Chris Pruett, a  Google employee working on the gaming side of Android development, revealed in a post on Android Developers yesterday that the Gingerbread NDK r5 has increased "the awesomeness" of the gaming experience that can be had on Android through new APIs which will allow developers "to do more from native code."

One of the changes that comes with the NDK r5 includes the ability for developers to implement apps entirely in C++, completely avoiding Java, if they are aimed at Gingerbread and later Android versions.

The post also notes that other new changes include the ability to:

• play sound from native code
• handle common application events (life cycle, touch and key events, as well as sensors)
• control windows directly (including direct access to the window’s pixel buffer)
• manage EGL contexts
• read assets directly out of APK files

Chris Pruett also adds that NDK r5 "adds backwards-compatible support for RTTI, C++ exceptions, wchar_t, and includes improved debugging tools."

While most Android users won't know what to make out of these changes, developers will likely be elated to hear some of the changes that have been made. Now if only everyone was running Android Gingerbread...

Head on over to the source link for more indepth info on the changes that have been made.

Image from Android Central