Android OpenGL ES & Quake Tutorials / TDC Launched

General Discussions
#1

Greets…

I just finished up the TDC - Tactel US Developer Corner web site and it’s online here; now officially launced:
http://www.android-tactelus.com/

There are 45 tutorials planned split into 4 sections including Android essentials, math & algorithms, Android OpenGL ES, Android Quake / Auriga3D

Tutorial content is forthcoming and once I finish a few more announcements today about the site I’ll be working on them full time and plan to release them consistently over the next 3 months. Some of the code (specifically the timing control code) is applicable to desktop Java whether you use LWJGL, JOGL, Java2D/Swing, or various libraries/engines built on top of these APIs. Of course all the demo content will be Android focused. The general idea is to be able to guide someone who is already generally familiar with Java programming through the necessary OpenGL ES 1.X API topics leading up to implementation of a 3D FPS engine that loads Quake assets. I’m considering releasing Auriga3D w/ Quake 3 asset loading support instead of Q1 too. All source code available by the MIT license. We actually want as many people as possible to run with the code and create really awesome apps for Android.

Beyond that, I put a bit of time into developing the site and added some neat community oriented features w/ more forthcoming. You can log in using several different 3rd party services like your Google account, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and a bunch more automatically creating a profile from the account you chose. This is my first message announcing the site, so it would be great to get some eyes on it. Check it out if you guys can and add it to yor RSS reader or follow on Twitter to hear about when new tutorial content becomes available.

Thanks for checking it out!! :slight_smile:

#2

I am really looking forward to this. Although, I have now almost finished porting my Android game to OpenGL, if this site was done, it probably would have told me a few gotchas like failing to enable things like GL_VERTEX_ARRAY and/or GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY will not matter while running in the Android emulator, but will matter when running on the device.

Site looks great! Bring on the content! :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks… This is the first web site I’ve done in years (web 1.0 / Perl munging fellow here) and my 1st foray into the ever wonderful world of “web 2.0”… I just got to say things have come a long way especially for JavaScript… I <3 the MooTools framework. It’s content time for sure…

Yeah… The Android emulator and OpenGL… hrm… I stopped using the emulator after a couple of hours and my 1st rotating wire frame cube. As things go while OpenGL ES is reasonably portable there are things that work in the emulator that don’t work devices. Even worse I’m sure there will be discrepancies between OpenGL ES support and different devices too. The worse hack so far is no getFloatV and the software side matrix/projection hacks to build a frustum. Also point sprites were limited with Android 1.0 amongst other functionality. I have to validate with the latest 1.5 release if any additional OpenGL ES support is available. One app I made which had a very narrow field of view changed slightly between the 1.0 and 1.5 release on the G1… You guessed it… This will all be part of a tutorial discussing the merits of ditching the emulator if you are doing serious OpenGL development and getting things running on your device of choice right away.

I checked out your game BTW and liked it… Keep it coming!

#4

look forward to going through the tutorials. When do you think the first ones will be ready?

#5

I’m looking forward to all this stuff too :slight_smile: Hopefully it’ll save me a ton of time figuring things out. When I can afford a gphone anyway.

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

Same here, plus we don’t have Android phones here, yet. Hopefully some come the next autumn. :slight_smile:

#7

I assume you don’t mean totally ditch the emulator. Some of us need to run in debug occasionally! :wink:

Thanks! It will hopefully look a lot nicer once I finish the conversion to OpenGL. ;D

EDIT: When I wrote this, I didn’t realize you could put android:debuggable=“true” in the AndroidManifest.xml and debug on the device. So, yes, totally ditch the emulator for OpenGL!