Just yesterday there was a big fat news bit posted on the Android developer blog talking all about how their new SDK is just the greatest gift they’ve ever given to the world. While we might agree, something made us push the story back for a moment to get some more important stories shot out of the cannon. Turns out there’s a really fun tidbit in there that reminds me of back about 100 years ago when I was in highschool and my friend whose name is also Chris was teaching himself programming languages. What’s the tidbit? The fact that games written entirely in C and C++ can now be ported to Android with minimal modification!
That’s a lot of fun, and since so many games and game engines have been created with these two languages, it means that the ease in process should yield a big batch of fabulous games coming on over to Android soon – we hope! Take a peek at this paragraph for more insight.
We worked hard to increase the utility of the NDK for this release because you guys, the developers who are actually out there making the awesome applications, told us you needed it. This release is specifically designed to help game developers continue to rock; with Gingerbread and the NDK r5, it should now be very easy to bring games written entirely in C and C++ to Android with minimal modification. We expect the APIs exposed by r5 to also benefit a wide range of media applications; access to a native sound buffer and the ability to write directly to window surfaces makes it much easier for applications implementing their own audio and video codecs to achieve maximum performance. In short, this release addresses many of the requests we’ve received over the last year since the first version of the NDK was announced.
[Via Droid Free Apps]
It’s time to port Qt over!
It will be interesting to see if the big boys now come over. I have a feeling that there will be some holdouts that boil down to fanboyism.
I guess this will be useful if Google pulls support for Java due to Oracle’s lame lawsuits…
I am a C++ programmer so I am very glad to se this 🙂