Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Overview of this book

Game development is a field of interdisciplinary skills, which also makes it a very complex topic in many respects. One decision that usually needs to be made at the beginning of a game development processis to define the kind of computer system or platform the game will be developed for. This does not pose any problems in general but as soon as the game should also be able to run on multiple platforms it will become a developer's nightmare to maintain several distinct copies of the same game. This is where the libGDX multi-platform game development framework comes to the rescue! "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to know about the libGDX framework as well as game development in general so you can start developing your own games for multiple platforms. You will gradually acquire deeper knowledge of both, libGDX and game development while you work through twelve easy-to-follow chapters. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" will walk you through a complete game development cycle by creating an example game that is extended with new features over several chapters. These chapters handle specific topics such as organizing resources, managing game scenes and transitions, actors, a menu system, using an advanced physics engine and many more. The chapters are filled with screenshots and/or diagrams to facilitate comprehension. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is the book for you if you want to learn how to write your game code once and run it on a multitude of platforms using libGDX.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Libgdx Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Playing back music and sound effects


Libgdx provides cross-platform audio playback for prerecorded audio files of the following three supported file formats:

  • .wav (RIFF WAVE)

  • .mp3 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer III)

  • .ogg (Ogg Vorbis)

There are two interfaces called Music and Sound. They serve two different use cases of playing back audio files. In terms of Libgdx, sounds are audio files that usually play no longer than one second; think of laser or machine gun sounds. Audio files used as Sound objects are loaded and decoded so that they can be directly sent to the audio device. Obviously, the decoded audio data kept in memory can heavily increase the overall memory usage. On the contrary, audio files used as Music objects are streamed, which means that only the necessary portion of it is decoded and held in memory. Therefore, Music objects should be used for playing long audio files like background music.

Note

Music objects may require more CPU cycles because the streamed audio data needs to be...