audio and video is superb!