Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Android, Miscellaneous, Roundups

OpenGL Community Roundup, January 2013 Edition

Leave a comment

Welcome to another community round-up! A lot of people have been busy, creating great games, tutorials, and live wallpapers. Check them out below (in alphabetical order):

Advancing Usability

Ino

pleyasLab

Rene van der Lende

  • Kube — a tutorial on rotating a cube using OpenGL for Android.

Teaching Machines

Team Blubee

If I forgot someone or something, just let me know! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays, and I look forward to a great 2013, with more great stuff coming from the community. :)

Share
Spiral Maze!
Android, Miscellaneous, Roundups

Check Out These Cool Live Wallpapers, Games, and Tutorials by Fellow Learn OpenGL ESers!

2 Comments

The community has been busy here at Learn OpenGL ES, as many visitors have been developing fantastic games, live wallpapers, and tutorials of their own! I’d like to highlight some of the work that I have come across in recent weeks; if you’re part of the community here and would like to be featured as well, please give me a shout-out via the contact form!

Spiral Maze!

Spiral Maze!Buggies! - Live Wallpaper

Spiral Maze! is a fun and addictive little game by Prodigen, with physics implemented with JBox2D. Prodigen is also behind the highly ranked and regarded Buggies! – Live Wallpaper, as well as AppShaker. All are definitely worth checking out!

Paperland

Paperland Live WallpaperExodus Live WallpaperLight Grid Live Wallpaper

Then there’s Joko Interactive, the developer behind the incredibly beautiful and attractive Paperland Live Wallpaper, Light Grid Live Wallpaper, Exodus Live Wallpaper, and many more!

Tutorials

I’d also like to give props to fellow community members Sankar and bluBee!

Sankar has been sharing his own work and tutorials here: http://code.google.com/p/my3dcube/

bluBee has been sharing his own work and tutorials here: http://code.google.com/p/blubee-opengles20/

Thanks for giving back to the community!

If you’re part of the community and would like to be featured as well, please let me know via the contact form!

Enhanced by Zemanta
Share
Shark
Android, Miscellaneous, Roundups

Check out These Cool Apps from an Early Student of Learn OpenGL ES!

8 Comments

An early student of Learn OpenGL ES, Miguel, has been working on some neat apps lately. Miguel was one of the first readers at Learn OpenGL ES, and we’ve exchanged at least a few emails back and forth about different topics, such as working with the camera through matrices. We were both learning a lot back then, and that sort of interaction really helped to strengthen my own personal knowledge of OpenGL.

Miguel hasn’t stopped learning, and he recently sent me over a link to his live wallpaper, “Shark 3D Kosmos”. I’m really happy with the progress he’s made so far; read on to learn more!

Shark 3D Kosmos Live Wallpaper

This wallpaper features a scary and realistic shark swimming on your home screen! The shark can be rendered in different modes, including holo mode, and you can select from several different camera modes, including one where the shark swims straight at you! The live wallpaper even includes features to save battery usage.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ksm.plylab.ksmwpp

Kosmos Galaxy 3D

This is a neat dynamic simulation of the attraction between the center of a galaxy and its surrounding stars. You can move the simulation around and add galaxies in realtime.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pleyasLab.KSMglx

I’m happy with how far Miguel has come since the first lessons here at Learn OpenGL ES. If you’ve also learned from the site and would like to showcase your work, let me know!

Share
Android, Miscellaneous, Roundups

Android Emulator Now Supports Native OpenGL ES2.0!

14 Comments

For those of you who may have missed it, the Android team recently released an upgraded emulator image that has support for native OpenGL ES 2.0! That’s right; not only is it now supported, but the calls are translated to desktop OpenGL so they can be accelerated by your native graphics layer. It’s still better to test on an actual device, but this is a great boon for those who want to try out their app on different form factors without having to go out and buy a bunch of tablets and devices.

Check out the video:

Three notes about the GPU emulation

  1. First, you need to edit your emulator image, go down to the hardware section, and add “GPU Emulation” and set it to true.
  2. Second, there’s a bug with the emulator such that this line: “final boolean supportsEs2 = configurationInfo.reqGlEsVersion >= 0×20000;” does not work. It will always return false. You can add “|| Build.FINGERPRINT.startsWith(“generic”)” or simply comment out these checks and assume that OpenGL ES 2 is supported, when running on the emulator.
  3. Finally, if it crashes with “no config found”, try adding this line before the call to “setRenderer(…)”: “glSurfaceView.setEGLConfigChooser(8 , 8, 8, 8, 16, 0);”

A quick roundup

Hope that everyone is enjoying the gradually improving weather out there.

Share
Android, iOS, Miscellaneous, Roundups, WebGL

OpenGL ES Roundup, March 9, 2012

Leave a comment

Thank yous and mentions

A big thank you goes to the following guys who have recently kindly featured Learn OpenGL ES:

Thanks again; you all have my deepest gratitude!

State of WebGL on Android

The following browsers now support WebGL on Android:

Using Vertex Buffer Objects on Froyo (Android 2.2, SDK 8)

Bindings can be downloaded from here:

I cover how to use these bindings in Android Lesson Seven: An Introduction to Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs). Note: These bindings are NOT needed if you don’t mind excluding a quarter of the market (as of the time of this writing) and target Gingerbread and higher.

The new iPad

In non-Android related news, Apple just released the third generation iPad, known as the “new iPad”, with a 2048×1536 “retina display”. Here are the specs:

Apple A5 SoC (system on a chip):

Judging by initial benchmarks, this thing just screams. iOS had never had the “Android lag” problem seen so often on Android phones and tablets, and this new tablet will only continue that trend. To be fair, throw enough hardware at the problem and maybe even Android will become lag-free.

What are your thoughts on the new iPad? Interested in picking it up? I love competition, because the more Apple, Android, and Microsoft duke it out, the better it is for us consumers! So long as nobody ends up dominating the market.

Have a good weekend, all!

Enhanced by Zemanta
Share
Android, Miscellaneous

Google Celebrates 10 Billion Downloads on the Market: Several Great Apps Available for Only 10 Cents Each!

Leave a comment
Android Market

Image via Wikipedia

Android is booming very rapidly, and the market share has gone from nothing to dominating the market, within only a couple of years. I still remember when just a bit more than a year ago, competitors still thought that Android was only going to fill a niche market, and that it was “clunky” and “slow”. Well, its open nature has led to a rapid explosion of devices with Android, and rapidly improving speeds are getting rid of the Android “lag”.

From the Android Developer’s Blog:

The Android Market has recently crossed 10 billion downloads, and Google is celebrating:
“One billion is a pretty big number by any measurement. However, when it’s describing the speed at which something is growing, it’s simply amazing. This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month. We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012.”

“To celebrate this milestone, we partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only 10 cents each. Today, we are starting with Asphalt 6 HD, Color & Draw for Kids, Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro, Fieldrunners HD, Great Little War Game, Minecraft, Paper Camera, Sketchbook Mobile, Soundhound Infinity and Swiftkey X.”

For 10 cents, why not try out a couple of apps? It’s amazing to see just how the quality of apps has improved over the past year, especially games. Unfortunately my Nexus S did reboot while playing one of the games, so the stability still isn’t all there, but I definitely do see an improvement in quality as compared to last year.

Check out the post for more details. It sounds like there will be a new set of apps at 10 cents each day!

Note: If you don’t see the apps at 10 cents on your phone, try going to the Android Market from your PC, instead. I had the same issue, where the app was listed at $4.99 on my phone and at 10 cents on the web. If you have a Google account linked to your phone, then you can just purchase from the web and Google will automatically send the app to your phone.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Share
Android, Miscellaneous, WebGL

The Project Code Has Moved to Github!

Leave a comment

Hi guys,

It’s been ages since I last posted an update, I know. I went away during the summer and neglected the site upon coming back, and now that I’m busy with school it’s been harder than ever to find the time to find an update. Excuses, excuses, I know. ;)

In any case, many of you were asking for a tutorial and demo on texturing, and this is what I’m going to talk about next. There also seems to be a lot more interest for Android tutorials rather than WebGL tutorials, so I will be focusing more time on Android. Let me know if you guys have other thoughts and suggestions.

The project source code is now moving to GitHub! The project page is located at http://learnopengles.github.com/Learn-OpenGLES-Tutorials/ and the repository is located at https://github.com/learnopengles/Learn-OpenGLES-Tutorials. The old repository at https://code.google.com/p/learn-opengles-tutorials/ will remain, but will no longer be updated going forward.

There was nothing wrong with the Google Code project site, and in fact I prefer the simplicity of Google’s interface, but I also prefer to develop using Git. Once you’ve gotten used to Git, it’s hard to go back to anything else. An advantage of GitHub is that it should be easier for others to fork and contribute to the project if they wish to.

As always, let me know your comments and thoughts. The code for Lesson 4 is already done, so I’ll start writing it up now and hopefully publish that soon!

Enhanced by Zemanta
Share
OpenGL ES.
Miscellaneous

Welcome to Learn OpenGL ES!

5 Comments

Hi there, and welcome to Learn OpenGL ES!

This is the beginning of a site about developing graphics in OpenGL ES for Android, WebGL, and more. According to Khronos, OpenGL ES is “the standard for embedded accelerated 3D graphics” and is entering widespread use.

What is OpenGL ES?

OpenGL ES is a graphics library that can be used for 2D and 3D graphics. It is basically a slimmed-down and optimized version of desktop OpenGL and is used on Android, iPhone, J2ME, the web via WebGL, and more. There are currently two main branches: OpenGL ES 1.x, and OpenGL ES 2.x. The first version uses a fixed-function pipeline which will be familiar to people who have worked with desktop OpenGL and for those who have followed tutorials from other sites such as Nehe’s OpenGL tutorials.

The second version is somewhat of a different beast entirely, as many of the fixed functions have been removed with the functionality replaced by small programs known as shaders. This ability to program the graphics card gives a lot more power and flexibility, but it also requires more work and understanding from the developer.

Why learn OpenGL ES?

OpenGL ES is a cross-platform library, so once you learn it, you’ll be able to take that knowledge with you and create compelling and beautiful graphics across a wide variety of platforms. Hundreds of thousands of devices are shipping with OpenGL ES every single day. If you’re interested in learning more about mobile game development or the future of graphics on the web, then you’ll definitely want to learn OpenGL ES.

About me

Like some of you, I am also a beginner when it comes to OpenGL ES. My goal with this website is not only to develop my skills, but to share what I have learned with others. I have found over time that this is a good way to learn a topic that you’re interested in. I am personally interested in Android and WebGL in particular, so I will focus on those for now. In the meantime, I have linked to some great resources over in the right sidebar.

Thanks for stopping by, and hope to see you again soon.

Share