Update 07/14/2010: With the latest Beta release of the Windows Phone 7 Tools there is now built in support for landscape games in XNA Game Studio 4.0. I just put it into my landscape game and it works great - it even automatically supports both landscape directions. Check out this article for details.
I've been working on a game in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 (WP7), but I have started thinking I should have gone the XNA route. I am now trying to recreate the game in XNA so that once I can get my hands on a device I can figure out for certain if the Silverlight version can perform as well as the XNA version for what I'm trying to accomplish.
In getting started in XNA it took me a bit to figure out how to draw my sprites and game in the landscape orientation on the phone. I also thought it was a bit tough to add a frame per second counter, something I heavily rely on when developing for Silverlight - this blog entry will show how to accomplish both.
How to create a landscape game in XNA for WP7
Keep in mind that according to this article by Shawn Hargreaves there will eventually be built in support in WP7 for handling the landscape orientation - this solution is just a temporary solution until then. Also, keep in mind that things like the X and Y positions for mouse and touch events will need to be inverted as well to support landscape.
First, we are going to create a RenderTarget2D - this is basically a buffer we are going to render everything to before rendering this buffer to the screen at a 90 degree rotation. We also want to define variables for the width and height of the game window instead of relying on GraphicsDevice.Viewport since we are flipping the X and Y coordinates to make the game landscape.
private RenderTarget2D renderTarget; // what game world is rendered on before being rotated
private int GameWindowWidth; // the width of the game window we are rendering to
private int GameWindowHeight; // the height of the game window we are rendering to
Setup the GameWindow variables in the Initialize() method:
GameWindowWidth = graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height;
GameWindowHeight = graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width;
Initialize our RenderTarget variable in the LoadContent() method:
renderTarget = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, GameWindowWidth, GameWindowHeight, false,
SurfaceFormat.Color, DepthFormat.Depth16);
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