Book Image

Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

Book Image

Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications which require direct access to a system's resources. Android NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn provides a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. If your wish to build Android games using this amazing framework, then this book is a must-have.This book provides you with a number of clear step-by-step recipes which will help you to start developing mobile games with Android NDK and boost your productivity debugging them on your computer. This book will also provide you with new ways of working as well as some useful tips and tricks that will demonstrably increase your development speed and efficiency.This book will take you through a number of easy-to-follow recipes that will help you to take advantage of the Android NDK as well as some popular C++ libraries. It presents Android application development in C++ and shows you how to create a complete gaming application. You will learn how to write portable multithreaded C++ code, use HTTP networking, play audio files, use OpenGL ES, to render high-quality text, and how to recognize user gestures on multi-touch devices. If you want to leverage your C++ skills in mobile development and add performance to your Android applications, then this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Android NDK Game Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Switching NDK toolchains


A toolchain is a set of tools that are used to build your project. A toolchain usually consists of a compiler, an assembler, and a linker. Android NDK comes with different toolchains—GCC and Clang—of different versions. It has a convenient and simple way to switch between them.

Getting ready

Look through the list of the available toolchains before proceeding. You can find all the available toolchains in the $(NDK_ROOT)/toolchains/ folder.

How to do it...

The parameter NDK_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION in Application.mk corresponds to one of the available toolchains. In NDK r9b, you can switch between three GCC versions—4.6, and 4.7, which are marked as deprecated and will be removed from the next NDK releases, and 4.8. And two Clang versions—Clang3.2, which is also marked as deprecated, and Clang3.3. The default toolchain in the NDK r9b is still GCC 4.6.

Starting from the NDK r8e, you can just specify clang as the value of NDK_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION. This option will select the most recent version of the available Clang toolchain.

There's more...

The toolchains are discovered by the $(NDK_ROOT)/build/core/init.mk script, so you can define your own toolchain in a folder named <ABI>-<ToolchainName> and use it in Application.mk.