Should a game loop be placed inside an AsyncTask

Issue

I am making an android game which is made up of a game loop that is constantly running as well as use of the android UI stuff. So they need to be in separate threads to work concurrently.

I am planning to put the game loop inside an AsyncTask however it says in the developer.android documentation that

AsyncTasks should ideally be used for short operations (a few seconds at the most.)

My game loop will in theory be operating indefinitely and almost always for more than a few seconds. Is the asynctask the right place to put this then or is there another preferred method to split up a game loop and the UI operations

Solution

AsyncTasks are for short operations only, as the documentation has stated. Also, they usually do some work that shouldn't interfere with the UI. Hence, "Async" and "Task".

What you should use instead is a new Thread. This is called Multi-Threading. There are a lot of Game Frameworks out there which will have problems with android's UI. Though you have not stated what UI Operations you are talking about, but if you plan to use the android's widgets(UI), you could call Activity.runOnUiThread() to run a code on the UI Thread, for example, changing a TextView's text.

Here is a snippet on how you would create a never ending loop in a new thread(or something like this, i dont remember if the function is private):

new Thread(new Runnable() {
    @Override
    private void run() {
        while(true) {
            //your code goes here
        }
    }
});

Answered By - Jian Astrero