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

Managing memory using reference counting


When working in the native code environment, every memory allocation event is handled by the developer. Tracking all the allocations in a multithreaded environment becomes notoriously difficult. The C++ language provides a way to avoid manual object deallocation using smart pointers. Since we are developing mobile applications, we cannot afford to use the whole Boost library just to include smart pointers.

Note

You can use the Boost library with Android NDK. The main two reasons we avoid it in our small examples are as follows: a drastically increased compilation time and the desire for showing how basic things can be implemented yourself. If your project already includes Boost, you are advised to use smart pointers from that library. The compilation is straightforward and does not require special steps for porting.

Getting ready

We need a simple intrusive counter to be embedded into all of our reference-countered classes. Here, we provide a lightweight...