Tunnel Lords

Summary:

THE ALMOST FINAL PUSH TO UWP!!!!!

Tunnel Lords

Brett208 12 Dec 2017 05:05

Hey everyone,

I've been slowly finishing the Window Store release of Tunnel Lords. It has been a fair amount of work, but I've been picking away at it a lot slower than in the past. It is getting pretty close though. I've got a couple of tough bugs to crack and then off to some actual playtesting.

Right now, I'm having difficulty with the game switching between landscape and portrait mode when you rotate a tablet. When compiling the code for UWP, I can set properties in Package.appxmanifest that force the program to stay only in Landscape or Landscape-flipped mode. However, Package.appxmanifest is only available in the UWP build and not in the MonoGame Windows build.

There is a property in GraphicsDeviceManager called SupportedOrientations. I can set this property to only support Landscape, but the game still allows switching into Portrait mode with this property set.

graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this)
{
    SupportedOrientations = DisplayOrientation.LandscapeLeft
};

I was wondering if anyone has experience with how to do this properly for a Windows build that is not UWP specific? In particular, it is a problem if someone plays the game on a 2 in 1 and switches to tablet mode for some reason, as it really messes up the resolution when it rotates. I'd like to be able to release the game on Windows outside of the Windows Store/UWP.

Thanks,
Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 27 Jan 2018 06:59

Unsure if anyone is really reading these threads or cares but I'll share anyways…

I've learned that MonoGame projects for Windows seem to be built on Windows Forms. Windows Forms do not have a method to lock the screen in portrait or landscape mode. So, if you play the game on a 2 in 1 laptop, you have to allow the user to rotate the screen when they change to tablet mode. I haven't looked into it yet, but a viable alternative would be to pause the game and throw up a dialog box saying to rotate the screen back into landscape mode. I have not researched if there is a way for Windows Forms to determine when the screen is rotated. I could probably live with this anyways because if you buy it on your laptop and it doesn't do well in tablet mode, you can always switch back.

A bigger frustration I'm dealing with is that if you want to compile your game for use with UWP/Windows 10 store, you are required to allow the user to resize the screen. I had planned on disabling this feature, forcing the user to resize the game in the options menu.

As a workaround, I looked into handling dynamic resizing of the screen. There is an event in UWP called Window.Current.CoreWindow.SizeChanged that fires whenever someone starts resizing their screen. However, when I call MonoGame's GraphicsDeviceManager.ApplyChanges, the application crashes. Something inside of SharpDX which I currently don't have loaded in my debugger.

I think there may be some other ways to detect the resize from UWP and perhaps I could get it to work without crashing. Or I could try to dig into what the issue in SharpDX is. However, I'm starting to think it might be prudent to abandon the Windows Store PC & Tablet release of the game for now. There have just been too many obstacles.

I would like to research UWP on Xbox One and see how viable it looks for Tunnel Lords. Resolution changes, rotating the screen, and full screen vs windowed are just not problems on a TV screen.

The sticking point is that I've spent a lot of time refining the touch screen and mouse code. Buttons are integrated into the menus as needed and the game allows intuitive fallback between the different input sources (touch, controller, mouse, and keyboard). I've solved all the known input bugs in the game and it actually plays fine in Mouse/Touch. So, abandoning the Windows Store PC & Tablet release would mean that work sort of goes to waste.

-Brett

Chris (guest) 01 Apr 2018 22:15

Your efforts are an amazing help - keep on going!