back to article Android native code kit apes iPhone game 3D

Google has opened the door to iPhone-like 3D games on certain Android handsets, offering support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard with its latest Android Native Development Kit (NDK). Mountain View announced the third release of its Android NDK in a Monday blog post. The chief addition is Open GL for Embedded Systems 2. …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An it's good too

    Apple's lawsuits tell you that Apple thinks its great! So great that Apple can't possibly compete. And so it's playing the lawyer games instead.

    I predict iPad will flop badly. If Apple want to understand why, they should turn to their lawyers to see the cause.

    1. ThomH

      That's what lawsuits mean

      It's like that time I sued my neighbours for continually parking their car on my lawn. Because I couldn't compete.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The future will tell, however...

      With prediction skills like that, you've got a future in banking!

      Perhas you should define what "flop" would mean, because if we define it the same way, I predict you will be proven wrong.

  2. Rob Crawford
    Thumb Up

    Lacking a suitable title

    Google seems to be heading in the right direction with the Android platform.

    Between

    Apple insisting on 100 quid a year and the devkit being Mac only, along with horrendous NDAs and restrictions.

    Symbian being a complete dogs dinner, I can see why they did certain things but try developing an app which used GPS without a $200 developer cert <shudder> and testing on a real phone.

    Now if somebody would only give me a decent Android based phone (2.0 or later) I would be a very happy little home coder.

    I don't know about Google as a company, but they deserve to do well in the phone market because they are making developers (both commercial and home based) feel welcome

  3. Jimmy Floyd

    Am I missing something?

    Forgive my lack of knowledge here but isn't OpenGL already on the Android? I've played a Tron-like game with impressive 3D graphics on my Hero. What is the added-value I haven't noticed in the article?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Skrrp

      Guessing here

      My first guess is that the reason to go this way is that native code runs that much faster than the Java stuff. Good for games.

      Google did say at the outset though that it was possible to run native code from day 1 (I now have g++ on my Ubuntu-under-Android build and can confirm it works) but that lack of access to the API would stuff you.

      I'm only guessing that the new NDK does allow for some support from the SDK so that native apps can access graphics, sound and data as a bare minimum. If it's allowing graphics only then I can't see much future for these games.

    3. Mr Brush
      Boffin

      Warning! Version Number Overload

      NDK r2 supported OpenGL ES1.1, but only for Android 1.6 and up (SDK 4+)

      NDK r3 now supports OpenGL ES 2.0, but only on Android 2.0 and above (SDK 5+)

      The SDK supports OpenGL ES 1.0 on all Android Levels (IIRC)

      Hero (1.5) owners should be joining the ranks of Eclair (2.0) once HTC finish faffing with the Sense integration and roll the update out, (any day now)

      Clear as mud?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    "iPhone Game 3D"?

    Nokia S60 products has supported OpenGL ES since 2004, so nothing new here...

    http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/research/demos/3d-graphics

    "The software is running on an off-the-shelf Nokia 3650 phone"

    "The first version of OpenGL ES was released in July 2003, with Nokia being one of the main contributors to it. In the future, developers may expect to see built-in support for OpenGL ES in devices based on the Symbian OS. "

    "Devices with built-in support for the standard can be expected to hit the market during the first half of 2004."

    Nokia N900 seems to have built-in OpenGL ES 2.0 support:

    http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/N900/

    Others surely to follow.

    1. Argh

      Not available in the hardware any more

      Yes but Nokia then removed the hardware accelerated 3D from their devices making a lot of this unusable.

      The N95 and a couple of other phones released around that time were the last ones to have hardware accelerated 3D.

  5. Rich Woods

    OpenGL ES 1.1 vs OpenGL ES 2.0

    The Hero, and other Android 1.5 devices only have ES 1.1 support, the same as the iPhone 3G. This update allows the platform to use the ES 2.0 rendering pipeline, which is the same as the iPhone 3GS and the Nokia N900.

    The main feature that 2.0 adds is support for hardware shaders, which make a lot cleverer 3D effects possible.

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