Learn OpenGL ES

Happy New Year 2017 Roundup – CHIP-8, Rust, and more

Lately, I’ve been more interested in learning about emulators and interpreters, down to the way that CPUs work at a low level. In university, the furthest down we got was C++ and we didn’t spend that much time there, so everything under that has always felt a little like black magic to me. To overcome … Continue reading »

Learning Java by Building Android Games — a New Android Game Coding Books for Beginners

I recently heard about Learning Java by Building Android Games, a new book by John Horton. John was one of the reviewers for OpenGL ES 2 for Android: A Quick Start Guide and helped me out when I was writing the book, so when I found out that he had a book of his own, … Continue reading »

OpenGL Roundup, Fall Edition

There’s been a lot of changes in the graphics programming community, with Google’s latest version of Android now supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, which brings support for compute shaders, as well as an Android-specific extension pack which adds support for additional features. Apple has chosen to go the proprietary route by remaining with OpenGL ES 3.0 … Continue reading »

A performance comparison redux: Java, C, and Renderscript on the Nexus 5

In my previous post on this topic, A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5, I compared the performance of an audio low-pass filter in Java and C. The results were clear: The C version outperformed, and by a significant amount. This result brought more attention to the post than I was expecting; some of … Continue reading »

OpenGL Roundup, April 29, 2014: Milestones

Two big names in the game development community are celebrating their achievements as they reach important milestones and bring their work to the community: libGDX 1.0 released Zero to 95,688: How I wrote Game Programming Patterns Congrats to you guys, and thanks for sharing your work with the world! In other news, I’d like to thank El androide … Continue reading »

OpenGL Roundup, April 10, 2014: GDC 2014 Report, libgdx 1.0, Data-Oriented Design and More…

Top stories GDC 2014 Report libgdx: We’ll go 1.0 next weekend! Recent posts A Performance Comparison Between Java and C on the Nexus 5 How Powerful Is Your Nexus 7? Finishing up Our Native Air Hockey Project with Touch Events and Basic Collision Detection Android native development Android on x86: Java Native Interface and the Android … Continue reading »

A performance comparison between Java and C on the Nexus 5

Android phones have been growing ever more powerful with time, with the Nexus 5 sporting a quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400; this is a very powerful CPU for a mobile phone. With most Android apps being written in Java, does Java allow us to access all of that power? Or, put another way, is Java … Continue reading »

How Powerful Is Your Nexus 7?

The following post is based on a paper generously contributed by Jerome Huck, a senior aerospace/defence engineer, scientist, and author. A link to figures and the code can be found at the bottom of this post. So you want to run some heavy-duty algorithms on your Android device, and you’re wondering what is the best environment … Continue reading »

Finishing Up Our Native Air Hockey Project With Touch Events and Basic Collision Detection

In this post in the air hockey series, we’re going to wrap up our air hockey project and add touch event handling and basic collision detection with support for Android, iOS, and emscripten. Prerequisites This lesson continues the air hockey project series, building upon the code from GitHub for ‘article-3-matrices-and-objects’. Here are the previous posts in this series: … Continue reading »