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

Monitoring the memory footprint


Memory footprints are the signs and ways of using memory during runtime. From the point of game memory usage optimization, monitoring the memory footprint is very important:

  • Checking log messages

  • Checking heap updates

  • Tracking memory allocation

  • Checking overall memory usage

  • Tracking memory leaks

Checking log messages

Using log messages has been the most effective and immediate debugging technique. Message logs are very useful for tracking the program control flow and runtime object tracking.

Dalvik message log

The Dalvik message log is useful for tracking memory. Whenever garbage collection happens, the garbage collector can print the following information through Dalvik log messaging:

  • Garbage collection reason: This info reveals the reason for triggering garbage collection. The reasons can be GC_CONCURRENT, GC_FOR_MALLOC, GC_HPROF_DUMP_HEAP, GC_EXPLICIT, or GC_EXTERNAL_ALLOC.

  • Amount of memory freed: This section states the amount of memory freed by the garbage collector...