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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

Handling different versions of Android


Most of the time throughout this book we haven't paid any attention to supporting older Android devices. The main reason being that all the up to date parts of the API we have been using work on such a high percentage of devices (in excess of 95%) it has not seemed worthwhile. Unless you intend carving out a niche, in apps for ancient Android relics this seems like a sensible approach. Regarding playing sounds however there have been some relatively recent modifications to the Android API.

Actually, this isn't immediately a big deal because devices newer than this can still use the old parts of the API. But it is good practice to specifically handle these differences in compatibility, because eventually, one day, the older parts might not work on newer versions of Android.

The main reason for discussing this here and now is that the slight differences in pre and post-Android Lollipop sound handling gives us a good excuse to see how we can deal with things...

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