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

Image gallery with Picasa downloader


In this recipe, we will integrate our Picasa images downloader with a carousel-based 3D gallery, and use it as a picture selection page in our game.

How to do it…

  1. To download the images and track the state of the downloader, we use the sImageDescriptor structure describing the state of any game image:

    class sImageDescriptor: public iObject
    {
    public:
      size_t FID;
      std::string FURL; 

    Now comes the image size code. We support a single image type only: small 256 pixel-wide previews. Multi-stage previews can be implemented when the game first loads very small images over the network, let's say not larger than 128 pixels. Then larger 256 pixel previews replace them to give crisp previews on Full HD screens. And after the player has picked an image from the gallery, a full-sized preview is fetched from the server.

  2. The previously described method is exactly how we do it in our Linderdaum Puzzle HD game:

      LPhotoSize FSize;
  3. We set the current state of this image to...