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TIMOGR - TIny MObile GRaphics starter template

TIMOGR is a tiny Android starter template for creating fullscreen 2D apps using the TIGR library.

Like TIGR, TIMOGR is designed to be small and mostly independent.

TIMOGR takes care of the Android life-cycle stuff and lets you write the fun part of your little app. Oh, and you don't need Android Studio - it works just fine with the plain Android SDK + NDK, and you can build, run and debug from within VS Code.

Getting started

• Generate your own repo based on this template
• Clone your new repo to get the files to your machine
• Install Android SDK (or Android Studio)
• If not already in place, install the Android NDK (Use sdkmanager or Android Studio)
• Make sure ANDROID_SDK_ROOT is set, and JAVA_HOME if gradle cannot find the correct version below.
• Copy keystore.properties.example to keystore.properties (and modify it if you want to sign your app)
• Run a test build: ./gradlew buildCMakeDebug (that's gradlew.bat build on Windows)
• Tweak app/build/build.gradle if the test build complains about compileSdkVersion or ndkVersion
• Plug in your device (or run an emulator), and run ./gradlew installDebug to install the template TIMOGR app
• Run the app (and report back if there are problems)

Now, replace the meat of app/src/main/cpp/main.c with your TIGR code, and you're done.

Just like with desktop TIGR, the code can be as tiny as this:

#include "tigr.h"

void tigrMain()
{
    Tigr *screen = tigrWindow(320, 240, "Hello", TIGR_4X);
    while (!tigrClosed(screen))
    {
        tigrClear(screen, tigrRGB(0x80, 0x90, 0xa0));
        tigrPrint(screen, tfont, 120, 110, tigrRGB(0xff, 0xff, 0xff), "Hello, world.");
        tigrUpdate(screen);
    }
    tigrFree(screen);
}

Debugging in VS Code

Experimental!

The project includes .vscode configuration of tasks for building and debugging directly in VS Code.

This currently requires a working go installation, so that you can build go executables.

To get started, connect a device or launch an emulator, then simply press F5 to build and start debugging.

You can launch the default (first) emulator by running ./dbgtool/dbgtool emulator.

Some details and pointers

Input

• Keyboard input using the virtual keyboard is supported. Use tigrShowKeyboard() to show or hide the keyboard.
• The "back" button produces a TK_ESCAPE keypress.
• The "buttons" reported by tigrMouse is the number of detected touch points, the position is always of the last triggered touch point.
• Use tigrTouch to process multi-touch input.

Threads and extending the Android side

The tigrMain entry point runs on a rendering thread separate from the Activity main thread. If you need to do more Android specifics, check out the Activity implementation in tigractivity.cpp.

Files and assets

Reading "files" by using tigrLoadImage for example, reads from the corresponding asset path. Putting image.png at app/src/main/assets will make it loadable from /image.png.

Writing files (tigrSaveImage) will write to the given path. TIMOGR will not redirect writes to the app internal storage.

C/C++

You can of course replace main.c with main.cpp if you want. Just update CMakeLists.txt and declare tigrMain as extern "C":

extern "C" void tigrMain() {
    // ...
}

Building a "real" app

You can make a distributable app based on TIMOGR. There is plenty of information of the steps involved on the Android developer site. Start by changing the application ID in app/build.gradle.

The Android developer site also describes how to sign your app from the command line or by using Gradle.

Adding more activities

There can be only one instance of the TIMOGR native activity. If you need another instance, you could theoretically add another native library target in CMakeLists.txt and refer to that in the second activity declaration in AndroidManifest.xml.