Mastering Android NDK

Mastering Android NDK

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications that require direct access to system resources. NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn allows a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. This is a hands-on guide to extending your game development skills with Android NDK. The book takes you through many clear, step-by-step example applications to help you further explore the features of Android NDK and some popular C++ libraries and boost your productivity by debugging the development process. Through the course of this book, you will learn how to write portable multi-threaded native code, use HTTP networking in C++, play audio files, use OpenGL ES 3, and render high-quality text. Each chapter aims to take you one step closer to building your application. By the end of this book, you will be able to create an engaging, complete gaming application.

Mastering Android NDK

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Using Command-line Tools

Using Android command-line tools on Windows

Using Android command-line tools on OS X

Using Android command-line tools on Linux

Creating an Ant-based application template manually

Creating a Gradle-based application template manually

Embedding native code

Building and signing release Android applications

Organizing the cross-platform code

Using TeamCity continuous integration server with Android applications

Summary

Native Libraries

Dealing with precompiled static libraries

Dynamic linking on Windows platform

Curl

OpenSSL

FreeImage

Loading and saving images

FreeType

Theora

OpenAL

Linking the libraries to your application

Summary

Networking

Intrusive smart pointers

Portable multithreading primitives

Task queues

Message pumps and asynchronous callbacks

Asynchronous networking with libcurl

Android licensing in native applications

Flurry analytics

Summary

Organizing a Virtual Filesystem

Mount points

Mount points and streams

Accessing files on the host filesystems

In-memory files

Aliasing

Writing files

Accessing the archive files

Accessing application assets

Summary

Cross-platform Audio Streaming

Initialization and playback

Streaming sounds

Stringed musical instrument model

Decoding compressed audio

Summary

OpenGL ES 3.1 and Cross-platform Rendering

Linear algebra and transformations

Graphics initialization using SDL2

OpenGL API binding

Cross-platform OpenGL abstractions

Feeding the geometry data to OpenGL

Shader programs

Textures

Summary

Cross-platform UI and Input System

Rendering

Text rendering

Organizing the UI system

Summary

Writing a Rendering Engine

The scene graph

Lighting and shading

Lights and light nodes

Material system

Demo application and a rendering technique

Summary

Implementing Game Logic

Boids

Implementation of the flocking algorithms

Digression: helper routines

Collective behaviors

Rendering the swarm

Boids demonstration

The page-based user interface

Summary

Writing Asteroids Game

Creating an on-screen joystick

Implementing the particle system

Asteroids game

Summary

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Linking the libraries to your application

There is one more thing left to discuss in this chapter before we proceed to further topics. Indeed, we learned how to build the libraries, but not how to link your Android application against them. For this purpose, we need to modify the Android.mk file of your application. Let's take a look at the 3_FreeImage_Example sample and its Application.mk. It starts with the declaration of the prebuilt static library pointing to a binary file:

include $(CLEAR_VARS)
LOCAL_MODULE := libFreeImage
LOCAL_SRC_FILES :=../../../Libs.Android/libFreeImage.$(TARGET_ARCH_ABI).a
include $(PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY)

Here, we use the $(TARGET_ARCH_ABI) variable in the path to transparently handle armeabi-v7a-hard and x86 versions of the libraries. You can add yet more architectures with ease.

Once the library is declared, let's link the application against it. Take a look at the bottom of Application.mk:

LOCAL_STATIC_LIBRARIES += FreeImage
include $(BUILD_SHARED_LIBRARY)

The...

Mastering Android NDK

Mastering Android NDK

Overview of this book

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