Let's take MacOS as an example, the processes on win32 and linux are more or less the same.
At first, you should download Cocos2d-x and unzip it. We could simply unzip it on the root directory of your home folder.
Double click the folder cocos2d-x and you will find a lot of files and folders. Here is the screenshot:
Before configuring the development environment, let's download some dependency software first.
Since we are trying to develop Android games, so Java is a necessary toolkit.
- Open Your Terminal(You can hit Control-Space to open Spotlight and enter "Terminal" and hit "Enter" key), input the following commands to verify whether your machine supports Java or not.
java -version
If the following lines shown on your Terminal then you may have get JDK properly installed.
(Note, the Java version number may be different, but it's doesn't matter. As to Cocos2d-x, you could upgrade the JDK and we recommend you to install JDK 1.6 or 1.7)
Java version "1.7.0_51"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_51-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.51-b03, mixed mode)
- Download the Android SDK. If you are using Mac, click this link to download ADT Bundle for Mac.
The bundle includes the newest Android SDK version plus an Eclipse version with Android Development Tool installed. So we don't need to download an extra Eclipse and install it the ADK manually any more.
After downloaded it, unzip the package into ~/AndroidDev directory. The folder contains two folders: sdk and eclipse.
You could launch the Eclipse and install other SDK versions. Here is an example:
- Download NDK. Here is the download link. You could always prefer the latest version. When we are writing this article, the latest version of NDK is r9d.
After downloading it, unzip the package at the same location of the Android SDK. In our case, it is under the ~/AndroidDev directory.
Aha, we have installed all the required software. Let's do the final verification.
At first, we should verify that python 2.7 is installed and it is accessible under the current user's environment which means you could type python --version in your Terminal(or Command Line on win32) and it will give you the following result:
-> % python --version
Python 2.7.5
If there is a prompt like "command not found: python" which means your python environment is not correct, you should install it. We recommend you install python with homebrew.
brew install python
If the homebrew isn't installed on your system, please refer to this link for more information.
At last, let's install ant tools. If you are a homebrew user, you could simply type the following command in your terminal to install ant:
brew install ant
Configure Android development environment is really tough but worth it, isn't it?
Without any further ado, let's rock!
At first, open your Terminal and cd to ~/cocos2d-x.
If you type ls command, it will show you all the files.
Now, type python setup.py and you will get the following results:
It added the COCOS2D_CONSOLE_ROOT environment variable to point to the bin directory under ~/cocos2d-x/tools/cocos2d-console directory.
And then it looked for an NDK_ROOT environment variable. If you haven't configured this environment before, it will prompts you the environment variable is not found and you should enter the path of your NDK.
In our case, we could input /Users/guanghui/AndroidDev/android-ndk-r9d/.
Caution: You must expand the ~ sign to your own user directory path. Otherwise, the scripts will fail due to error path value.
Here is the screenshot:
Now it's time to repeat the last process to configure the ANDROID_SDK_ROOT. You can simply input /Users/guanghui/AndroidDev/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20130522/sdk/. The adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-xxxx, the xxxx number maybe different. So please note this non-trivial difference.
If you don't install ant program, you should install ant first.
After you have installed ant, when the scripts ask you to config the ANT_ROOT, you can simply hit Enter key and let the scripts do the remaining jobs for you.
If all the environment variables are correctly configured, you should let them take effect.
On *nix systems, you could issue the following commands:
source ~/.bash_profile
on win32 system, you can just close the command line windows and restart it.
Now it's time to compile the built-in samples of Cocos2d-x.
At first, you should change your directory to the android-build.py scripts lays.
cd build
and then
python android-build.py -p 10 cpp-tests
Bang! Hit enter and the scripts will handle all the remaining things for you.
Let's over all the parameters to android-build.py.
If you only type python android-build.py in the Terminal, it will give you the following results:
Please read the help information carefully when this is your first time trying to build Cocos2d-x.
If all things are going well, you will get the following messages:
Now it's time to test on your Android device.
At first, you should enable USB Debugging on your phone and then connect your device via an USB line.
At first, change your directory to the the bin directory of testcpp android project:
cd ~/cocos2d-x/tests/cpp-tests/proj.android/bin
(Note:If your current directory is build, you could use some relative path like thiscd ../tests/cpp-tests/proj.android/bin)
Then you could use adb to install the apk to your android phone:
adb install CppTests-debug.apk
If it prompts you the adb is not a command, then you could run the following commands in your Terminal or add this code line into your ~/.bashrc file.
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_SDK_ROOT/tools:$ANDROID_SDK_ROOT/platform-tools
If it gives you the following screenshot, congratulations, it's done!
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After configuring the setup.py file, you still suffer NDK_ROOT not found issue, you maybe miss sourcing the ~/.bash_profile file.
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If you are on Windows pc, you should be careful about the difference of the filesystem conventions.
In this article, we use the MacOS system as our development environment. But it should work well on other platform.
If you are creating a new project with cocos2d-console, you should try this documentation for more help to get it run on your Android phone.
If you have any problems, please post it on the forum.