…Java , Android, OpenGL ES and Box2D. That’s what I’ve been doing the last few days during my (currently rather rare) coding sessions. I wrote a simple physics playground using JBox2D for my phone that allows me to drop different objects by the touch of a finger and also uses the orientation sensor to change the gravity vectors. Putting lots of dynamic objects inside a confined box, and seeing them fall over by just tilting the phone is a fun affair ;)
I also wrote a (very simple) OpenGL ES renderer to display the physics bodies. Luckily OpenGL ES is pretty close to recent OpenGL versions (if you skip all the legacy immediate functions), and getting the renderer up-and-running only took a few hours.
And I actually don’t miss Delphi that much for my hobby development (Though I’m still earning my money with it), Java has come a long way, is a modern language that actually evolves (whereas Delphi, in terms of the language hasn’t changed a lot in the recent years) and writing quality code kinda seems easier, even though I’ve actually just started writing code with Java. I’m not yet feeling as comfortable with it as with Delphi, but writing Java code gets easier and easier by every line of code.
So for the next few weeks (or months) I plan on playing around with realtime physics on Android, and especially with all the different input methods and sensors that simply aren’t present on PCs. I’m still not sure about what type of game I’m gonna do for Android, but I have some initial ideas that I’d like to implement. Maybe I’ll even port Trugbild to android, just to get some more experience developing for mobile platforms using OpenGL ES.