Thanks for the input and thoughts guys, and thanks Ms Ancient for the heads up on those issues. I probably would've piled in and been head scratching for a while when I hit that issue.
To pick up Van's point and then ramble about everyone elses, Tier 2 C++ would still be significantly less complicated than Android SDK + OpenGL. Unless there are some new libraries out that I'm unaware of, OpenGL is a right old rabbit warren. To do my performance test I had to lift classes from an older droid OpenGL project I was working on, and many thousands of lines of model loaders, meshes, renderers, buffers, factories blah blah is required for well structured OpenGL programming. If Tier 2 handles all that for me (as I'm sure it does) then that's most of the Android SDK approach complexities removed.
I've already used Tier 1 to work on an app, so have done some serious AppGameKit work, though never used 3D in AGK. Can't see that being an issue though. Before that I did C++ and GDK to write Carnage (RIP
) so using a TGC library in C++ has a lot of appeal. Programming in OO calling a TGC library is almost second nature!
I don't think the FPS for my test would be any different in Tier 2, as it was purely a static render test, but there will be a lot of AI, collision, etc calculations going on, so native C++ sounds good for that. Plus the game will have complex data structures and objects. I am really down with the usefulness of OO and inheritance when dealing with complex simulations.
And Matty, yep this is the space game. This'll be the third (and most serious) attempt at it. I'm still using DBPro to make my development tools, as it's so quick and easy. Perhaps I should be using Tier 1 AppGameKit, but anyway, I already have the majority of a ship hull designer tool done and it saving to a file format, so it's time to get developing the game and making my ship interactive!
I'll give you a shout if I have any thoughts. In fact, once I've made a dent in this thing and have something to show, I'll start a WIP.
At the moment I'm leaning towards jumping straight into Tier 2 and seeing where it takes me.
Thanks for your thoughts guys. It's helped me to rationalise it all.