Book Image

Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
Book Image

Android NDK Game Development Cookbook

By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

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


Networking is an inherently asynchronous and unpredictable area in terms of timing. One may not be sure about the reliability of the connection. Even when we use the TCP protocol, there is no guarantee on the delivery time, and nothing prevents the applications from freezing while waiting for the data in the socket. To develop a responsive and safe application, a number of problems must be solved: we need to be in full control of the download process, we have to limit the downloaded data size, and gracefully handle the errors that occur. Without delving into the details of the HTTP protocol implementation, we use the libcurl library and concentrate on higher-level tasks related to game development.

At first, we look at the Picasa and Flickr REST APIs to download image lists and form direct URLs to photos. Then, we get to the thread-safe asynchronous programming and finally we implement a simple HTTP server for debugging purposes using the pure Berkeley sockets interface.

The examples...