Android Development

Android is a great platform which makes creating applications for mobile devices much easier than before. But in the progress of creating your applications you are bound to face bugs. For this purpose you need a good understanding of debugging your software. In this article I will explain how to debug your applications using the Eclipse IDE with the Android plugins.

We’ll use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) which basically is a tool that runs on both your android platform (emulator or device) and your development computer. The ADB can be used via the command line interface, or just simply via Eclipse. We will be using Eclipse to debug since it’s much easier. If you are debugging on a device, you first have to enable USB debugging. Go to the settings of the machine > software > development > USB-debugging (or something like that, my phone is Dutch!)
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As requested here is a sample tutorial in how to create a menu system for games in Android. Sorry for the delay but this tutorials take time to code test and write up. Anyway I hope you find it useful.

Before I jump into the code I’m going to take a second to explain my way of coding menus in Android. As we all know Android is built on the concept of activities. If you have been following earlier tutorials you already know how to create activities which can display graphics and deal with player input. But what if you want several different screens, such as options or credits? You could code them all into one activity but you would end up with a bloated and hard to maintain class.
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Every new Android SDK Version means that someone has to collect the sources and bundle them. Thanks to the supporter of the missing source jar issue a new source jar is provided. Also please star the issue to flag that issue as important!

Install instructions:

To use it in Eclipse, create a directory sources/ inside your
/platforms/android-1.6/ directory, and unzip the archive there. Start
Eclipse and check that you can see the source, for example ask for the definition of
the Gesture class (new in 1.6), you should see the source code, not the decompiled
byte code.

We will mirror the sources to, so feel free to download and use it!
Android SDK 1.6 sources

If you read my last tutorial entry here, then you may have come across a problem with the code.

If you load several large bitmaps using the BitmapFactory class to decode the bitmap you application will give you the dreaded force close dialogue box. A quick look in the logcat shows that a bitmap exceeds the virtual machine memory budget.

1

ERROR/AndroidRuntime(750): Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget

You may wonder how its possible that a few PNG’s can take up all the 16 mb of memory allocation for an application.
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In order to make anything more than very simple games in 2D it’s important to be able to draw animated sprites.

There are several ways to create animated sprites in Android, including using XML based declarations and swapping between multiple bitmaps. But when I came to write my animation code neither of these methods was flexible enough for the kind of animation I needed.

Instead of using these methods I instead used sprite sheets and the functionality provided by the Android bitmap drawing functions to draw each frame of the animation. In a nutshell each frame of animation is set on a single bitmap one after the other. The animation code then plays one frame after the other until the animation is complete. Below is an example of a sprite of a bouncing color changing arrow.
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Updated to be Android 2.0.1 compatible.

You are new to this series? Please start with the first part.

The sixth part of this series will show you how you create the correct perspective because 3D is nothing without the correct perspective.

Before we start we should discuss the two possible “views” OpenGL offers: orthographic and perspective.
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