Book Image

Learning AndEngine

By : Varga
Book Image

Learning AndEngine

By: Varga

Overview of this book

AndEngine is a very popular open source OpenGL (open graphics library) Android game engine, used to create mobile games quickly while maintaining the ability to fully customize them. This book will guide you through the whole development process of creating a mobile game for the Android platform using one of the most popular and easy-to-use game engines available today. Beginning with the very basics, you will learn how to install AndEngine, gather graphics, add sound and music assets, and design game rules. You will first design an example game and enhance it by adding various features over the course of the book. Each chapter adds more colors, enhances the game, and takes it to the next level. You will also learn how to work with Box2D, a popular 2D physics engine that forms an integral part of some of the most successful mobile games. By the end of the book, you will be able to create a complete, interactive, and fully featured mobile game for Android and publish it to Google Play.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Storing values


From time to time, we need to persist some values. Typical examples are a high score or the settings of our game. AndEngine doesn't have any built-in mechanism for this, but we can use the Android SDK to achieve it.

There are two ways. A simple way is to use shared preferences, which is a key-value persistent storage. A more robust but more complicated way is to use the SQLite database, which is accessible from every Android application. We are going to use the simple way to store the high score and sound settings.

Using preferences

Each application has access to its Preferences object. It's basically a key-value map. It is very simple to use preferences, but it's easy to make a mistake. First, we need to initialize the storage. This is done with the following code:

SharedPreferences settings = getSharedPreferences("andengine_game_prefs", MODE_PRIVATE);

We can have multiple preferences and they are identified by the name. This is the first parameter and any name will do. The second...