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


We are looking for a truly portable implementation of the sound playback for desktop PCs and mobile devices. We propose using the OpenAL library, since it is a well-established library on a desktop, and using it will make easier porting of existing games to Android. In this chapter we organize a small multithreaded sound streaming library.

Audio playback is inherently an asynchronous process, so the decoding and control of sound hardware should be done on a separate thread and controlled from other dedicated threads. For example, when a player presses a fire button, or a character in an arcade game hits the ground, we might just ask the system to start playback of an audio file. The latency of this operation in games usually does not matter so much.

From the digital perspective, a monaural or monophonic sound (mono for short), is nothing more than a long one-dimensional array of values representing a continuous signal. Stereophonic or multichannel sounds are represented by a few...