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Learning Java by Building Android  Games

You're reading from   Learning Java by Building Android Games Learn Java and Android from scratch by building six exciting games

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2018
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781788839150
Length 774 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
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Author (1):
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John Horton John Horton
Author Profile Icon John Horton
John Horton
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Table of Contents (30) Chapters Close

Learning Java by Building Android Games Second Edition
Contributors
Preface
1. Java, Android and Game Development FREE CHAPTER 2. Java: First Contact 3. Variables, Operators and Expressions 4. Structuring Code with Java Methods 5. The Android Canvas Class – Drawing to the Screen 6. Repeating Blocks of Code with Loops 7. Making Decisions with Java If, Else and Switch 8. Object-Oriented Programming 9. The Game Engine, Threads, and The Game Loop 10. Coding the Bat and Ball 11. Collisions, Sound Effects and Supporting Different Versions of Android 12. Handling Lots of Data with Arrays 13. Bitmap Graphics and Measuring Time 14. The Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector 15. Android Localization -Hola! 16. Collections, Generics and Enumerations 17. Manipulating Bitmaps and Coding the Snake class 18. Introduction to Design Patterns and much more! 19. Listening with the Observer Pattern, Multitouch and Building a Particle System 20. More Patterns, a Scrolling Background and Building the Player's ship 21. Completing the Scrolling Shooter Game 22. Exploring More Patterns and Planning the Platformer Project 23. The Singleton Pattern, Java HashMap, Storing Bitmaps Efficiently and Designing Levels 24. Sprite-sheet animations, Controllable Player and Parallax Scrolling Backgrounds 25. Intelligent Platforms and Advanced Collision Detection 26. What next? Index

Summary


This was probably the most technical chapter so far. Threads, game loops, timing try and catch blocks, using interfaces, the Activity lifecycle, etc… It's an awfully long list of topics to cram into 35 pages. If the exact interrelationships between these things are not entirely clear it is not a problem. All you need to know is that when the player starts and stops the game the PongActivity class will handle starting and stopping the thread by calling the PongGame class' pause and resume methods. It achieves this via the overridden onPause and onResume methods which are called by the OS.

Once the thread is running the code inside the run method executes alongside the UI thread that is listening for player input. As we call the update and draw methods from the run method at the same time as keeping track of how long each frame is taking, our game is ready to rock and roll. We just need to add some game objects to update in each call to update and draw in each call to draw.

In the next...

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