What should I learn [closed]

What should I learn [closed] - android

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So, I have been making simple apps with Android Studio for a while now. Now I want to move into the game development section. What do I need to learn to make games. I know a little bit on Java, but i do not know on what learn specifically to make games. What do i NEED to know to make games in Android Studio. If you guys have any websites or tutorials that you found handy please share them with me.
Thanks.

If you’re an Android app programmer who’s thinking about getting into game development, chances are you are planning on writing code in Java. If you’re a game development veteran who’s thinking of bringing games to Android, it’s likely that you prefer to do everything in C++.
The side-scrolling action game that I wrote, Replica Island, is entirely Java. It uses OpenGL ES 1.0 to draw and is backwards compatible to Android 1.5. It runs at a good frame rate (close to 60 fps on the G1) across almost all Android devices. In fact, many of the popular games on Android Market were written in Java, so if you’re the type of person who finds coding in C++ like speaking in tongues, you can rest easy in the knowledge that Java on Android is perfectly viable for games.
That said, native code is the way to go if your game needs to run as fast as possible. We’ve just released the fourth revision of our Native Development Kit for Android, and it includes a number of improvements that are particularly useful to game developers. Using the NDK, you can compile your code into a shared library, wrap it in a thin Java shell to manage input and lifecycle events, and do all of the heavy lifting in C++ with regular OpenGL ES APIs. As of Revision 4, you can also draw directly into Java Bitmap pixel buffers from native code, which should be faster than loading bitmaps as GL textures every frame for 2D games that want to do their own scene compositing. Revision 4 also (finally!) includes gdb support for debugging your native code on the device.
You should know that when using the NDK, you don’t have access to Android Framework APIs. There’s no way, for example, to play audio from C++ (though we announced at Google I/O our intention to support OpenSL ES in the future). Some developers use the AudioTrack API to share a direct buffer with native code that mixes and generates a PCM stream on the fly, and many call from C++ into the Java SoundPool interface. Just be aware that for this type of work, a jump through JNI back into Java code is required.
~Chris Pruett
Directly copied and posted here.
Original Article: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/game-development-for-android-quick.html

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Looking for OpenGL ES framework for cross-platform development on Win/Linux/MacOSX/Android/IOS [closed]

I just stumbled onto this one: GamePlay 3D
Supported platforms are Blackberry, Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
You can always do 2D using a 3D framework.

openframeworks
Does everything you asked.

2D cross-platform game engine for Android and iOS? [closed]

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I've worked for some time with Unity3d and found it's 2D part with OnGUI() or GUITextures too clumsy. Also, even a smallest game done on Unity3d is at least 10MB download which is just too much for a 2D game.
So, I'm currently looking for an engine for 2D. I've tried Cocos2D but it's iOS only and I wouldn't like to rewrite everything into another language for Android (so, e.g. Java port of Cocos2d for Android is not an option). Instead, I want to write the code once and with least hassle deploy it on iOS, Android and possibly Windows Phone 7. I have both Mac and Windows.
Just to be more detailed, here are my requirements to the engine:
must be cross-platform
must be efficient
should be C++, Java, C# or Objective C since I'm comfortable with them and NOT Flash, Javascript, HTML5 since I am not a web developer
must have a large community, tutorials, additional libraries which cover most of the stuff you'd have when developing on iOS or Android directly (in-app billing, facebook etc.)
the final delivered package must be not too large
the engine can be free, but I also wouldn't mind paying a reasonable price
I've found the following engines:
Marmalade (and IwGame engine on top of it) - C++, found overall very positive reviews of Marmalade but not sure about IwGame. EDIT (March 2013): Looks like Marmalade SDK now includes Cocos2Dx and some in-built IDE which makes it much better (and costs $150 per year for indie dev which is ok with me).
Corona SDK - Lua (efficiency doubtful), also needs internet connection to compile code
Cocos2d-x - C++, received lots of reviews from developers, mostly positive and many think it's best for 2D
Particle code - Java+Eclipse, found no reviews or comments
Moai - Lua, coudn't find any reviews/opinions on it
Monkey engine - seems to have too few features
Haxenme - it's Flash, I've never used it and don't want to
use Unity3d but with 2D packages like 2D Toolkit
ports of SDL to Android (also here) and iOS - doesn't look to have much support or current development (?)
GLBasic - Basic language, I don't like it
playN - seems to be early in development (?)
Gamvas - HTML5, doesn't look like a mature engine to me
Ignifuga - Python, also doesn't look mature
ORX - not sure if it's still developed (?)
Construct 2 - reminds GameMaker, might be ok for rapid prototypes but definitely not for industry-level games
XNA and then port the game using ExEn (would need Mono Touch to port to iOS and Mono for Android to port to Android) - C#, and is probably more thought for folks coming from Microsoft products like xBox (I come from Android). Also, those Mono tools cost $800 in total for small developers
Impact - JavaScript, uses HTML5. I'm not much into JavaScript (e.g. preferred C# on Unity3d), also not sure about efficiency since it runs in the browser (?)
GameMaker - own scripting language GML and I actually remember this one as a tool for non-programmers. Has it actually grown into a real engine, I mean for serious development?
AppGameKit - C++, yet seems to be still pretty new. Haven't found any reviews on it
use Cocos2D and Objective C to develop for iOS only and then make an APK for Android out of it using Stella SDK. Has anyone done this? I'm pretty sure there will be limitations, and how about Google's in-app billing, AdMob and Facebook integration on Android?
Moscrif - JavaScript, looks like it's more for former web-developers
Starling - Flash 11, i'm not much into Flash
ND2D - not yet 1.0, does it have many features?
So, I'd be happy if you could comment from your experiences with the engines and suggest which one in the list (or anything else that I've missed) is the best for the described requirements. I also may be wrong with my first impressions about some of the engines.
I'm currently thinking of Marmalade+IwGame as the best option but since I don't have much info about Cocos2d-x and Particle code, I am not really sure about it.
Thank you!
EDIT (June 2013): So far I made 2 cross-platform 2D games and used Unity3D with 2D Toolkit plugin for both. For the game with simple GUI I used a simple self-made GUI system based on Unity's own. For more complex one (e.g. where GUI elements can overlap) I used the NGUI plugin. Recently 2D Toolkit added some more classes for GUI which is very handy since one had to use 2 different systems for texture atlases when combining NGUI with 2D Toolkit. I'll definitely try that one in the next 2D game. The main reason for choosing Unity3D for 2D games was that I already was deep into Unity3D both in terms of experience and accumulated code snippets for re-use. Also, I purchased Unity3D pro (with Android Pro and iOS Pro) for 3D games and it made full sense to just pay additional $60 for the 2D Toolkit to get 2D games also covered. I so far don't regret my decision, it seems to have been optimal for my case. The only thing which gave me headache was adding social features with the Prime31's plugins (Android & iOS social plugins) but I assume that their bugs are not the fault of Prime31 but of Twitter/Facebook instead, so I probably would see the same bugs on any other engine or plugin.
EDIT (Jan 2014): I guess with Unity 4.3 the answer to my question is pretty obvious now: the Unity's new sprites system and maybe also 2DToolkit totally beat anything else, especially for people who have (like me) been on Unity for a while and purchased the Pro version with add-ons.

LibGDX is one of the best engines I've ever used, works on almost all platforms, and performs twice as fast as cocos2d-x in most tests I've done. You can use any JVM language you like. Here's a 13 part tutorial in Java, and here's a bunch using jruby. There's a good skeletal animation tool that works with it here, and it has baked in support for tiled TMX maps as well. The ui framework is awesome, and it has a scene graph and actor style API similar to cocos2d scenes, sprites and actions. The community is awesome, updates are frequent, and the documentation is good. Don't let the java part scare you, it's fast, and you can use jruby or scala or whatever you like. I highly recommend it for 2d or 3d work, it supports both.

I've worked with Marmalade and I found it satisfying. Although it's not free and the developer community is also not large enough, but still you can handle most of the task using it's tutorials. (I'll write my tutorials once I got some times too).
IwGame is a good engine, developed by one of the Marmalade user. It's good for a basic game, but if you are looking for some serious advanced gaming stuff, you can also use Cocos2D-x with Marmalade. I've never used Cocos2D-x, but there's an Extension on Marmalade's Github.
Another good thing about Marmalade is it's EDK (Extension Development Kit), which lets you make an extension for whatever functionality you need which is available in native code, but not in Marmalade. I've used it to develop my own Customized Admob extension and a Facebook extension too.
Edit:
Marmalade now has it's own RAD(Rapid Application Development) tool just for 2D development, named as Marmalade Quick. Although the coding will be in Lua not in C++, but since it's built on top of C++ Marmalade, you can easily include a C++ library, and all other EDK extensions. Also the Cocos-2Dx and Box2D extensions are preincluded in the Quick. They recently launched it's Release version (It was in beta for 3-4 months). I think we you're really looking for only 2D development, you should give it a try.
Update:
Unity3D recently launched support for 2D games, which seems better than any other 2D game engine, due to it's GUI and Editor. Physics, sprite etc support is inbuilt. You can have a look on it.
Update 2
Marmalade is going to discontinue their SDK in favor of their in-house game production soon. So it won't be a wise decision to rely on that.

You mention Haxe/NME but you seem to instinctively dislike it. However, my experience with it has been very positive. Sure, the API is a reimplementation of the Flash API, but you're not limited to targeting Flash, you can also compile to HTML5 or native Windows, Mac, iOS and Android apps. Haxe is a pleasant, modern language similar to Java or C#.
If you're interested, I've written a bit about my experience using Haxe/NME: link

V-Play (v-play.net) is a cross-platform game engine based on Qt/QML with many useful V-Play QML game components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more. API reference
The engine core is written in native C++, combined with the custom renderer, the games reach a solid performance of 60fps across all devices.
V-Play also comes with ready-to-use game templates for the most successful game genres like tower defense, platform games or puzzle games.
If you are curious about games made with V-Play, here is a quick selection of them:
Squaby: a tower defense game
Chicken Outbreak: a platformer like Doodle Jump
Blockoban: puzzle game
Crazy Elephant: a game similar to Angry Birds
Snowball Mania: multiplayer action game
Blitzkopf: brain game
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the guys behind V-Play)

Here is just a reply from Richard Pickup on LinkedIn to a similar question of mine:
I've used cocos 2dx marmalade and unity on both iOS and android. For
2d games cocos2dx is the way to go every time. Unity is just too much
overkill for 2d games and as already stated marmalade is just a thin
abstraction layer not really a game engine. You can even run cocos2d
on top of marmalade. My approach would be to use cocos2dx on iOS and
android then in future run cocosd2dx code on top of marmalade as an
easy way to port to bb10 and win phone 7

I find a nice and tidy Wave game engine few days ago. It uses C# and have Windows Phone and Windows Store converters as well which makes it a great replacement of XNA for me

and what about LibGDX from BadLogicGames?

Check out Loom (http://theengine.co) is a new cross platform 2D game engine featuring hot swapping code & assets on devices. This means that you can work in Photoshop on your assets, you can update your code, modify the UI of your app/game and then see the changes on your device(s) while the app is running.
Thinking to the other cross platform game engines I’ve heard of or even played with, the Loom Game Engine is by far the best in my oppinion with lots of great features. Most of the other similar game engines (Corona SDK, MOAI SDK, Gideros Mobile) are Lua based (with an odd syntax, at least for me). The Loom Game Engine uses LoomScripts, a scripting language inspired from ActionScript 3, with a couple of features borrowed from C#. If you ever developed in ActionScript 3, C# or Java, LoomScript will look familiar to you (and I’m more comfortable with this syntax than with Lua’s syntax).
The 1 year license for the Loom Game Engine costs $500, and I think it’s an affordable price for any indie game developer. Couple of weeks ago the offered a 1 year license for free too. After the license expires, you can still use Loom to create and deploy your own games, but you won’t get any further updates. The creators of Loom are very confident and they promised to constantly improve their baby making it worthwile to purchase another license.
Without further ado, here are Loom’s great features:
Cross platform (iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux/Ubuntu)
Rails-inspired workflow lets you spend your time working with your game (one command to create a new project, and another command to run it)
Fast compiler
Live code and assets editing
Possibility to integrate third party libraries
Uses Cocos2DX for rendering
XML, JSON support
LML (markup language) and CSS for styling UI elements
UI library
Dependency injection
Unit test framework
Chipmunk physics
Seeing your changes live makes multidevice development easy
Small download size
Built for teams
You can find more videos about Loom here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LoomEngine?feature=watch
Check out this 4 part in-depth tutorial too: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2013/02/28/A-closer-look-at-the-Loom-game-engine-Part-one-getting-started.aspx

I've tried AppGameKit, It's both c++ and Basic.
It's very easy to code 2d games in the Basic varient, with physics, collision and heaps more.
It's also in active development, and really cheap (65$).
The main problem is that it's really hard to compile for Android (you need to download heaps of files and follow difficult guides and things like that)
My opinion is that it isn't yet good enough for commercial use, but is good for indie programmers
It's got a medium size community

I currently use Corona for business applications with great success. As far as games go, I'm under the impression that it doesn't provide the performance that some of the other cross-platform development engines do. It is worth noting that Carlos (founder of Ansca Mobile/Corona SDK) has started another company on a competing engine; Lanica Platino Engine for Appcelerator Titanium. While I haven't worked with this personally, it does look promising. Keep in mind, however, that it comes with a $999/yr price tag.
All that said, I have been researching Moai for a little while now (since I am already familiar with Lua syntax) and it does seem promising. The fact that it can compile for multiple platforms, not limited to mobile environments, is appealing.
Multimedia Fusion 2 is also a worth contender, considering the complexity of games produced and the performance realized from them. Vincere Totus Astrum (http://gamesare.com) comes to mind.

Recently I used an AS3 engine: PushButton (now is dead, but it's still functional and you could use something else) to do this job. To make it works with Android and iOS, the project was compiled in AIR for both platforms and everything worked with no performance damage. Since Flash Builder is kinda expensive ($249), you could use FlashDevelop (there is some tutorials to compile in AIR with it).
Flash could be an option since is very easy to learn.

What is the difference between Android SDK and NDK? [closed]

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I am about to start android application development.
From What is NDK? documentation I was not able to extract the following information:
Does using NDK actually introduce new features comparing to SDK?
I am interested in this because using NDK greatly increases application complexity, so if I am not interested in performance increase, are there other reasons to go for NDK?
What I mean is for example:
-restart phone
(I know neither SDK nor NDK allows this, I just use it as an example of what I mean) let's say java SDK does not allow this, but some native libraries do - then the answer to my question would be yes, NDK does add some functionality
Thanks in advance for any helpful answers.

You really should use SDK, unless you have a good reason to use NDK. Good reasons may vary, but for example, you could use NDK:
If you want to use OpenGL ES 2.0 for Android 2.1 (Eclair), it is only avaiable through NDK. The SDK support for OpenGL ES 2.0 began with the Froyo version.
If you want to use Renderscript
If you have a great portion of your app's logic written in C/C++

The NDK is much more limited in terms of functionality.
What you do get from the NDK is the ability to write your app in C++ and compile it to native ARM code. If you like C++ better than Java, if you have an existing C++ app that you want to port to Android, or if you just need the extra performance that only native code can offer, then by all means you should use the NDK.
I haven't done this myself, but another alternative is to write hybrid app, where the app is written mostly in Java, with selected functions written in C++ that are called from the Java code.

The only reasons to use the NDK as far as I know is to squeeze extra performance out of your application and get closer to the bare metal. If you don't need to do either of these things, you should probably stay away from the NDK.
Also note that the Dalvik VM already has some pretty awesome performance and comparatively simpler.

For me, I think it’s important to know the NDK which is a powerful tool in the development of mobile applications. Especially if you want to develop a multiplatform application, the NDK is unbeatable in this domain. Since the same code written in C + + for Android can be easily ported and run the same way on the iOS, Windows or any other platform without changing the original code. Which actually save a lot of time in the development of applications which are developed for being run on multiple platforms; as games and other classic applications. Thing you cannot do with the SDK.

Native methods are platform-specific code. They are usually written in languages such as C or C++ and contained in libraries(dll's). It is possible to create a hybrid Java application that benefits from such libraries.
Reasons for Using Native Methods
Gaining access to special capabilities of your device or or Android
OS
Gaining extra speed
Gaining access to a large body of existing legacy code
Typically, good use cases for the NDK are CPU-intensive applications such as game engines, signal processing, and physics simulation
The major disadvantage of native methods is that you won't have cross-platform capability.
Now if you don't know what native code is, then probably you don't need to use native code. Android NDK documentation explains this well:
..., you should understand that the NDK will not benefit most apps. As
a developer, you need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks.
Notably, using native code on Android generally does not result in a
noticable performance improvement, but it always increases your app
complexity. In general, you should only use the NDK if it is essential
to your app—never because you simply prefer to program in C/C++. When
examining whether or not you should develop in native code, think
about your requirements and see if the Android framework APIs provide
the functionality that you need.

Porting iOS app to Android [closed]

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we made a quit big iOS application with 2000+ objective c classes. I am wondering there is a best practice guide to port it to Android ? Currently I am looking at Visual Paradigm (UML) which reverse engineers objective c files to UML. Like Enterprise Architect it also allows me to generate code(headers + declaration) for another popular language like java or c++. Are there any other approaches yet ? Also, as our app is heavily using the UINavigation and UIView controllers, I am wondering there is similar model and implementation on Android.
Thanks so far, guenter

In all honesty, I think that what you are planing is just going to make for crappy code that will be insanely hard to maintain. I realize it sounds like a lot of work, but its gonna be easier in the long run, I would just "port" the concept of the app to android and write it from the ground up.

The Apportable SDK
It cross-compiles Objective-C applications to Android, without extensive changes to the original codebase. Instead of translating the code to Java, Apportable cross-compiles your code to run directly on the Android device’s processor, bypassing the Java runtime, resulting in speed and performance that rivals the iOS version.
The platform has been tested on Apportable’s library of over 150 devices and in the wild, where Apportable-powered apps have received 5-star reviews on thousands of devices.
check out the sdk here

AFAIK there is no automatic tool to convert Objective-C to Java. There is java2objc that does the reverse.
Here are some official tips for porting Objective-C to Java: http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/WebObjects/Guides/PortingObjectiveCtoJava.pdf
I'm not an iOS expert, but AFAIK iOS does not have layout managers - it uses XIB/NIB to do layout (or dynamically in code, which is not recommended). On Android there are layout classes which are primarily used to support different resolutions. Also, layout is declared via XML files.
So it seems there is a lot of hand-coding in front of you. Since a project is quite large, I'd get a help of an expert that knows both Android and iPhone.

For going from C or C++ to Android you are probably best of using the NDK. The problem is that I don't think this is possible (at least, not directly?) for Objective C.
I think it might be best to try and go to C, and then use the NDK to make it into an app for Android. Going from your code, trough UML to JAVA sounds like a much harder option.

just to let you know how the story did end up, I kept using Sparx Enterprise Architect and have my design, architecture and documentation well under control, for all platforms finally except for JavaScript. Its a bit tedious when integrating new features but in an enterprise environment it saved me a lot of time. We are working on iOS, Desktop(Web2.0/HTML5), Android, Blackberry, Symbian and some router systems. To get rid of platform specific things, I introduced always an additional layer. Seems to work for our products so far.
Thanks to all again, g.

MyAppConverter service helps to convert native iOS mobile apps instantly to native Android app, it's not focused mainly on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app. That means it don't replicate your application as it is. Instead, MyAppConverter make all changes to make a project suitable for the development of an Android application.
MyAppConverter currently support only iOS to Android conversion and objective-c to swift.

Are there any decent physics engines for Android? [closed]

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I've looked around for a physics engine that will play nicely with Android, but I've only been disappointed.
In terms of performance, I had heard that jbox2d was the best bet, but (from my understanding) ever since Android SDK V1.0, the Dalvik VM's verifier has become very strict and rejects some of the key classes and refuses to run. This problem persists after using the dx tool (although I might be using the tool improperly).
I know that the AndroidBox2D porting project exists to optimize jbox2d for the Android garbage collector, but the project page doesn't have any downloads and the gpl license isn't as attractive as the zlib license of the original.
Does anyone have any tips for making jbox2d work in Eclipse, or have any recommendations for where I should start looking?

I don't know why Dalvik would reject classes unless they were obfuscated with some tool. Did you try recompiling Box2d from source?
The only other Java lib I've seen is http://www.cokeandcode.com/phys2d/

I am getting good results with the Java version of APE using Fixed Point math rather than floats.
http://www.cove.org/ape/

I have done an implementation of the APE engine now using (mostly) fixed point math and it is without garbage collection. Its a pretty nice engine to do stuff with constraints but seems less suited for really rigid bodies.
http://code.google.com/p/ape-physics-for-android/
You could also look into the NDK port of Chipmunk (download link on youtube page)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i_GFjfmLTc

Also look # Glaze which is optimized for arrays .. might not be a horrible port to Java from AS3 (it was ported to Haxe also)
http://code.google.com/p/glaze/

I am not sure, if jBox2D is really suitable for smartphones. I would rather look at J2ME engines, as they are highly optimized for performance- E.g: http://emini.at
Also you should have no problems with integration.

Libgdx has JBox2D built in and is cross platform (Android, Java Desktop, GWT Web) like Unity, tho it's free and open source.
I got it set up in 15 minutes and was creating physics bodies in no time. The Libgdx physics manual helps from there. Good luck!

Develop Reference

The Android operating system is a mobile operating system that was developed by Google (GOOGL?) to be primarily used for touchscreen devices, cell phones, and tablets.