Tweaked – “Draw Horizontally Centered Text in XNA”

28Feb/11Off

By mort8088

Tweaked – “Draw Horizontally Centered Text in XNA”

Originally Posted 2009

OK I was doing my usual potter around the net tonight when I found "Draw Horizontally Centered Text in XNA" and thought I have to tweak this...

///
/// Take a string and draw it centered horizontally on the screen.
///
public static void DrawCentered(String myText, int ScreenWidth, int yPosition, Color drawColor, SpriteFont spriteFont, SpriteBatch spriteBatch)
{
    // Get the size the spritefont will be drawn on the screen.
    Vector2 textSize = spriteFont.MeasureString(myText);
 
    // Get the position we need to draw the text at for it to be centered.
    int centerXPosition = (ScreenWidth / 2) - ((int)textSize.X / 2);
 
    // Draw the centered text.
    spriteBatch.DrawString(spriteFont, myText, new Vector2(centerXPosition, yPosition), drawColor);
}

I hate passing parameters i don't need and you should strive to avoid magic numbers so I moved the int ScreenWidth to be a local variable and pulled the required value in from the SpriteBatch with the following line :-

            // pick up the screen width.
            int ScreenWidth = spriteBatch.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width;

And as a sort of old school codey kick removed the division from the int centerXPosition calculation and replaced it with some bit shifts to bring us to

            // Get the position we need to draw the text at for it to be centered.
            int centerXPosition = (ScreenWidth >> 1) - ((int)textSize.X >> 1);

so in all my replacement method is :-

        ///
        /// Take a string and draw it centered horizontally on the screen.
        ///
        public static void DrawCentered(String myText, int yPosition, Color drawColor, SpriteFont spriteFont, SpriteBatch spriteBatch)
        {
            // pick up the screen width.
            int ScreenWidth = spriteBatch.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width;
 
            // Get the size the spritefont will be drawn on the screen.
            Vector2 textSize = spriteFont.MeasureString(myText);
 
            // Get the position we need to draw the text at for it to be centered.
            int centerXPosition = (ScreenWidth >> 1) - ((int)textSize.X >> 1);
 
            // Draw the centered text.
            spriteBatch.DrawString(spriteFont, myText, new Vector2(centerXPosition, yPosition), drawColor);
        }