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

Linking and source code organization


In the previous recipes, we learned how to create basic wrappers that allow us to run our application on Android and Windows. However, we used an ad-hoc approach since the amount of source code was low and fit into a single file. We have to organize our project source files in a way suitable for building the code for larger projects in Windows and Android.

Getting ready

Recall the folder structure of the App3 project. We have the src and jni folders inside our App2 folder. The jni/Android.mk, jni/Application.mk, and build.xml files specify the Android build process. To enable the Windows executable creation, we add a file named Makefile, which references the main.cpp file.

How to do it...

The following is the content of Makefile:

CC = gcc
all:
  $(CC) -o main.exe main.cpp -lgdi32 -lstdc++

The idea is that when we add more and more OS-independent logic, the code resides in .cpp files, which do not reference any OS-specific headers or libraries. For the first few chapters, this simple framework that delegates frame rendering and event handling to portable OS-independent functions (OnDrawFrame(), OnKeyUp() and so on) is enough.

How it works...

All of our examples from the subsequent chapters are buildable for Windows from the command line using a single make all command. Android native code is buildable with a single ndk-build command. We will use this convention throughout the rest of the book.