HOWTO Use Google Play Services C++ SDK Version 3+ with CodeWorks 1R8

[HardlineStudios]

Hey all, I needed to update my game to use the latest versions of Android CodeWorks, Google Play Games and Visual Studio. A lot has changed since my original post from April 2016:

HOWTO Use Google Play Services C++ SDK with nSight Tegra

It took me a little while to get this working so hopefully I can save you some time with this little howto. Launch the Android SDK Manager and ensure you have installed the SDK platform for API 21 (Android 5.0) as well as the Google Play Services SDK way down the list in the extras section. 1.1) You will need to adjust your project’s Target Android API Level to 21. This helps avoid some little gotchas with getting this to work. You can keep the Min Android API Leve to whatever. 1.2) You’ll a…

The good news is that it’s much simpler now. That said, here is the updated procedure I had to do in order to get my game to use GPG Native SDK Version 3.1.0 (currently the latest) and Android CodeWorks 1R8.

If this is your first time setting up GPG in your project, you will need to do some setup in the Android Developer Console first. Follow this guide:

Get Started with Play Games Services for C++  |  Google for Developers

Then…

1. Download the GPG-CPP-SDK version 3.1.0, unzip it with the rest of the libraries in your project and setup the include and library paths as you would normally and add the library to your project as gpg only (not libgpg!)
   https://developers.google.com/games/services/downloads/gpg-cpp-sdk.v3.1.0.zip

2. Under the Gradle Build->Additional Dependencies section, you’ll want to set it as:
   Maven Local Repositories: https://maven.google.com
   AAR Maven Dependencies: com.google.android.gms:play-services-games:19.0.0;com.google.android.gms:play-services-nearby:17.0.0

3. Inside your AndroidManifest.xml you will need to have these meta-data tags inside the Application tags NOT the Activity tags!

<meta-data android:name="com.google.android.gms.games.APP_ID" android:value="@string/app_id" />
<meta-data android:name="com.google.android.gms.version" android:value="@integer/google_play_services_version"/>

The app_id is your unique Google Play Service ID and should be set in an .XML file in your res/values directory. The file I THINK can be anything. People use game-ids.xml. Mine is just ids.xml. The contents should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<resources>
  <string name="app_id"> Put your App ID number here </string>
</resources>

… and that’s it! The Gradle build system takes care of downloading and including everything needed which is nice.

Now if you were like me and had things setup following my previous guide of 2016, then you’ll have to remove the references to the JAR directories and the android-support-v4.jar.

This is what my Gradle Build->Additional Dependencies section looks like now:

From there, your code should just work. Good luck!

Fredy of Hardline Studios

[TomNVIDIA]

Thanks for sharing!