iPad Orientation rejection « cocos2d for iPhone

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iPad Orientation rejection

(15 posts) (11 voices)

Started 1 year ago by patrickC
Latest reply from Blue Ether

Tags:

uiorientation

patrickC
Member

Hey everyone,
just wanted to give heads up to anyone planning on submitting a game for the iPad.
As you probably know the iPad Human Interface Guidelines state that all apps should support multiple orientations.
It goes on to say that understandably some apps, such as games, may not not be able to support all orientations.

Based on this and other games available for iPad, I submitted a small game that only support Portrait orientation.
It got rejected on the "multiple orientation basis" and I was asked, if possible to support landscape, and if not that it's necessary to at least support both variants of the orientation (UIDeviceOrientationPortrait, UIDeviceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown)

Excerpt from email:
The iPad Human Interface Guidelines state that an iPad application should be able to run in all orientations. XXX is only supporting one variant of the portrait orientation. While we understand there are certain applications that need to run in the portrait orientation, it would be appropriate to support both variants of this orientation in your application.
Please note that supporting all four orientations, each with unique launch images, provides the best user experience and is recommended.

Just thought it'd be good to know ;)

Posted 1 year ago #
GameBit
Member

thanks for info

Posted 1 year ago #
DonomaGames
Member

I was rejected on Monday for the same issue.

Are you going to support auto-rotation within the game or only during launch? For me it only made sense to support launch orientations. Haven't heard back from the approval dept yet.

Posted 1 year ago #
wiegerthefarmer
Member

Hey Guys, check out this post. It should help you out. http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/5176#post-33670

My app only supports landscape, but both kinds. :) Also, I made a loading image that you can't tell what orientation you're in, so it's all good!

Posted 1 year ago #
patrickC
Member

I ended up using a similar approach to what Jeston did in this thread:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/2588

I found that handling rotation myself, rather than rotating the director, made things easier.
Then again, the game in question is very simple, so it might not suit everyone.
Doing so I was able to implement in-game rotation for all 4 orientations in no time.

I hope it actually works, I don't have a device so I can only test in the Simulator, which doesn't seem to be overly reliable...

Posted 1 year ago #
wiegerthefarmer
Member

I'd be more than happy to test on my iPad. I can send you my UUID and if you have an adhoc provisioning profile, I can test for you.

Posted 1 year ago #
slipster216
Moderator

Unless you happen to be a larger developer, then you can freely ignore this annoying rule as so many large-developer produced apps in the iPad app store have..

Posted 1 year ago #
DonomaGames
Member

Well, my update was just accepted. Only supports portrait and portrait upside down. No auto-rotation in the game, just launch orientation. This is a very old title and didn't use cocos2d.

Posted 1 year ago #

drPedro
Member

Rejected for the same reason! Now it is fixed (and in review) thanks to your help!
My fix just consist in taking into account the iPad orientation at startup (that's my understanding of what Apple wants).
To resume if it can help someone (in my case i support the 4 orientations but as stated by others I think you need to support (portrait and portraitupsidedown) or (landscaperight and lascandeleft) or the 4 orientations)
-add your launch image for Landscape and Portrait (Default-Portrait.png and Default-Landscape.png) and specify the supported orientation in info.list (key:UISupportedInterfaceOrientations)
-now to display the first scene, you need to know the orientation. So in my first scene I use the trick explained in the other post to receive orientation notifications. I don't display anythng before receiving the orientation notification. Once I receive the notification I add evertything to the scene then remove the observer to stop receiving the orientation notification.

//!!! iimportant you must do the following call before to make it work!! (in your app delegate for instance before running the scene)
//[[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];
-(id) init
{

	if( (self=[super init] )) {
		self.isTouchEnabled = YES;

		[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playBackgroundMusic:@"night2-mono.wav" ];

		//a little hack to know we are on ipad or iphone
		CGSize size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize];
		bool ipad=false;
		if (size.width>500)
			ipad=true;

		//if ipad we need to wait for the orientation to display the good startup image
		if (ipad)
		[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(orientationChanged:) name:@"UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification" object:nil];
		else{
			//iphone app don't need to take into account the orientation
			[self showIntroScreen];
		}
	}
	return self;
}

-(void) orientationChanged:(NSNotification *)notification
{
	[self showIntructionsScreen];
	 [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self name:@"UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification" object:nil];
}

-(void) showIntroScreen{

	//a little hack to know we are on ipad or iphone
	CGSize size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize];
	bool ipad=false;
	if (size.width>500)
		ipad=true;

	CCSprite *background;
	CCSprite *instructions;
	if (!ipad){
		//force the landscape mode in iphone
		[[CCDirector sharedDirector] setDeviceOrientation:CCDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft];
		//size may have changed due to orientation
		size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize];
		background=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"Default.png"];
		instructions=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"instructions-iphone.png"];
		background.rotation=-90;
		instructions.rotation=-90;
		}
	else {
		//we must know the landscape or portrait mode
		UIDeviceOrientation orientation = [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation];
		if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft || orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeRight)
			[[CCDirector sharedDirector] setDeviceOrientation:(ccDeviceOrientation)orientation];
		//size may have changed due to orientation
		size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize];
		if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft || orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeRight)
		{
			background=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"Default-Landscape.png"];
			instructions=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"instructions-ipad-landscape.png"];
		}
		else{
			background=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"Default-Portrait.png"];
			instructions=[CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"instructions-ipad-portrait.png"];
			if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown) {
				background.rotation=180;
				instructions.rotation=180;
			}
		}

	}
	// position the label on the center of the screen
	background.position =  ccp( size.width /2 , size.height/2 );
	instructions.position =  ccp( size.width /2 , size.height/2 );

	[self addChild: background];
	[self addChild: instructions];

}

As you can see I reuse the launch images and I add some instructions as an image (it is a transparent png with the text). There is still the flicking issue that prevent to display a transparent transitions between launch image and the introduction scene, but I read in another post that there can be some issues with the IPad (and I'm still waiting for iPad (not avaiable in France) and cannot test it!)

Posted 1 year ago #

stalefishlabs
Member

Just wanted to weigh in that it's also possible to selectively support orientation changes for specific UI elements, such as alerts or other messages. One of our games is essentially orientation-neutral since players can play from any side of the screen, but we manually rotate the title logo and an alert message to match the current device orientation. We were approved, so apparently Apple was satisfied.

Posted 1 year ago #
malcolm cowler
Member

I tried to do the above for my app, but I'm not getting the orientation back (it's always portrait).

The additional coding I included is as follows

In my AppDelegate:

// Tell the UIDevice to send notifications when the orientation changes
[[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];

And here's what I have in my game code:

-(id) init
{

// always call "super" init
// Apple recommends to re-assign "self" with the "super" return value
if( (self=[super init] )) {

// Allow touches
isTouchEnabled = YES;

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(orientationChanged:) name:@"UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification" object:nil];

}

return self;
}

-(void) orientationChanged:(NSNotification *)notification
{
[self startGame];
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self name:@"UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification" object:nil];
}

-(void) startGame {

// Get the orientation
UIDeviceOrientation orientation = [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation];
if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft) NSLog(@"lleft");
if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeRight) NSLog(@"lright");
if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationPortrait) NSLog(@"port");
if (orientation == UIDeviceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown) NSLog(@"portUSD");

NSLog always prints "port" no matter what orientation I hold my iPad.

Anyone know why this code is not working?

Posted 1 year ago #
drPedro
Member

check also this post : http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/6154?replies=3#post-36267
in fact there is a kind of bug with orientation in CCDirector..normally you don't have to rotate your object yourself if you are in portraitupsidedown

Posted 1 year ago #
Spicycamp
Member

It seems that apple has changed theirs policies because my game "Snake fusion" has been accepted by apple even it only support portrait orientation, strange

Posted 5 months ago #
Jeston
Member

I have a mini story to add to this too... One of my apps went live with no problem, but we discovered a bug with some multiplayer (hotseat) stuff, and we fixed a critical bug, and our update was rejected despite having options to turn on and off accelerometer.

In our game, you can tilt the device to rotate a camera around a fully enclosed 360 sky dome, so we couldn't just put in device orientation.

First launch - No rejection
First update - rejected
Second Update - No rejection

Despite the fact our second update had 0 changes from our first update. So this rule is really dependent on who is reviewing.

Posted 5 months ago #
Blue Ether
Member

In my experience, games that are portrait-only are accepted provided they at least provide portrait-upside-down support- which is pretty simple. I've been involved on several projects that were portrait only iPad and we never had any problem with Apple.

Although, said projects were universal apps. Maybe the approvers follow the guidelines less strictly for universal apps?

Posted 5 months ago #

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