First a bit of context: I'm developing a video game for both the Android and iPhone platforms. The way the iPhone works, when a user hits the home button and returns to the game later, in most circumstances the game will pick up RIGHT where it left off with no hicups. I immediately jump back into my rendering and game loop. Setting this up on the iOS platform was absolutely easy for me to do. Accomplishing this on the Android has left me in a fit of rage after hours of wrestling with google results :P
I have my own OpenGL setup for both the iPhone and Android, and everything has been working great. The root of the problem, I believe, is that I need a SurfaceHolder to create an OpenGL Context. Here's the sucky part, when the screen loses focus of the game (ie the home button was hit), Android calls surfaceDestroyed in my SurfaceView class and basically KILLS my opengl context. I could recreate a new one with a new SurfaceHolder when surfaceCreated is called, but then I need to reload all of my art assets which defeats the purpose of everything I'm trying to accomplish.
Can I somehow prevent the Android OS from killing my surface holder, is there some sort of custom view I can use to get this to work? Is there some setting in the Manifest that can help me out here (I doubt it as I have thoroughly tested most of the flags)? I know this is possible because Angry Birds does this perfectly on the Android OS.