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 – making the button a reusable component


So far, we have been working on a single button. Adding another button by copying the code, changing the identifiers of all components, and setting different bindings to properties are very tedious tasks. Instead, we can make our button item a real component, that is, a new QML type that can be instantiated on demand as many times as required.

First, position the text cursor right before the bracket opening of the definition of the button and press Alt + Enter on the keyboard to open the refactoring menu, like in the following screenshot:

From the menu, choose Move Component into Separate File. In the popup, type in a name for the new type (for example, Button) and accept the dialog by clicking on the OK button:

What just happened?

You can see that we have a new file called Button.qml in the project, which contains everything the button item used to have. The main file was simplified to something similar the following:

import QtQuick...