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

Implementing the main loop


In the previous chapters our code examples used the OnTimer() callback with a rough fixed timestep to update the state and the OnDrawFrame() callback to render graphics. This is not suitable for a real-time game where we should update the state based on the real time elapsed since the last frame. However, it is still desirable to use a small fixed timestep in the call to OnTimer(). We can solve this problem by interleaving calls to OnTimer() and OnDrawFrame() in a tricky fashion and put this logic into a game main loop.

Getting ready

There is a very interesting article called Fix Your Timestep! available at http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep, which explains in great detail different approaches to the implementation of a game main loop and why fixed timesteps are important.

How to do it…

  1. The logic of the game main loop is platform-independent and can be put into a method:

    void GenerateTicks()
    {
  2. GetSeconds() returns monotonous time in seconds since...