Question

My game uses the accelerometer, everything works fine but I noticed there is going to be a slight issue with some phones. The game forces the orientation to be landscape however some phones have a default screen orientation of landscape…

Right now I was always assuming the user was going to have to tilt their phone to see the game correctly, this would mean the accelerometer reading for the X axis would move the player in the Y and the Y reading would move the player in the X. With the phones that have a default landscape screen the X will correspond to the X in game and the Y for the Y in game (as they wont need to tilt their phones.)

My question is how do I handle this? I can adapt the code to invert the X and Y directions based on the phones orientation, so how would I get the current orientation of the phone programmatically? If there is a better way that would be great

Hope that makes sense

EDIT:

Actually would it be safe to assume that if the devices length is greater than its height the screen would be defaulted to landscape?

Answer 1

Display display = ((WindowManager) getSystemService(WINDOW_SERVICE)).getDefaultDisplay();
int rotation = display.getRotation();

from http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/Display.html:

public int getRotation ()

Returns the rotation of the screen from its “natural” orientation. The
returned value may be Surface.ROTATION_0 (no rotation),
Surface.ROTATION_90, Surface.ROTATION_180, or Surface.ROTATION_270.
For example, if a device has a naturally tall screen, and the user has
turned it on its side to go into a landscape orientation, the value
returned here may be either Surface.ROTATION_90 or
Surface.ROTATION_270 depending on the direction it was turned. The
angle is the rotation of the drawn graphics on the screen, which is
the opposite direction of the physical rotation of the device. For
example, if the device is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, to
compensate rendering will be rotated by 90 degrees clockwise and thus
the returned value here will be Surface.ROTATION_90.

You’ll have to experiment with the devices to make sure android knows the “natural” orientation correctly. If so, then just check for ROTATION_90 (or ROTATION_270) to see if the device is on it’s side or not. If so, then switch x and y axis.