Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By : Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas
Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By: Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas

Overview of this book

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming more popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. Despite its simplicity, it's a powerful tool that perfectly fits game developers’ needs. Using Qt and Qt Quick, it is easy to build fun games or shiny user interfaces. You only need to create your game once and deploy it on all major platforms like iOS, Android, and WinRT without changing a single source file. The book begins with a brief introduction to creating an application and preparing a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. It then dives deeper into the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt core concepts of data processing and display before you try creating a game. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. We then delve into Qt Quick, OpenGL, and various other tools to add game logic, design animation, add game physics, and build astonishing UI for the games. Towards the final chapters, you’ll learn to exploit mobile device features such as accelerators and sensors to build engaging user experiences. If you are planning to learn about Qt and its associated toolsets to build apps and games, this book is a must have.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Game Programming Using Qt
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Bringing life into static user interfaces


What we have described so far can be called anything but "fluid." Let's change that now by learning how to add some dynamics into the user interfaces we create. Thus far, books cannot contain moving pictures, so most things we describe here you will have to test yourself by running the provided Qt Quick code.

Animating elements

Qt Quick provides a very extensive framework for creating animations. By that, we don't mean only moving items around. We define an animation as changing an arbitrary value over time. So, what can we animate? Of course, we can animate item geometry. But we can also animate rotation, scale, other numeric values, and even colors. But let's not stop here. Qt Quick also lets you animate the parent-child hierarchy of items or anchor assignments. Almost anything that can be represented by an item property can be animated.

Moreover, the changes are rarely linear—if you kick a ball in the air, it first gains height quickly because its...