Book Image

AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook

By : JAYME SCHROEDER, Brian Boyles
Book Image

AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook

By: JAYME SCHROEDER, Brian Boyles

Overview of this book

AndEngine is a broad 2D game engine which allows game developers, both experienced and inexperienced, to develop games for the Android platform with ease. Don't be fooled by the simplicity, though. As easy as it is to “pick up and go,” AndEngine includes enough functionality to bring any type of 2D game world to life.The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" contains all of the necessary information and examples in order to build the games as you imagine them. The book's recipes will walk you through the various aspects of game design with AndEngine and provides detailed instructions on how to achieve some of the most desirable effects for your games.The "AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook" begins with detailed information on some of the more useful structuring techniques in game design and general aspects of resource management. Continuing on, the book will begin to discuss AndEngine entities, including sprites, text, meshes, and more. Everything from positioning, to modifiers, and even tips on improving entity functionality with raw OpenGL capabilities. From here on, everything from applying physics to your game, working with multi-touch events and gestures, game optimization, and even an overview of the various AndEngine extensions will be covered.The book has a widerange of recipes, from saving and loading game data, applying parallax backgrounds to create a seemingly 3D world, relying on touch events to zoom the game camera, taking screen-shots of the device's screen, and performance optimization using object pools. If physics-based games are more interesting to you, there's also a list of recipes ranging from controlling the world forces and calculating forces applied to bodies, creating destructible objects, and even creating rag-dolls.Pong styled games were fun 35 years ago, but it is time to take your game to the next level with the AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook.

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AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
JAYME SCHROEDER | Brian Boyles
Jan, 2013 | 380 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
AndEngine Game Structure
AndEngine Game Structure
Introduction
Know the life cycle
Choosing our engine type
Selecting a resolution policy
Creating object factories
Creating the game manager
Introducing sounds and music
Working with different types of textures
Applying texture options
Using AndEngine font resources
Creating the resource manager
Saving and loading game data
2
Working with Entities
Working with Entities
Introduction
Understanding AndEngine entities
Applying primitives to a layer
Bringing a scene to life with sprites
Applying text to a layer
Using relative rotation
Overriding the onManagedUpdate method
Using modifiers and entity modifiers
Working with particle systems
3
Designing Your Menu
Designing Your Menu
Introduction
Adding buttons to the menu
Adding music to the menu
Applying a background
Using parallax backgrounds to create perspective
Creating our level selection system
Hiding and retrieving layers
4
Working with Cameras
Working with Cameras
Introduction
Introducing the camera object
Limiting the camera area with the bound camera
Taking a closer look with zoom cameras
Creating smooth moves with a smooth camera
Pinch-zoom camera functionality
Stitching a background together
Applying a HUD to the camera
Applying a controller to the display
Coordinate conversion
Creating a split screen game
5
Scene and Layer Management
Scene and Layer Management
Introduction
Creating the scene manager
Setting up the resource manager for scene resources
Customizing managed scenes and layers
Setting up an activity to use the scene manager
6
Applications of Physics
Applications of Physics
Introduction to the Box2D physics extension
Understanding different body types
Creating category-filtered bodies
Creating multiple-fixture bodies
Creating unique bodies by specifying vertices
Using forces, velocities, and torque
Applying anti-gravity to a specific body
Working with joints
Creating a rag doll
Creating a rope
Working with collisions
Using preSolve and postSolve
Creating destructible objects
Raycasting
7
Working with Update Handlers
Working with Update Handlers
Getting started with update handlers
Attaching an update handler to an entity
Using update handlers with conditionals
Handling the removal of an entity from the game
Adding game timers
Setting entity properties based on the time passed
8
Maximizing Performance
Maximizing Performance
Introduction
Ignoring entity updates
Disabling background window rendering
Limiting simultaneous sound streams
Creating sprite pools
Cutting down render time with sprite groups
9
AndEngine Extensions Overview
AndEngine Extensions Overview
Introduction
Creating live wallpaper
Networking with the multiplayer extension
Creating high-resolution graphics with SVG
Color mapping with SVG texture regions
10
Getting More From AndEngine
Getting More From AndEngine
Loading all textures from a folder
Using textured meshes
Applying a sprite-based shadow
Creating a physics-based moving platform
Creating a physics-based rope bridge
Source Code for MagneTank
Source Code for MagneTank
Game level classes
Input classes
Layer classes
Manager classes
Menu classes
Index
Index

Selecting a resolution policy

Choosing a resolution policy can be a sensitive topic, especially since we're dealing with a platform which currently runs on devices ranging from 3-inch displays up to 10.1-inch for the most part. Generally developers and users alike prefer that a game takes up the full width and height of the device's display, but in some cases our resolution policy may need to be carefully selected in order to properly display our scenes as we—the developer—see fit. In this recipe, we're going to discuss the various resolution policies included in AndEngine, which will help us decide which policy might best fit our application's needs.

How to do it…

The resolution policy that we choose to adhere to must be included as a parameter in the EngineOptions constructor which is created in the onCreateEngineOptions() method of AndEngine's life cycle. The following code creates our EngineOptions object using the FillResolutionPolicy class, which will be explained later in the chapter:

EngineOptions engineOptions = new EngineOptions(true,
    ScreenOrientation.LANDSCAPE_FIXED, new FillResolutionPolicy(),
    mCamera);

We can select a different resolution policy by simply passing another variation of the resolution policy classes to this constructor.

How it works…

The following is an overview of AndEngine's BaseResolutionPolicy subtypes. These policies are used to specify how AndEngine will handle our application's display width and height based on various factors:

  • FillResolutionPolicy: The FillResolutionPolicy class is the typical resolution policy if we simply want our application to take up the full width and height of the display. While this policy allows our application to run in true full screen mode, it may cause some noticeable stretching in order for our scene to take up the full available dimensions of the display. We can select this resolution policy by simply including new FillResolutionPolicy() as our resolution policy parameter in the EngineOptions constructor.

  • FixedResolutionPolicy: The FixedResolutionPolicy class allows us to apply a fixed display size for our application, regardless of the size of the device's display or Camera object dimensions. This policy can be passed to EngineOptions via new FixedResolutionPolicy(pWidth, pHeight), where pWidth defines the final width that the application's view will cover, and pHeight defines the final height that the application's view will cover. For example, if we pass a width of 800 and a height of 480 to this policy-types constructor, on a tablet with a resolution of 1280 x 752, we'd be left with an empty black area since there will be no compensation between the resolution policy and the actual display size.

  • RatioResolutionPolicy: The RatioResolutionPolicy class is the best choice for resolution policies if we need to obtain the maximum display size without causing any distortion of sprites. On the other hand, due to the wide range of Android devices spanning many display sizes, it is possible that some devices may see "black bars" either on the top and bottom, or left and right sides of the display. This resolution policy's constructor can be passed either a float value, which defines a preferred ratio value for the display dimensions, or a width and a height parameter from which a ratio value will be extracted by dividing the width by the height. For example, new RatioResolutionPolicy(1.6f) to define a ratio, or new RatioResolutionPolicy(mCameraWidth, mCameraHeight), assuming mCameraWidth and mCameraHeight are the defined Camera object dimensions.

  • RelativeResolutionPolicy: This is the final resolution policy. This policy allows us to apply scaling, either larger or smaller, to the overall application view based on a scaling factor with 1f being the default value. We can apply general scaling to the view with the constructor—new RelativeResolutionPolicy(1.5f)—which will increase the scale of both the width and height by 1.5 times, or we can specify individual width and height scales, for example, new RelativeResolutionPolicy(1.5f, 0.5f). One thing to note with this policy is that we must be careful with the scaling factors, as scaling too large will cause an application to close without warning. Try to keep the scaling factor to less than 1.8f; otherwise make sure to do extensive testing on various devices.

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