Live Wallpaper with Game Engine or not?

I'd like to develop a live wallpaper. After some research, I concluded that there were two options to create one :

• Directly, i.e like it's said on Android-Developpers ( http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/live-wallpapers.html )

• Or thanks to a game engine like AndEngine ( http:/开发者_StackOverflow社区/code.google.com/p/andenginelivewallpaperextension/ )

I've never developed Live Wallpaper. Which solution is the easiest and fastest?

You can handle the drawing directly, as in the Cube example in the SDK. Or you can use OpenGl ES, e.g. via AndEngine, LibGDX, GLWallpaperService, or RenderScript. More work, but better performance.

If your wallpaper is fairly simple, I would suggest doing the drawing yourself. That is what most people do. If you need "physics" (e.g. a particle system), look at AndEngine or LibGDX. If you need 3D, look at GLWallpaperService. In addition to the Cube example, you might want to look at the Android system source code to see how the stock wallpapers (Grass, Galaxy, etc.) use RenderScript. This link may get you there, but things keep moving: http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/ext/com.google.android/android-apps/4.1.1_r1/com/android/wallpaper/ (then scroll down to the wallpapers)

Good luck. George.

I suggest Rajawali: https://github.com/MasDennis/Rajawali A 3D engine for Android based on OpenGL ES 2.0

It sure is easier to develop with a game engine. Unity engine is pretty good for that, with its visual editor, good asset import pipeline a tons of stuff on Asset Store that would help to boost your development. There are other game engines tyou could use for live wallpapers, but it'd be a much more tedious task.

The negative side of using Unity is that ti might be somewhat heavy - it's expected to have an minimal APK of around 9 MB in size This doesn't really matters if you have a resource-heavy live wallpaper, though.

I've recently released uLiveWallpaper - a Unity asset that makes it possible to create live wallpapers for Android using Unity 5. It is well-tested and reliable, creates projects for Android Studio, complete with placeholder code to get you started.

Unity is probably not the best option if you want to make something really simple, but definitely the best option if you aim for high visual quality.

Check out uLiveWallpaper forum thread here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ulivewallpaper-develop-android-live-wallpapers-with-unity-5.375255/

Or just search up for "uLiveWallpaper".