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

Time for action – forwarding a new message


When a connected client sends a new chat message, the underlying socket—since it inherits QIODevice—emits readyRead(), and thus, our newMessage() slot will be called.

Before we have a look at this slot, there is something important that you need to keep in mind. Even though TCP is ordered and without any duplicates, this does not mean that all the data is delivered in one big chunk. So, before processing the received data, we need to make sure that we get the entire message. Unfortunately, there is neither an easy way to detect whether all data was transmitted nor a globally usable method for such a task. Therefore, it is up to you to solve this problem, as it depends on the use case. Two common solutions, however, are to either send magic tokens to indicate the start and the end of a message, for example, single characters or XML tags, or you can send the size of the message upfront. The second solution is shown in the Qt documentation where the...