Zune Game Development Using XNA 3.0

CHAPTER 6Advanced Techniques

In Chapter 5, you successfully built a Zune game that utilized fairly complex input, vector math, texture scaling, and more. Monkey Feeder, which you built in the final example of Chapter 5, brought together a lot of the concepts addressed thus far in the book.

This chapter introduces some interesting techniques that you can apply in your games. We'll start with a couple of useful things you can do on the Zune, and move onward to solve more complex problems, including rendering in landscape mode, querying battery status, more complicated input, and even creating a visualizer for music.

Device Status

In the course of writing a game, you may come upon situations where you need to know more about the device. Such device ...