Android, OpenGL and extending GLSurfaceView?

Posted by Spoon Thumb on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Spoon Thumb
Published on 2011-12-16T23:36:40Z Indexed on 2012/04/02 11:42 UTC
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This question is part-technical, part-meta, part-subjective and very specific:

I'm an indie game dev working on android, and for the past 6 months I've struggled and finally succeeded in making my own 3D game app for android. So I thought I'd hop on SO and help out others struggling with android and openGL-ES

However, the vast majority of questions relate to extending GLSurfaceView. I made my whole app without extending GLSurfaceView (and it runs fine). I can't see any reason at all to extend GLSurfaceView for the majority of questions I come across.

Worse, the android documentation implies that you ought to, but gives no detailed explaination of why or what the pros/cons are vs not extending and doing everything through implementing your own GLSurfaceView.Renderer as I did

Still, the sheer volume of questions where the problem is purely to do with extending GLSurfaceView is making me wonder whether actually there is some really good reason for doing it that way vs the way I've been doing it (and suggesting in my answers to others to do).

So, is there something I'm missing? Should I stop answering questions in the meantime?

Android openGL documentation

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