Book Image

Mastering AndEngine Game Development

By : Maya Posch
Book Image

Mastering AndEngine Game Development

By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

AndEngine is a popular and easy-to-use game framework, best suited for Android game development. After learning the basics of creating an Android game using AndEngine it's time you move beyond the basics to explore further. For this you need to understand the theory behind many of the technologies AndEngine uses. This book aims to provide all the skills and tools you need to learn more about Android game development using AndEngine. With this book you will get a quick overview of the basics of AndEngine and Android application development. From there, you will learn how to use 3D models in a 2D scene, render a visual representation of a scene's objects, and create interaction between these objects. You will explore frame-based animations and learn to use skeletal animations. As the book progresses, you will be guided through exploring all the relevant aspects of rendering graphics with OpenGL ES, generating audio using OpenSL ES and OpenAL, making the best use of Android's network API, implementing anti-aliasing algorithms, shaders, dynamic lighting and much more. With all this, you will be ready to enhance the look and feel of your game with its user interface, sound effects and background music. After an in-depth study of 2D and 3D worlds and multi-player implementations, you will be a master in AndEngine and Android game development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering AndEngine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The benefits of static lighting and shadows


The main benefits of static lighting should be fairly obvious:

  • Low resource usage, as all of the lighting is precalculated

  • It can look nicer, as there's no limit on how long the lighting algorithm can run on a single scene

Basically put, static lighting is a good choice for lights and objects that are static in a scene. As they won't shift their positions, there's no need to recalculate the effect of these lights on the same objects again if it doesn't change the resulting visual effect of the scene.

The same applies for shadows. Pregenerating them allows many more high-quality shadows than doing it in real time, especially when the target platform is quite limited in terms of resources, which is often the case on a mobile platform.

The disadvantages of static lighting and shadows should be fairly self-evident as well:

  • Static lighting, by definition, does not affect objects that move through a scene.

  • Static shadows are not affected by dynamic objects...