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

Compiling the native static libraries for Android


Android NDK includes a number of GCC and Clang toolchains for each kind of the supported processors.

Getting ready

When building a static library from the source code, we follow the steps similar to the Windows version.

How to do it...

  1. Create a folder named jni and create the Application.mk file with the appropriate compiler switches, and set the name of the library accordingly. For example, one for the FreeImage library should look like the following:

    APP_OPTIM := release
    APP_PLATFORM := android-8
    APP_STL := gnustl_static
    APP_CPPFLAGS += -frtti 
    APP_CPPFLAGS += -fexceptions
    APP_CPPFLAGS += -DANDROID
    APP_ABI := armeabi-v7a x86
    APP_MODULES := FreeImage
  2. The Android.mk file is similar to the ones we have written for the sample applications in the previous chapter, yet with a few exceptions. At the top of the file, some required variables must be defined. Let us see what the Android.mk file for the FreeImage library may look like:

    # Android API level...