Programming
- page 9Android: Use ccache with Android NDK on Cygwin
Posted by Dimitri | Nov 24th, 2011
This Android tutorial explains how to set-up ccache to work with the NDK on Cygwin environments. Ccache is a great tool that detects unnecessary code recompilation by comparing the current source compilation with previously cached results, thus reducing the time it takes to complete. The support for ccache has been officially added to the 7th revision of the NDK.
The instructions in this posts have been tested on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bits and Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bits, using Cygwin 6.1, Eclipse 3.5.2 and obviously, Android NDK r7. The commands to compile Android native code are from this post. Continue reading: “Android: Use ccache with Android NDK on Cygwin”
Android: Initialize View child class object from a XML file
Posted by Dimitri | Nov 16th, 2011
This tutorial shows how to inherit from the View class to create your own customized View element, and how to initialize an object from this child class with parameters defined at a layout XML file. There are two major advantages in this approach over initializing the extended View object at the Activity.
The first is that the Java part of your code remains clean, without a lot of member variable assignments to set the View’s basic parameters. The second and most important, is the possibility to instantly preview the changes at the Graphical Layout tool in Eclipse without the need to execute the application. This means that the space this customized View element takes on the screen can be immediately be seen and adjusted, if necessary.
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Unity: Creating a texture from a XML file
Posted by Dimitri | Nov 7th, 2011
This Unity3D programming tutorial explains how to read a XML file from the Resources folder and use the pixel color data defined there to create a Texture2D object. Basically, it’s the same as creating a texture from an array, but this array will be obtained from a XML file, instead of being defined in the script.
Since even a small image uses a large amount of tags on the XML file, an example project is available for download at the end of the post. This sample project has a XML file with 4096 items, that creates a 64×64 texture.
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Unity3D: Using textures larger than 4096×4096
Posted by Dimitri | Oct 30th, 2011
This post explains how to assign images larger than 4096×4096 px as textures in Unity. This image size is the maximum supported dimension for a texture in that game engine, however Unity allows us to write our own custom shaders that can use four images as textures, instead of just one.
Therefore, this post shows how to create a simple diffuse shader that takes four images to compose a single texture. That way, a 8192×8192 image can be used as a texture by breaking it into four 4096×4096 pieces, thus respecting the engine’s image size limit.
Continue reading: “Unity3D: Using textures larger than 4096×4096”