Tutorials and libraries for OpenGL-ES games on Android

Question

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:

• DroidNova: Basic tutorial covering polygons, no textures
• anddev forum with some tutorials

Other Android OpenGL-ES information:

• Google IO lecture regarding games, not much OpenGLES
• The The Khronos Reference Manual is also relevant to have, but its not exactly the best place to start.

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

• http://web.me.com/smaurice/AppleCoder/iPhone_OpenGL/Archive.html
• http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-table-of.html

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

The site you mentioned is very good, but I think the best one I have found is by INsanityDesign. It is a portof 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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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 Every such tutorial I tried would not even build correctly, they were way out of date, and the guy who does them never seems to finish anything.

Much more useful are the tutorials at http://www.droidnova.com/android-3d-game-tutorial-part-i,312.html, but even these won't help you if you must insist on a single URL. BTW: I cannot imagine a useful purpose for this restriction. 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.