Cocoa Touch™ for iPhone® OS 3

Chapter 15. Using OpenGL ES

In This Chapter

Learning about the iPhone OpenGL ES implementation

Exploring the default OpenGL ES-based application

Interfacing your OpenGL ES code with the iPhone graphics hardware

One of the things that excite application developers about the iPhone is that it ships with an excellent implementation of OpenGL ES. This means that developers have available to them the full power of OpenGL ES for developing 2-D and 3-D games. Some of the most amazing applications developed for the iPhone have been developed using OpenGL.

Unfortunately, OpenGL ES is a huge topic that I can't cover in depth in this book. It would simply be impossible for me to cover it with any level of competency in one or two chapters.

That said, however, I want to provide at least some information about OpenGL ES so that you have a basic understanding of how it works on the iPhone, and then to tell you where to get more information about OpenGL ES.

So, in order to do this, you'll first take a look at the implementation of OpenGL ES on the iPhone and then look at its features and limitations. You'll then take a look at the OpenGL ES template project and see what it gives you and how you can use it as a launching point for your own applications.

Understanding the Capabilities of iPhone OpenGL ES

The first thing that you need to know about using OpenGL ES on the iPhone is that OpenGL ES is not OpenGL. While they address the same problem, the ability to draw two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics ...