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

Hardware dependency


We have discussed earlier that hardware configuration plays a major role in the FPS system. If the hardware is not capable of running a certain set of instructions with a certain frequency, then it is not possible for any developer to run a game on the target FPS.

Let's list the tasks that take most of the processing time for a game:

  • Display or rendering

  • Memory load/unload operations

  • Logical operations

Display or rendering

Display processing depends mostly on the graphics processor and what all needs to be displayed. When it comes to interaction with the hardware, the process becomes slow. Rendering each and every pixel with shader manipulation and mapping takes time.

There were times when running a game with a frame rate of 12 was difficult. However, in the modern world, a superb display quality game needs to be run on a frame rate of 60. It is only a matter of hardware quality.

A large display requires a good amount of cache memory. So, for example, hardware with a large and...