Bob, I recently released a game (actually just this week, called "Prism" or "Prism Light" by Shadowpuppets), which doesn't use OpenGL at all. I just draw onto the canvas from my overrided onDraw method, and then invalidate only the part of the view which contains animation. I have determined that the drawing portion is the bottleneck for me (i.e. all the "physics" calculations and the rest of the game engine have no effect on the framerate). For your reference, I have an original Motorola Droid and I generally get around 60 frames per second of animation. During beta testing, other users with more advanced phones got upwards of 100 frames per second (I actually had to put a frame rate limiter in my game to keep it at 60 fps max).
*However!* This is my experience only and is unique to my game. If you download and play the free version, then you'll notice that my game board only takes up about 2/3 of the screen (and that is the *only* part of the screen which can be animated in my game). Furthermore, the performance increased drastically when I clipped the regions of the screen which didn't contain any animation. For example, my worst possible case scenario was needing to animation something in the top left corner and the bottom right corner at the same time. This causes the entire view to be redrawn and results in my worst frame rate scenario. In this case, the frame rate dropped to around 40 or 45 fps. At any other time, when the clipped region didn't take up the entire game board the frame rate increased upwards and past 60 fps (of note: even though the region was clipped, I still drew all the animations to the canvas, even if they were totally outside the clipped region. This didn't seem to affect the increased frame rate -- that is, it mostly depended on what actually gets pushed out to the screen buffers). So, it varies, but overall I got acceptable performance. Also, depending on what devices you target, there are other options. For instance, if you're just targeting Honeycomb then you can enable hardware acceleration for your view with only the addition of 1 line of Java code (see the Developer's Guide recent Blog on the subject). I haven't tried using OpenGL for my game, because overall I didn't need it. I was prepared to try, but I found that drawing my 2D animated game onto a view's canvas was sufficient for my purposes. I hope that this gives you the perspective you were looking for. Nick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
