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

Ignoring entity updates

One of the most important rules for game development when it comes to optimizing a game is, don't do work that does not need to be done!. In this recipe, we're going to talk about how we can use the setIgnoreUpdate() method on our entities in order to restrict the update thread to only update what should be updated, rather than constantly updating all of our entities whether we're using them or not.

How to do it…

The following setIgnoreUpdate(boolean) methods allow us to control which entities will be updated via the engine's update thread:

Entity entity = new Entity();
        
// Ignore updates for this entity
entity.setIgnoreUpdate(true);
        
// Allow this entity to continue updating
entity.setIgnoreUpdate(false);

How it works…

As we've discussed in the previous chapters, each child's onUpdate() method is called via its parent. The engine first updates, calling the update method for the main Scene object. The scene then proceeds to call all of the update methods...

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