Android NDK r3 Brings OpenGL ES 2.0 Support

The latest development tool released into the wild for those who are building applications for Google's Android operating system is a new flavor of the Android Native Development Kit (NDK), which has just reached revision 3. The third release of the NDK brings forth a series of appealing features, among which we can count OpenGL ES 2.0 support and Toolchain improvement, as well as a series of bug fixes and enhancements.

According to a recent post on the Android Developers Blog, the Android NDK r3 includes toolchain binaries refreshed with GCC 4.4.0, which is expected to generate a more compact and efficient machine code than the previous version (4.2.1). “Note that the GCC 4.4.0 C++ frontend is more pedantic, and may refuse to compile certain rare and invalid template declarations that were accepted by 4.2.1. To alleviate the problem, this NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, which can optionally be used to build your machine code,” the blog post notes.

The OpenGL ES 2.0 support that the new development tool brings along can be seen as one of the most welcome feature of the Android NDK. According to the Android Developers, applications aimed at Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher are now able to directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features, which offers graphics rendering control via vertex and fragment shader programs through the use of the GLSL shading language. In other words, games built for the Android platform should become a little more appealing than before.

At the same time, the Android developing team has also made some modifications in the name of the NDK. While the previous release came with the '1.6_r1' name, the new one is called only r3 (from revision 3). It seems that the 1.6 part was a little confusing, as some might have considered the development tool as providing support only for the Android 1.6 version of the OS, which is not true. The solution can actually be used to target all handsets running under Android 1.5 and higher.

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