Introduction
As we saw in the previous chapter, Android offers many tools for handling graphics and animations. Although the canvas and drawable objects are designed for custom drawing, when you need high-performance graphics, especially 3D gaming graphics, Android also supports OpenGL ES. Open Graphics Library for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES), is targeted at embedded systems. (Embedded systems include consoles and phones.)
This chapter is meant to serve as an introduction to using OpenGL ES on Android. As usual, we'll provide the steps and explain how things work, but we aren't going to be digging into the math or technical details of OpenGL. If you are already familiar with OpenGL ES from other platforms, such as iOS, this chapter should get you up and running quickly. If you are new to OpenGL, hopefully these recipes will help you decide whether this is an area you want to pursue.
Android supports the following versions of OpenGL:
- OpenGL ES 1.0: Android 1.0
- OpenGL ES 2.0: Introduced in Android...
