Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By : Sean Scaplehorn
Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By: Sean Scaplehorn

Overview of this book

Modern mobile devices are capable of supporting video games of amazing quality but there are so many different devices and platforms how can you support them all? The answer is to use the Marmalade SDK to write your code once and deploy it to all popular mobile platforms at the touch of a button.Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials will provide you with everything you need to know to transfer your existing C++ videogame programming knowledge to mobile devices. From graphics and sound to input methods and actual deployment to device, this book covers the lot.Learn how to make use of keys, touch screen and accelerometer inputs for controlling your game.Take the pain out of supporting a varied range of target devices, both across multiple platforms and multiple specifications.Step by step from "Hello World" to a complete game, this book will show how to use the Marmalade SDK to develop games for mobile devices.Learn how to make dazzling 2D and 3D games complete with fully animated characters, music and sound effects that can be deployed to all the leading mobile platforms, whilst ensuring it can run on a wide range of possible devices, from low specification to high end.If you want to join the exciting world of mobile videogames then Learning Mobile Game Development with Marmalade will show you how to do so, fast!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Compressing resources using the Derbh archiver


Game resources can soon grow very large in size, so it would be great if we could somehow compress these files so that they take up less space in our installation package, particularly if there are any restrictions on the maximum size an install package can have.

Marmalade provides just such a feature in the form of Derbh archives, which is very similar to compression systems such as ZIP that you will no doubt be familiar with. Derbh supports multiple compression algorithms, including the standard LZMA and also its own proprietary algorithm, which can achieve improved compression by operating over multiple files simultaneously.

The Marmalade SDK provides an API which allows us to load compressed files as easily as if they were provided as individual uncompressed files. A command-line utility called DZip is also provided to generate the archives in the first place.

Creating a Derbh archive

To create a Derbh archive, the first thing we have to do...