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

Unifying the OpenGL 3 core profile and OpenGL ES 2


Let's implement a thin abstraction layer on top of OpenGL 3 and OpenGL ES 2, to make our high-level code unaware of the particular GL version that our application runs on. This means that our game code can be completely unaware whether it runs on a mobile or a desktop version of OpenGL. Take a look at the following diagram:

The part that we are going to implement in this chapter is within the High-level API rectangle.

Getting ready

In Chapter 4, Organizing a Virtual Filesystem, we created an example 3_AsyncTexture, where we learned how to initialize OpenGL ES 2 on Android using Java. Now we use GLView.java from that example to initialize a rendering context on Android. No EGL from Android NDK is involved, so our examples will run on Android 2.1 and higher.

How to do it…

  1. In the previous recipe, we mentioned the sLGLAPI struct. It contains pointers to OpenGL functions that we load at startup dynamically. The declaration can be found in LGLAPI.h...