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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
AndEngine for Android Game Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cutting down render time with sprite groups


Sprite groups are a great addition to any AndEngine game which deals with hundreds of visible sprites on the scene at any given time. The SpriteGroup class allows us to eliminate a large amount of overhead by grouping many sprite rendering calls into a limited number of OpenGL calls. If a school bus were to pick up a single child, drop them off at school, then pick up the next child, repeating until all children were at school, the process would take a far greater time to complete. The same goes for drawing sprites with OpenGL.

Getting started…

Refer to the class named ApplyingSpriteGroups in the code bundle. This recipe requires an image named marble.png, which is 32 pixels in width by 32 pixels in height.

How to do it…

When creating a SpriteGroup for use in our games, we can treat them as an Entity layer which is specifically meant for Sprite objects only. The following steps explain how to create and attach Sprite objects to a SpriteGroup.

  1. Creating...