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

Decoding tracker music using ModPlug


Mobile devices are always limited on resources compared to the desktops. These limitations are both in terms of computing power and the amount of available storage. High-quality MPEG-1 Layer 3 or the Ogg Vorbis audio files occupy a lot of space even at modest bitrates. For example, in a 20 Mb game, two tracks of size 5 Mb each would be unacceptable. However, there is a good trade-off between quality and compression. A technology originated in the eighties known as the tracker music — sometimes called chiptune or 8-bit music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker). Tracker music formats don't use pulse-code modulation to store the entire soundtrack. Instead, they use notes and effects, which are applied to samples and played in several channels. Samples are small PCM encoded sounds of musical instruments. Notes correspond to the playback speed of a sample. We use the libmodplug library to decode the most popular tracker music file formats, such as...