Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications that require direct access to system resources. NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn allows a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. This is a hands-on guide to extending your game development skills with Android NDK. The book takes you through many clear, step-by-step example applications to help you further explore the features of Android NDK and some popular C++ libraries and boost your productivity by debugging the development process. Through the course of this book, you will learn how to write portable multi-threaded native code, use HTTP networking in C++, play audio files, use OpenGL ES 3, and render high-quality text. Each chapter aims to take you one step closer to building your application. By the end of this book, you will be able to create an engaging, complete gaming application.

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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Android NDK
Mastering Android NDK
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Using Command-line Tools
Using Command-line Tools
Using Android command-line tools on Windows
Using Android command-line tools on OS X
Using Android command-line tools on Linux
Creating an Ant-based application template manually
Creating a Gradle-based application template manually
Embedding native code
Building and signing release Android applications
Organizing the cross-platform code
Using TeamCity continuous integration server with Android applications
Summary
2
Native Libraries
Native Libraries
Dealing with precompiled static libraries
Dynamic linking on Windows platform
Curl
OpenSSL
FreeImage
Loading and saving images
FreeType
Theora
OpenAL
Linking the libraries to your application
Summary
3
Networking
Networking
Intrusive smart pointers
Portable multithreading primitives
Task queues
Message pumps and asynchronous callbacks
Asynchronous networking with libcurl
Android licensing in native applications
Flurry analytics
Summary
4
Organizing a Virtual Filesystem
Organizing a Virtual Filesystem
Mount points
Mount points and streams
Accessing files on the host filesystems
In-memory files
Aliasing
Writing files
Accessing the archive files
Accessing application assets
Summary
5
Cross-platform Audio Streaming
Cross-platform Audio Streaming
Initialization and playback
Streaming sounds
Stringed musical instrument model
Decoding compressed audio
Summary
6
OpenGL ES 3.1 and Cross-platform Rendering
OpenGL ES 3.1 and Cross-platform Rendering
Linear algebra and transformations
Graphics initialization using SDL2
OpenGL API binding
Cross-platform OpenGL abstractions
Feeding the geometry data to OpenGL
Shader programs
Textures
Summary
7
Cross-platform UI and Input System
Cross-platform UI and Input System
Rendering
Text rendering
Organizing the UI system
Summary
8
Writing a Rendering Engine
Writing a Rendering Engine
The scene graph
Lighting and shading
Lights and light nodes
Material system
Demo application and a rendering technique
Summary
9
Implementing Game Logic
Implementing Game Logic
Boids
Implementation of the flocking algorithms
Digression: helper routines
Collective behaviors
Rendering the swarm
Boids demonstration
The page-based user interface
Summary
10
Writing Asteroids Game
Writing Asteroids Game
Creating an on-screen joystick
Implementing the particle system
Asteroids game
Summary
Index
Index

OpenGL API binding

As you can see, all OpenGL calls in the earlier mentioned code are done via the LGL3 prefix. This is a structure called sLGLAPI declared in LGLAPI.h containing pointers to actual OpenGL API functions:

  struct sLGLAPI
  {
    sLGLAPI()
    {
      memset( this, 0, sizeof( *this ) );
    };
    PFNGLACTIVETEXTUREPROC        glActiveTexture;
    PFNGLATTACHSHADERPROC         glAttachShader;
    PFNGLBINDATTRIBLOCATIONPROC   glBindAttribLocation;
    PFNGLBINDBUFFERPROC           glBindBuffer;
    PFNGLBINDBUFFERBASEPROC       glBindBufferBase;
    PFNGLBINDFRAGDATALOCATIONPROC glBindFragDataLocation;
    ...
  }

The fields of the sLGLAPI structure are set in the LGL::GetAPI() function. There are two distinct implementations of this function, one is for Windows in LGL_Windows.h, and the other is in LGL_Android.h for everything else. The difference is in the dynamic linking on Windows, as shown in the following code:

  void LGL::GetAPI( sLGLAPI* API )
  {
    API->glBlendFunc...
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