Creating Splash Screen:

As I mentioned in my article about useful 'patterns' while developing your game, I said that's rather better to use multiple scenes instead of using multiple Activities. In this tutorial I will show and describe smart way to handle splash screen creation. This is a modified version of the code shared by  thepi - adapted to the latest AndEngine version - GLES2 and with some useful additions. On the bottom of this tutorial, you will find ready project to download (template) with cool AndEngine badge splash screen.

1. How its going to work?

• Firstly load only single texture with splash screen.
• Display splash screen scene, till rest of the game resources will be loaded
• After loading resources, display your main scene (menu or what ever)

With this simple approach, we have nice looking splash screen, displayed while loading game resources, its much better than displaying blank black screen. 

2. Instruction, step by step with code description:

• Create new Activity, use BaseGameActivity as a extension.
• Create new EngineOptions, camera
• Create two Scene fields, splashScene and mainScene.

• Now we have to create new texture and texture region for ours splash screen
• Create new Sprite field called splash.

private BitmapTextureAtlas splashTextureAtlas;
private ITextureRegion splashTextureRegion;
private Sprite splash;

BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.setAssetBasePath("gfx/");
splashTextureAtlas = new BitmapTextureAtlas(this.getTextureManager(), 256, 256, TextureOptions.DEFAULT);
splashTextureRegion =BitmapTextureAtlasTextureRegionFactory.createFromAsset(splashTextureAtlas,
this,"splash.png", 0, 0);
splashTextureAtlas.load();
pOnCreateResourcesCallback.onCreateResourcesFinished();

private void initSplashScene()
{
    splashScene = new Scene();
    splash = new Sprite(0, 0, splashTextureRegion, mEngine.getVertexBufferObjectManager())
    {
        @Override
        protected void preDraw(GLState pGLState, Camera pCamera)
        {
            super.preDraw(pGLState, pCamera);
            pGLState.enableDither();
        }
    };

    splash.setScale(1.5f);
    splash.setPosition((CAMERA_WIDTH - splash.getWidth()) * 0.5f, (CAMERA_HEIGHT - splash.getHeight()) * 0.5f);
    splashScene.attachChild(splash);
}

• Insert those lines inside onCreateScene()

initSplashScene();
pOnCreateSceneCallback.onCreateSceneFinished(this.splashScene);

mEngine.registerUpdateHandler(new TimerHandler(3f, new ITimerCallback() 
{
    public void onTimePassed(final TimerHandler pTimerHandler) 
    {
        mEngine.unregisterUpdateHandler(pTimerHandler);
        loadResources();
        loadScenes();         
        splash.detachSelf();
        mEngine.setScene(mainScene);
    }
}));
 
pOnPopulateSceneCallback.onPopulateSceneFinished();

• Also create those methods (check their comments to understand what they does)

public void loadResources() 
{
    // Load your game resources here!
}

private void loadScenes()
{
    // load your game here, you scenes
    mainScene = new Scene();
    mainScene.setBackground(new Background(50, 50, 50));
}

Download Source code: