A while back I posted about using the Android NDK to put particles on my android. Since then I’ve learned a good bit, made more progress on my primary project and I have a little something to show:

[RTPS] Android demo from Ian Johnson on Vimeo.

Sorry about the blurriness, my new camcorder doesn’t have a macro mode (but it is waterproof! won’t have to worry about my fluid simulations spilling out of the screen ;)

As part of the newly founded Tallahassee Android Developers group I did a presentation on using the NDK to code in C++ for Android. This presentation was done maybe a week before NDK-r5 came out so the parts about using a custom tool-chain to get STL support are outdated, but I go over getting started with the NDK and discuss how I used it in this project. The video is kind of long, and mostly a reference for those in the group, but feel free to check it out. The actual information in the video is distilled into 5 slides which have been updated for NDK-r5

Ok this is where things get technical, so if that ain’t your thing just close this window, pick up your droid and text your bff about me.

So I’m running Android 2.2 on my HTC Incredible. I’m using the Android NDK-r5, with the majority of my code as C++ (with STL, like std::vector and std::string) and OpenGL ES1.0

The interesting thing is that the code is only slightly modified from the CPU version of my RTPS project. They are still separate code bases, but I just copied the CPU version to a new folder and deleted every reference to OpenCL. If I was so inclined I could keep it as one codebase and use #DEFINEs to remove things at compile time, but I’d rather not complicate my thesis work and it’s actually a good mental workout to maintain both.

As I learn more about GLSL I’d like to start using OpenGL ES2.0 and shaders to make some cool effects. I’d like to do it in a cross platform way so that older phones can fall back on ES1.0 and the fixed pipeline. I also really need to make a Java interface so that you can switch between the Simple particles and the SPH, as well as change some parameters on the fly.