Book Image

The Android Game Developer's Handbook

By : Avisekhar Roy
Book Image

The Android Game Developer's Handbook

By: Avisekhar Roy

Overview of this book

Gaming in android is an already established market and growing each day. Previously games were made for specific platforms, but this is the time of cross platform gaming with social connectivity. It requires vision of polishing, design and must follow user behavior. This book would help developers to predict and create scopes of improvement according to user behavior. You will begin with the guidelines and rules of game development on the Android platform followed by a brief description about the current variants of Android devices available. Next you will walk through the various tools available to develop any Android games and learn how to choose the most appropriate tools for a specific purpose. You will then learn JAVA game coding standard and style upon the Android SDK. Later, you would focus on creation, maintenance of Game Loop using Android SDK, common mistakes in game development and the solutions to avoid them to improve performance. We will deep dive into Shaders and learn how to optimize memory and performance for an Android Game before moving on to another important topic, testing and debugging Android Games followed by an overview about Virtual Reality and how to integrate them into Android games. Want to program a different way? Inside you’ll also learn Android game Development using C++ and OpenGL. Finally you would walk through the required tools to polish and finalize the game and possible integration of any third party tools or SDKs in order to monetize your game when it’s one the market!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
The Android Game Developer's Handbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Different CPU architecture support


The developer has the opportunity to optimize an Android application for a separate processor architecture. At a high-level point of view, it is a great feature. However, this feature comes at a significant cost. Let's have a look at the details of this feature.

Available CPU architectures

Here are the architectures currently supported by the NDK build:

  • ARM

  • x86

  • Neon

  • MIPS

ARM

ARM stands for Acorn RISC Machine. This is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based processor, mainly targeting embedded or mobile computing. As the base says, it is highly efficient for an operating system such as Android.

Currently, most used processors of the Android platform are from the ARM family. It can be further sub-categorized as follows:

  • ARMv5TE

  • ARMv7

  • ARMv8

x86

Intel introduced the x86 architecture for processors. At first, these processors were mainly used for desktop/laptop PCs. However, they were optimized to be used in mobile devices in the form of Celeron or Atom processors...