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

Using a 3D modeling package to create model data


We've seen how to create the streams of data for a cube in code, and to be honest it's not pretty! Even a simple shape such as a cube requires so much data that it becomes very difficult for us to keep track of it all and almost impossible to create a more complex 3D shape.

Luckily there is an easier way. We can use a 3D modeling package to create, color, and texture a 3D model and export all the required data in a format that Marmalade can then load and use.

The Marmalade 3D exporter plugins

Marmalade comes with exporter plugins for the two modeling packages used in most professional game development studios—Maya and 3DS Max. The details in the following sections apply equally to the exporters for both of these modeling packages.

Installing the plugins

The exporter plugins are installed to your computer when you install the main SDK, but they are not automatically installed into the modeling package for use. In order to use the exporters, we...