Question

I’m new in Android development and I have been making a tutorial for a game example which tells that using a layout file is not necessary because of the flexibility need on game development. However I’ve seen on Android docs that using a layout file is always the best way for Android development.

I’m sorry if my doubt looks obvious or kind of weird, but I’m really newbie and I’d really appreciate if you guys give me some help.

Answer 1

Most Android Games will use a Surface, Canvas, or GL Surface view to render all content to the screen. This element is likely to be fullscreen as well.

And so all drawing of UI and buttons and game elements are drawn directy to the surface, bypassing the use of Android’s many UI views.

There is no reason you game cannot use android UI views in addition to using a surface for drawing the game action itself.

And of course you will likely use layouts as well when integrating things such as Admob ads or user dialogs within you game. So in practice you will use both.

But a standard utility application built in android will use layouts almost exclusively.

As a final aside, it is not necessary to use layouts. Every view type can be created either through XML layouts and inflating the views, or by instantiating a view in java code. the main reason for using layout files is because they are fast to build easy to use for a large category of interface design. But he choice to use them or not is your own.