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

Enumerating files in the .zip archives


To incorporate the contents of a .zip file seamlessly into our filesystem, we need to read the archive contents and be able to access each file individually. Since we are developing our own file I/O library, we use the iIStream interface to access .zip files. The NDK provides a way to read the .apk assets from your C++ application (see usr/include/android/asset_manager.h in your NDK folder). However, it is only available on Android 2.3, and will make debugging of file access in your game more complex on a desktop computer without an emulator. To make our native code portable to previous Android versions and other mobile operating systems, we will craft our own assets reader.

Note

Android applications are distributed as .apk packages, which are basically just renamed .zip archives, containing a special folder structure and metadata inside them.

Getting ready

We use the zlib library and the MiniZIP project to access the content of a .zip archive. The most...