Animations / OpenGL (ES 2) in game menu

Question

(I am specifically asking for Android)

If you look at Angry Birds (and in fact many other games), you can already see a lot of animations & effects going in the main menu and in other places even before starting to play. I assume they are done with OpenGL, more precisely a FrameLayout is used and inside it a GLSurfaceView is somewhere at the bottom of the hierarchy; above the GLSurfaceView you have regular Android buttons and texts.

Is this how it's done*? Also would you reuse the same GLSurfaceView when running the actual game or should another one be created?

*I am aware an alternative approach would be to make absolutely everything in OpenGL. Of these two I prefer the FrameLayout one, but I don't know whether other developers agree.

Answer 1

The UI animations for games like Angry Birds is almost always done manually, i.e. not using platform specific elements. The reason of course being that the game will be released on multiple platforms. Using platform specific code will require rewriting it for each target platform, and even then there may be slight differences in how the end result looks and behaves.