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
- First, you need to edit your emulator image, go down to the hardware section, and add “GPU Emulation” and set it to true.
- 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.
- 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
- OpenGL Multiple Rendering Targets
- A Faster Emulator with Better Hardware Support
- Android Takes over US Smartphone Market
Hope that everyone is enjoying the gradually improving weather out there.