Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Android NDK
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Text rendering


In this section, we describe every essential detail of the text rendering process implemented in the clTextRenderer class. Here are the parts of our text renderer:

  • UTF-8 string decoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8)

  • Text size calculation, kerning, and advance calculation

  • Rendering of individual glyph, just like the one in the FreeType example from Chapter 2, Native Libraries

  • Fonts and glyphs loading and caching

  • String rendering

We assume all the strings are in the UTF-8 encoding because this way all Latin characters with ASCII codes between 0 and 127 take exactly one byte, and various national symbols take up to four bytes. The only problem with UTF-8 is that FreeType accepts fixed-width 2-byte UCS-2 encoding, so we have to include the decoding routine to convert from UTF-8 to UCS-2.

Note

There is a nice article on the absolute minimum every software developer must know about Unicode and character sets. Check it out at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html.

We...