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What tutorials and libraries are available which can help beginners to develop 2D and 3D games on Android using OpenGL-ES? I'm looking for tutorials which can help me learn OpenGL-ES, and I'm looking for OpenGL-ES libraries which can make life easier for beginners in OpenGL-ES.

Since Android is still small, I guess it may be help-full to read iPhone OpenGL-ES tutorials as well, as I suppose the OpenGL-ES functionality is much the same.

I have found the following useful information which I would have liked to share:

Android tutorials:

Other Android OpenGL-ES information:

iPhone OpenGL-ES tutorials (where the OpenGl-ES information is probably useful):

As for libraries which a beginner might use to get a simpler hands-on experience with OpenGL-ES, I have only found Rokon, which is recently started, thus has many holes and bugs. And it's gnuGPL licensed (at the moment) which means it cannot be used, if we wish to sell our games.

What else is out there?

Tofeeq Ahmad
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arberg
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  • @admin I seriously don't know why this question is closed as not constructive. This is seriously nice and needed and number of upvotes and stars indicates that its a good question. I feel its a bad attitude to close such questions which helps others. – Rengasami Ramanujam Dec 11 '15 at 11:45
  • There's a loooong discussion about it in the meta thread somewhere, which is the place to take such debate. I'm being brief here, to not pollute this good question with a off-topic meta discussion. – arberg Dec 13 '15 at 12:42

10 Answers10

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The site you mentioned is very good, but I think the best one I have found is by INsanityDesign. It is a port of the great OpenGL nehe tutorials. This is a great place to start, it gives you source at different levels that you can play with and change to see what different parts do. Other than that reading OpenGL documentation, will help as well. I am not great at the OpenGL stuff, but have been able to figure things out using the resources I mentioned.

Leushenko
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broschb
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16

An excelent tutorial about OpenGL ES 1.1 on Android:

http://blog.jayway.com/2009/12/03/opengl-es-tutorial-for-android-part-i/

VansFannel
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You definitely can sell your games based on GPL software, read more here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

skrat
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    This is a bit off-topic but then I invited it I guess :) Yes I can sell it. But the point is, I also have to distribute the source code. Anybody can then just take my source-code, and create a free version of the game on the market - after which I cannot really sell my app, I can only give people an opportunity to support it. This is possible on Android because Google has virtually no restrictions on the market (which is good). On the iPhone market it might be different, because Apple might (or might not) prevent it new versions of the game. – arberg Oct 28 '09 at 07:56
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    @user197141 - off Topic, but you can make the source open, but keep the graphics/ level data propriety. – Elazar Leibovich Mar 16 '10 at 14:34
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I gave up on anddev tutorials a long time ago. Every such tutorial I tried would not even build correctly, they were way out of date, and the guy who does them never seems to finish anything.

Unfortunately, the information you really want really is that scattered: you will not find it all at one URL unless you are willing to read the entire Red Book; but that is certainly no tutorial, it is a much more exhaustive reference.

Yet it seems that only such an exhaustive reference will give the information you need in a complete enough and precise enough form to understand such useful and basic issues as the distinction between viewing transformation, viewport transformation, model transformation and viewing transformation, and why OpenGL insists on combining the latter two.

AndyZ
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Matt J.
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    The 'one url' comment I had only meant that I could not yet post urls on stackoverflow.com. Now that is no longer a problem I have removed the confusing comment, from my post. Thx for the feedback. Droidnova and the red book are problably the two main sites at which I should do my reading. – arberg Mar 18 '10 at 10:42
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There are some good OpenGL ES tutorials for Android here too: http://obviam.net/index.php/category/opengl/

Impaler
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The best resource I have found so far is Learn OpenGL ES. In fact I found it because it is recommended on NeHe. It's active and has a series of tutorials specifically for Android which are quite comprehensive.

Neil Traft
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If you want to get started from a really basic OpenGL ES project on Android (one that's actually been compiled and works) you can have a look here: http://www.ruibm.com/?p=263

rui
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5

There is good tutorial series for beginners,to learn opengl.

http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/android/Android_3D.html

Ramesh Akula
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4

An OpenGL ES tutorial series that I found immensely helpful while porting an iPhone game to Android using the NDK was:

http://www.zeuscmd.com/tutorials/opengles/

Nick Gotch
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4

There is now a 3d library for android available called min3d:

http://code.google.com/p/min3d/

I haven't used it yet, but it looks useful.

ertemplin
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