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

Introduction


This chapter explains how to port existing popular C/C++ libraries to Android using Android NDK. These libraries are widely used to implement feature-rich applications with graphics, sounds, and physical simulations entirely in C++. There is not much fun in simply compiling libraries. So, the parts related to FreeImage, FreeType, and Box2D provide minimal samples to demonstrate the functionality of each library. Audio and networking libraries are discussed in greater detail in the subsequent chapters. We will show you how to compile libraries and, of course, give some short samples and hints on how to start using them.

Typical caveats for porting libraries across different processors and operating systems are memory access (structure alignment/padding), byte-order (endianness), calling conventions, and floating-point issues. All the libraries described below address these issues quite well, and even if some of them do not officially support Android NDK, fixing this is just a...