Shawn Hargreaves Blog

Zune landscape mode

My Zune Freecell game runs in 320x240 landscape mode, rather than the default 240x320 portrait orientation.

Unfortunately, the XNA Framework does nothing to help you render rotated scenes.

Fortunately, you can do this rather easily by drawing everything to a rendertarget, then rotating that as a postprocess.

But unfortunately, copying the entire scene via a rendertarget didn't meet my power efficiency goals.

The most efficient way to do any task is to find some way to avoid the need to do it at all. If I rotate my textures ahead of time during the Content Pipeline build process, my game code will not need to bother rotating them at runtime on the Zune. So I wrote this custom Content Processor:

    [ContentProcessor]
    public class RotatedTextureProcessor : TextureProcessor
    {
        public override TextureContent Process(TextureContent input, ContentProcessorContext context)
        {
            if (context.TargetPlatform == TargetPlatform.Zune)
            {
                input.ConvertBitmapType(typeof(PixelBitmapContent<Color>));

                for (int i = 0; i < input.Faces.Count; i++)
                {
                    for (int j = 0; j < input.Faces[i].Count; j++)
                    {
                        PixelBitmapContent<Color> source = (PixelBitmapContent<Color>)input.Faces[i][j];
                        PixelBitmapContent<Color> dest = new PixelBitmapContent<Color>(source.Height, source.Width);

                        for (int x = 0; x < dest.Width; x++)
                        {
                            for (int y = 0; y < dest.Height; y++)
                            {
                                dest.SetPixel(x, y, source.GetPixel(y, source.Height - x - 1));
                            }
                        }

                        input.Faces[i][j] = dest;
                    }
                }
            }

            return base.Process(input, context);
        }
    }

Of course it is not enough to just rotate the contents of each texture: I also need to change the coordinates where I draw them on the screen. I did this by tweaking my SpriteBatch class:

    class Renderer : SpriteBatch
    {
        new public void Draw(Texture2D texture, Vector2 position, Color color)
        {
#if ZUNE
            position = new Vector2(240 - texture.Width - position.Y, position.X);
#endif
            base.Draw(texture, position, color);
        }
    }