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

Types of shaders


There are many shaders used in the gaming industry. They are categorized on the basis of their behavior and features. Some of the shaders are as follows:

  • Pixel shaders

  • Vertex shaders

  • Geometry shaders

  • Tessellation shaders

Let's have a detailed look at these types.

Pixel shaders

Pixel shaders are 2D shaders that work on textures or digital images. Pixel shaders process colors and other attributes of a single pixel. Each single pixel is called a fragment. This is the reason pixel shaders are often called fragment shaders.

Vertex shaders

A vertex shader mainly operates on the vertices of a mesh or model. Every mesh of a model is made up of multiple vertices. A vertex shader can only be applied to 3D models. So, a vertex shader is a type of 3D shader.

Geometry shaders

Geometry shaders are used to create new primitive graphic elements. After applying a vertex shader in order to execute a rendering pipeline, geometry shaders are used to create points, lines, and triangles to form a surface...