First alpha version released

[dl.zerocool]

Perfect ! That's exactly what I needed.

Thank you so much It does work ! ^^

I could get transparency, with the fb and correct alpha I also changed my layout and set a background color to it.
Really nice!

Best regards.
----------------------------------------------
EDIT : color to layout is not needed.

Why do I use your alpha and color to fb.clear ?
Because behind my scene I use the camera, and I can apply filters to the camera view by applying filters on the clear.
like a color and an alpha value that I like.

So it's quite easy to set reduce brightness etc on the screen by this way, without modifying the picture or modifying the camera properties.

Thank you so much, I spend all the day doing this but well, since your clear always covered mines with black XD

I added a small screenshot with your demo scene and the camera behind

[attachment deleted by admin]

[EgonOlsen]

Looks cool...and reminds me to get a coffee now...

[dl.zerocool]

ahahah advertising does work finally

[zammbi]

A little good news about fragmentation: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/exclusive-android-froyo-to-take-a-serious-shot-at-stemming-plat/
Though this doesn't help us atm.

[EgonOlsen]

However, it's unlikely that for example Samsung will update the Galaxy to anything higher than 1.6 (which still isn't officially available through NPS).

[raft]

i've barrowed my friend's G1 for 10 days or so, and i must say all jPCT apps look very cute

[raft]

see this movie ? quake3 running on an IPhone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g64n3DylJfQ&playnext_from=TL&videos=SkGDKEWY7Iw

there are similar movies on youtube. well after seeing this, i must admit, i begun to think android games can be a dead end even with a JIT they can never catch native performace. prcessing will be faster but java to native data flow will be a bottleneck i'm afraid. as we saw in animation tests..

i remember, Sun was once working an a cpu which directly executes bytecode. maybe someday google takes that way to execute dalvik bytecode and only then iphone and android can race head to head. i'm kind of pessimistic

[zammbi]

There is a few videos of quake 3 running on android like so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Xaz7ECI4M

Though its probably mostly native...

[zammbi]

Found this:
http://code.google.com/p/kwaak3/

99.9% native code 

[EgonOlsen]

Can't see the videos right now, because this phone's youtube player can't play anything but old videos. However, a 1 Ghz cpu, a fpu and a jit should give us pretty good performance. At the moment, Suckvik is the major problem IMHO. But i hope that this will improve. I like this phone, but if i compare the gui and navigation feel with even the IPhone 2, IPhone wipes the floor with Android. However, the hardware is pretty similar, so there has to be room for improvement...

[dl.zerocool]

Yes atm there's room for improvement.
But what I read this last days about the android platform is that it hasn't been compiled with the last gcc,
so it doesn't include neon floating-point optimization.

Another thing that I read is that OpenglES does allow to work in fixed points instead of floating points.
So here is a big big difference between the iPhone and the Android, even if of course the nexus as exemple has twice pixels.
(even if in the test he said that he changed the viewport... I don't think android os allows you to do that, it will just ignore and
render graphics like it was in the all surface).

I do know some features still have to be in floating points, but why meshes and animation couldn't be used as fixed points ?

On http://code.google.com/p/kwaak3/ you can see that they do have 2 version with and without neon-float (which I don't understand since you have to recompile the os to be able to use this feature, and it will only work with the latest ndk + an linux-android kernel build with neon optimization).
As far as I understood what I've read.
Using VBO's (OpenglES 1.1) so not supported by all devices, apparently will give a performance boost too.

Perhaps you're true saying that android phones aren't ready for real gaming... Even I don't want to trust it.
But at the moment if you dev on an iPhone you know what is possible and is not.
Hope this will change soon !

Well anyway, I'm pretty sure too that google need to work on this and that there's a lot of room for improvement behind the scene.
Android os have a lot to improve, it's a great os but performance have to be improved.
it should restrict phone vendors to a min GPU,CPU,RAM requirement for example...
I really would like to help, but I'm quite missing time, so just let me know if you have improve something I'll test asap.

Here is some links that I've read.
Floating points on android.
http://www.anddev.org/good_fixed_point_math_libraries-t6714.html
Apparently there's good devs around this web site, and providing help.
Perhaps opening some discussion with them can make things improve like for this guy :
http://www.anddev.org/opengl_es_performance_problems-t12194.html

Best regards.

[EgonOlsen]

AE already supports VBOs. You can enable them in Config. I've disabled them by default, because the performance gain was 0.0 on my phone and you bind the geometry to the gl context, which is bad for orientation changes.
I did some tests with fixed point and it wasn't worth it imho.

[EgonOlsen]

well after seeing this, i must admit, i begun to think android games can be a dead end

I've installed a lot of games on my phones to get some ideas especially regarding the controls (99% of them sucked btw.). Most of them were 2D anyway (maybe around 95%). Those that used 3D graphics, usually didn't use much (if any) animation....like racing games. I also watched a video of a polished looking sci-fi shooter...the only thing animated there was the boss enemy. And even that looked pretty basic.
Look at the neocore demo...it looks pretty neat, but you don't find one single animation expect for sub-object translations and rotations.
To simplify this: Game objects in Android games are either balls (70%), cars (20%) or robots (10%), because they don't require complex animations. I want to code some game for Android, i just have no idea what. But i've already decided what my game objects will look like: Ball-like robots without any animation (in fact, i'm going to reuse the models from Paradroidz (R.I.P.)).

[raft]

quake3 was using skeletal animation if i remember correctly. it runs ok

[dl.zerocool]

I'll try enabling VBO to see if there's any change on my phone (since I'm always on landscape mode, I don't care about that problem)