Android development

This question goes out to the people who are using Windows OS and developing games on android with the SDL2 android framework.

The OS I’m using is Windows 7, 64-bit, and I’m having a lot of problems executing my app on an emulator and on an actual device.

The questions I have is:

  1. Which version of the Runtime Library (32-bit or 64-bit) on the SDL website should I use?
  2. Which version of the Android SDK (http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html , 32-bit or 64-bit) should I use?
  3. Which version of the Android NDK (https://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html , platform target) should I use?

As promised in the other thread (https://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=10770):

For “Hatched!” I simply run the game natively on Windows for development, which allows for rapid compilation and very easy debugging. Every now and then I need to get something to the device or emulator, which is what your question seems to be about. I am working with 32-bit builds, so that’s what I picked for everything. Android SDK: simply the latest version will work. Same for NDK… I found that from there, things can get a bit complicated. I made some notes while setting things up:

1.  Get SDL2, this includes an Android version
2.  Get the Android SDK
3.  Get the Android NDK
4.  Get WinAnt: https://code.google.com/p/winant
5.  Add NDK and SDK to system PATH
6.  Get the JAVA development kit (JDK)
7.  Create JAVA_HOME system variable and point it to JDK
8.  In the project folder, create local.properties, containing:
    sdk.dir=D:\\androidsdk\\sdk
9.  In the project folder, execute "ndk-build"
10. In the project folder, execute "ant debug" or "ant release"

There’s additional trickyness for generating a keystore, and then again when you want to get an app in the store (you’ll need a unique application identifier, which is non-trivial for a Java-evader like me).

Actually, now that Hatched is done, I could try to rip out all the game specific things and set up a ‘minimal Android SDL2 app’ with some guidelines for how to get it from the zip all the way to the store. I suspect that might be useful to newbies like I was 2 months ago. :slight_smile: My experience is still fresh, so that might help as well.

Here you go: https://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?p=45629#45629
Would be awesome if you could give this a whirl and let me know how it went.