How do I make a water effect view with openGLES on the iPhone?

Question

I found this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVi6ThY3LRs I wonder if that's some kind of standard effect of openGLES. I'm pretty sure it is, since I have seen this pretty often. KoiPond uses it, DuckDuckDuck uses it. A lot of games use it. They're not all astronauts. They're normal programmers ;) So how is this done? Is there any tutorial for this on the web?

Answer 1

For an old example have a look at the 'distort' example. Note that this is a thing created back in 1992 (just looked in distort.c).

Awesome program that causes ripples in the image wherever the mouse button is pressed. Another mode of the program acts like a sheet of rubber and can be pulled by dragging the mouse.

I managed to compile the example on my mac.

• Rename all #include <GL/glut.h> to #include <GLUT/glut.h>
• Add a usleep(33*1000); in the idle() function
• Rename the file ripple_precalc.c to ripple_precalc.c.org (or just rm it)
• Compile with "cc *.c -framework GLUT -framework OpenGL" will create an a.out