Android 3D game tutorial – Part III

Updated to be Android 2.0.1 compatible.

You are new to this series? Please start with the first part .

The third part of this series will show you how to stop the rotation of the triangle and that the rotation really just work on the triangle and not the “camera”.

We want to have more control over the rotation. To get that, we reset the matrix on every call of the onDrawFrame() method. This will reset the angle of our triangle so it always it stays rotated at the given angle on initialization.

@Override public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // define the color we want to be displayed as the "clipping wall" gl.glClearColor(_red, _green, _blue, 1.0f); // reset the matrix - good to fix the rotation to a static angle gl.glLoadIdentity(); // clear the color buffer and the depth buffer to show the ClearColor // we called above... gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); // code snipped }

In the VortexView class you should remove the division by 10 to be able to rotate it more than a bit.

_renderer.setAngle(event.getX());

If you try this, you will see the rotation will only goes the way our touch motion goes. If you don’t move the finger over the screen, it doesn’t change the rotation.

The next thing: Do we rotate the triangle or the view/camera?
To check that, the easiest way is to create a second triangle which will not rotate.
The fastest but also dirtiest way to do this is to copy & paste the initTriangle() method to initStaticTriangle(), copy & paste both buffers and finally copy & paste and modify the last 4 lines of the onDrawFrame() method.
Don’t forget to change the color of the second triangle and reduce the coordinates of the second triangle, so we can see both. I changed the every 0.5f coordinate to 0.4f.
Here the full class:

package com.droidnova.android.games.vortex; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; import java.nio.FloatBuffer; import java.nio.ShortBuffer; import javax.microedition.khronos.egl.EGLConfig; import javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10; import android.opengl.GLSurfaceView; public class VortexRenderer implements GLSurfaceView.Renderer { private static final String LOG_TAG = VortexRenderer.class.getSimpleName(); private float _red = 0f; private float _green = 0f; private float _blue = 0f; // a raw buffer to hold indices allowing a reuse of points. private ShortBuffer _indexBuffer; private ShortBuffer _indexBufferStatic; // a raw buffer to hold the vertices private FloatBuffer _vertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer _vertexBufferStatic; private short[] _indicesArray = {0, 1, 2}; private int _nrOfVertices = 3; private float _angle; @Override public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // preparation gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); initTriangle(); initStaticTriangle(); } @Override public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int w, int h) { gl.glViewport(0, 0, w, h); } public void setAngle(float angle) { _angle = angle; } @Override public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // define the color we want to be displayed as the "clipping wall" gl.glClearColor(_red, _green, _blue, 1.0f); // reset the matrix - good to fix the rotation to a static angle gl.glLoadIdentity(); // clear the color buffer to show the ClearColor we called above... gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); // draw the static triangle gl.glColor4f(0f, 0.5f, 0f, 0.5f); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, _vertexBufferStatic); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, _nrOfVertices, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, _indexBufferStatic); // set rotation for the non-static triangle gl.glRotatef(_angle, 0f, 1f, 0f); gl.glColor4f(0.5f, 0f, 0f, 0.5f); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, _vertexBuffer); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, _nrOfVertices, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, _indexBuffer); } private void initTriangle() { // float has 4 bytes ByteBuffer vbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(_nrOfVertices * 3 * 4); vbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); _vertexBuffer = vbb.asFloatBuffer(); // short has 4 bytes ByteBuffer ibb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(_nrOfVertices * 2); ibb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); _indexBuffer = ibb.asShortBuffer(); float[] coords = { -0.5f, -0.5f, 0f, // (x1, y1, z1) 0.5f, -0.5f, 0f, // (x2, y2, z2) 0f, 0.5f, 0f // (x3, y3, z3) }; _vertexBuffer.put(coords); _indexBuffer.put(_indicesArray); _vertexBuffer.position(0); _indexBuffer.position(0); } private void initStaticTriangle() { // float has 4 bytes ByteBuffer vbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(_nrOfVertices * 3 * 4); vbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); _vertexBufferStatic = vbb.asFloatBuffer(); // short has 4 bytes ByteBuffer ibb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(_nrOfVertices * 2); ibb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); _indexBufferStatic = ibb.asShortBuffer(); float[] coords = { -0.4f, -0.4f, 0f, // (x1, y1, z1) 0.4f, -0.4f, 0f, // (x2, y2, z2) 0f, 0.4f, 0f // (x3, y3, z3) }; _vertexBufferStatic.put(coords); _indexBufferStatic.put(_indicesArray); _vertexBufferStatic.position(0); _indexBufferStatic.position(0); } public void setColor(float r, float g, float b) { _red = r; _green = g; _blue = b; } }

If you try this, you will see only one triangle rotate. If you want to rotate both, simply change the place where the rotation will be called to right above the comment “draw the static triangle”.

Compile and run the application and you will see the green triangle rotate while the red triangle stays at the same angle.
That should be prove enough for the answer, that we really only rotate the triangle and not the whole scene.

Source as Eclipse project: Vortex Part III

Go to Android 3D game tutorial – Part IV