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

Introduction to shaders


Many developers develop games on Android, but do not possess much knowledge about shaders. In most cases, developers do not need to work with shaders, or there are some pre-defined shaders inside the game development framework or engines.

In 1988, the animation studio Pixar introduced the modern concept of shaders. However, GPUs were not capable of handling shaders at that point of time. OpenGL and Direct3D are the first two graphic libraries to support shaders. GPU started supporting shaders through pixel shading at the 2D level. Soon, it was enhanced to support vertex shaders. Nowadays, geometry shaders are also supported by OpenGL 3.2 and Direct3D 10 libraries.

Let's now dive a bit deeper into shaders to understand their definition, necessity, and scope for Android games.

What is a shader?

In simple words, a shader is an instruction set to manipulate the visual display of the input graphic assets.

Let's elaborate the definition a bit. All the instructions are basically...