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

The rendering pipeline in Android


Let's now have a look at the types of rendering pipeline in Android.

The 2D rendering pipeline

In the case of the 2D Android drawing system through Canvas, all the assets are first drawn on the canvas, and the canvas is rendered on screen. The graphic engine maps all the assets within the finite Canvas according to the given position.

Often, developers use small assets separately that cause a mapping instruction to execute for each asset. It is always recommended that you use sprite sheets to merge as many small assets as possible. A single draw call can then be applied to draw every object on the Canvas.

Now, the question is how to create the sprite and what the other consequences are. Previously, Android could not support images or sprites of a size more than 1024 x 1024 pixels. Since Android 2.3, the developer can use a 4096 x 4096 sprite. However, using such sprites can cause permanent memory occupancy during the scopes of all the small assets. Many low...