android opengl texture loading thread

Question

I'm working on an app that needs to load textures for frame animations at certain times while it's executing, the rendering thread needs to continue to run and I need to load the textures in a bg thread. Is there a way to do this in android? I was able to in ios by creating a separate opengl context on the other thread that used the same sharegroup but am not sure if there is a similar facility on android?

Answer 1

Yes, you can share textures between contexts (as long as your driver supports it). Create your background loading context like this (meaning you want to share objects with rendering_context):

eglCreateContext(display, config, rendering_context, attrs);

Then after doing something like this in your background context:

glGenTextures(1, &tex);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex);
glTexImage2D(...);

You can then bind and use tex from your rendering context.