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

Qt meta-objects


Most of the special functionality that Qt offers revolves around the QObject class and the meta-object paradigm that we will take a closer look at now. The paradigm says that with every QObject subclass, there is a special object associated that contains information about that class. It allows us to make runtime queries to learn useful things about the class—the class name, superclass, constructors, methods, fields, enumerations, and so on. The meta-object is generated for the class at compile time when three conditions are met:

  • The class is a descendant of QObject

  • It contains a special Q_OBJECT macro in a private section of its definition

  • Code of the class is preprocessed by a special Meta-Object Compiler (moc) tool

We can comply to the first two conditions ourselves by writing proper code for the class just like Qt Creator does when we create a class derived from QObject. The last condition is met automatically when you use a tool chain that comes with Qt (and Qt Creator)...