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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 five exciting games

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Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800565869
Length 686 pages
Edition 3rd 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 (24) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Chapter 1: Java, Android, and Game Development 2. Chapter 2: Java – First Contact FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 3: Variables, Operators, and Expressions 4. Chapter 4: Structuring Code with Java Methods 5. Chapter 5: The Android Canvas Class – Drawing to the Screen 6. Chapter 6: Repeating Blocks of Code with Loops 7. Chapter 7: Making Decisions with Java If, Else, and Switch 8. Chapter 8: Object-Oriented Programming 9. Chapter 9: The Game Engine, Threads, and the Game Loop 10. Chapter 10: Coding the Bat and Ball 11. Chapter 11: Collisions, Sound Effects, and Supporting Different Versions of Android 12. Chapter 12: Handling Lots of Data with Arrays 13. Chapter 13: Bitmap Graphics and Measuring Time 14. Chapter 14: Java Collections, the Stack, the Heap, and the Garbage Collector 15. Chapter 15: Android Localization – Hola! 16. Chapter 16: Collections and Enumerations 17. Chapter 17: Manipulating Bitmaps and Coding the Snake Class 18. Chapter 18: Introduction to Design Patterns and Much More! 19. Chapter 19: Listening with the Observer Pattern, Multitouch, and Building a Particle System 20. Chapter 20: More Patterns, a Scrolling Background, and Building the Player's Ship 21. Chapter 21: Completing the Scrolling Shooter Game 22. Chapter 22: What Next? 23. Other Books You May Enjoy

Summary

This was probably the most technical chapter so far. Threads, game loops, timing try and catch blocks, using interfaces, the activity lifecycle, and so on… that's an awfully long list of topics to cram into a chapter. 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's pause and resume methods. It achieves this via the overridden onPause and onResume methods, which are called by the operating system.

Once the thread is running, the code inside the run method executes alongside the user interface thread that is listening for player input. Once 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...

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