OpenGL ES coverage?

[Lance Colton]

I bought a book or two on android development, however their lacking in information regarding the Android platform's OpenGL support.
Does Android in Action go over this topic?

[robi sen]

It does but not into great detail. Basically if you know OpenGL ES Android has very strong support for it. Furthermore latter versions of Android or going to add a simpler and better 3D support as well in Android 3.0. Check out http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.0-highlights.html

"Hardware-accelerated 2D graphics

Android 3.0 offers a new hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer that gives a performance boost to many common graphics operations for applications running in the Android framework. When the renderer is enabled, most operations in Canvas, Paint, Xfermode, ColorFilter, Shader, and Camera are accelerated. Developers can control how hardware-acceleration is applied at every level, from enabling it globally in an application to enabling it in specific Activities and Views inside the application.

Renderscript 3D graphics engine

Renderscript is a runtime 3D framework that provides both an API for building 3D scenes as well as a special, platform-independent shader language for maximum performance. Using Renderscript, you can accelerate graphics operations and data processing. Renderscript is an ideal way to create high-performance 3D effects for applications, wallpapers, carousels, and more."

Once again though its worth repeating that if you know OpenGL ES your going to find doing OpenGL in Android pretty straight forward.

[Lance Colton]

robi sen wrote:
Renderscript is a runtime 3D framework that provides both an API for building 3D scenes as well as a special, platform-independent shader language for maximum performance. Using Renderscript, you can accelerate graphics operations and data processing. Renderscript is an ideal way to create high-performance 3D effects for applications, wallpapers, carousels, and more."

That definitely looks exciting, I'll have to read up on it in more detail later.

Thanks for the reply, I've been wanting to get into OpenGL development for the android however finding documentation (and updated documentation for that matter) is tough, I find myself ctrl+spacing in eclipse most of the time trying to figure out what functionality is there ;P

[zoheb hassan]

Hi Robi the sdk samples provided for the honeycomb platform, i am unable to configure the render script eclipse shows error for it, can you please explain how to??

[robi sen]

Zohed you will need to provide more information to me. What example, what error, etc

[zoheb hassan]

I was trying a example called Balls and there is this particular class called BallsRs.java where i was getting a error saying
"ScriptC_ball_physics cannot be resolved to a type" can you please tell me what was i doing wrong??

[Ulf Dittmer]

Impossible to say without seeing the source, and without knowing what you were doing when you got that message.

[zoheb hassan]

If someone has tried those examples that ship with honeycomb and try the ball example then things might be pretty clear