Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By : Sean Scaplehorn
Book Image

Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

By: Sean Scaplehorn

Overview of this book

Modern mobile devices are capable of supporting video games of amazing quality but there are so many different devices and platforms how can you support them all? The answer is to use the Marmalade SDK to write your code once and deploy it to all popular mobile platforms at the touch of a button.Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials will provide you with everything you need to know to transfer your existing C++ videogame programming knowledge to mobile devices. From graphics and sound to input methods and actual deployment to device, this book covers the lot.Learn how to make use of keys, touch screen and accelerometer inputs for controlling your game.Take the pain out of supporting a varied range of target devices, both across multiple platforms and multiple specifications.Step by step from "Hello World" to a complete game, this book will show how to use the Marmalade SDK to develop games for mobile devices.Learn how to make dazzling 2D and 3D games complete with fully animated characters, music and sound effects that can be deployed to all the leading mobile platforms, whilst ensuring it can run on a wide range of possible devices, from low specification to high end.If you want to join the exciting world of mobile videogames then Learning Mobile Game Development with Marmalade will show you how to do so, fast!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Why is the EDK necessary?


The Marmalade SDK manages to work its magic of being able to take one codebase and deploy it to multiple platforms by providing a set of APIs that sit on top of the APIs specific to each platform.

A deployed application executable actually consists of two separate files. Our application code is compiled into an S3E file, which is the Marmalade equivalent of a Windows Dynamic Link Library (DLL). This file is the same across all platforms.

In order to execute our S3E file, a Loader program is used. This program is the glue between the platform we are running on and our own code. The loader program starts up first, loads the S3E file into memory, and then passes control to the code within it. If our code needs to make a platform-dependant call, it actually makes a request to a function in the loader that will then call the correct operating system function.

The loader program is a fixed entity and cannot be changed by us, so Marmalade provides us with the EDK system...