Category: Roundups

Announcing the New Forums, and a Roundup!

Starting from today, Learn OpenGL ES now has a new community section of the site with a new set of forums! [Edit: Due to some technical issues and low usage, I have disabled the forums until further notice. I would still like to have a forums section in the future, so they can come back if the comments section proves to be inadequate. Thanks!] I’ve also switched themes, so please let me know if you find any issues, have feedback or miss anything from the old theme!

On to the roundup:

I’m also happy to announce that in the spirit of sharing with the community, all of the content on this site is now licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Please feel free to reuse and share in the spirit of CC-BY-SA 3.0.

OpenGL Community Roundup, January 2013 Edition

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. 🙂

OpenGL Community Roundup, October Edition

It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to showcase another great set of apps and posts from the community. 🙂

First up, we have…

Wubbly Bubble Live Wallpaper

This interesting and lively live wallpaper renders a deforming 3D bubble to your home screen, with five different themes, many options for customization, and it runs on a wide range of devices. Download it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Ephemeral

Next up we have…

Blu Mountain Live Wallpaper

This is a very peaceful and relaxing live wallpaper, overlooking Mt. Fuji. You can watch the waves of the rhythmic water, and see the tranquil Sakura leaves fall gracefully as you overlook one of Japan’s most beloved national treasures.

This wallpaper supports the latest tablets, and works well with any Android theme or layout. It also features an upgrade to full HD art. Download it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blubee.wp

Roundup

Android OpenGL and slow rendering

Android terrain test

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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

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!

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

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!

Android Emulator Now Supports Native OpenGL ES2.0!

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.

OpenGL ES Roundup, March 9, 2012

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!

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OpenGL ES Roundup, February 12, 2012

a single vanilla ice cream sandwich
Image via Wikipedia

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I recommend taking a look at the new Android Design website. There are a lot of resources and interesting information on developing attractive apps for Ice Cream Sandwich, Android’s newest platform. With Ice Cream Sandwich comes new changes, such as the deprecation of the menu bar.

Roundup

Question for you, dear reader: What do you all think about the current site design? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, both positive and negative.

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OpenGL ES Roundup, October 4, 2011

Diney from db-in.com has a great introduction to shaders up at his site. He annotates his post with useful diagrams and also has a clear and neat introduction to tangent space.

Learning WebGL has a cool roundup of WebGL around the web.

The NeHe OpenGL site is alive! They are starting to post updates on a regular basis again.

Is 3D the future of Android? This article by The Droid Demos takes a look at the emerging 3D screen technologies.

Android and Me has a possible screenshot of the Nexus Prime, Google’s next flagship device which will run Ice Cream Sandwich.