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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 (28) Chapters Close

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

Implementing the game loop with a thread


Now we have learned about the game loop, threads, try and catch, we can put it all together to implement our game loop.

We will add the entire code for the game loop including writing two methods in the PongGame class to start and stop the thread which will control the loop.

After we have done this we will again need to do a little bit more theory. The reason for this is that the player can quit the app whenever they like, and our game's thread will need to know so it can stop itself. We will examine the Android Activity lifecycle which will give us the final pieces of the puzzle that we need before we run our game.

Implementing Runnable and providing the run method

Update the class declaration by implementing Runnable, just like we discussed we would need to and as shown in this next highlighted code.

class PongGame extends SurfaceView implements Runnable{

Notice that we have a new error in the code. Hover the mouse pointer over the word Runnable and...

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