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

Multimedia support in Marmalade


Modern mobile phones and tablet devices are now capable of playing back good quality music and video, so it makes sense that Marmalade should provide ways in which we can harness these abilities.

Marmalade provides three different API layers that apply to multimedia support. These are s3eSound, s3eAudio, and s3eVideo. Unsurprisingly, the latter relates to the playback of video files, but you may be wondering why there are two APIs provided relating to sound.

The difference between s3eSound and s3eAudio is that the former is generally used for sound effects while the latter is normally used for music. The s3eSound API allows us to play several different sound effects at the same time, but by default only provides support for 16-bit mono-PCM sound samples. The s3eAudio API on the other hand allows us to play compressed formats such as MP3, but we are limited (on most devices) to playing a single audio track.

The good news is that most modern devices lets us have...