Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
4.
The CPU/ABI specifies which CPU type the AVD should emulate. Select
ARM here.
5.
You can specify the size of the SD card of the AVD, as well as the screen
size via the options in the Skin settings. Leave those fields as is. For real-life
testing, you'd usually want to create multiple AVDs that cover all the
Android versions and screen sizes you want your application to handle.
6.
Enabling the snapshot option will save the state of the emulator when
you close. Upon next startup, the emulator will load the snapshot of the
saved stated instead of booting. This can save you some time when
starting up a new emulator instance.
7.
Hardware options are more advanced. We'll peek into a few in the next
section. They let you modify low-level properties of the emulator devices
and the emulator itself, such as whether the emulator's graphics output
should be hardware accelerated.
Note
Unless you have dozens of different devices with different Android versions and screen
sizes, you should use the emulator for additional testing of Android version/screen size combinations.
Installing Advanced Emulator Features
There are a few hardware virtualization implementations that now support the Android emulator,
Intel being one of them. If you have an Intel CPU, you should be able to install the Intel
Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), which, in conjunction with an x86 emulator
image, will virtualize your CPU and run significantly faster than a normal fully emulated image.
Run in conjunction with this, enabling GPU acceleration will (in theory) provide a reasonable
performance testing environment. Our experience with these tools in their current state is
that they are still a bit buggy, but things look promising, so make sure to watch for official
announcements from Google. In the meantime, let's get set up:
1.
Download and install the HAXM software from Intel, available at
2.
Once installed, you will need to make sure you have installed the specific
AVD called Intel x86 Atom System Image. Open the SDK Manager,
navigate to the Android 4.0.3 section, and check if the image is installed
(see Figure
2-8
). If it is not installed, check the entry, then click “Install
packages . . .�
