Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By : Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen
Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By: Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen

Overview of this book

OpenGL is one of the most popular rendering SDKs used to develop games. OpenGL has been used to create everything from 3D masterpieces running on desktop computers to 2D puzzles running on mobile devices. You will learn to apply both 2D and 3D technologies to bring your game idea to life. There is a lot more to making a game than just drawing pictures and that is where this book is unique! It provides a complete tutorial on designing and coding games from the setup of the development environment to final credits screen, through the creation of a 2D and 3D game. The book starts off by showing you how to set up a development environment using Visual Studio, and create a code framework for your game. It then walks you through creation of two games–a 2D platform game called Roboracer 2D and a 3D first-person space shooter game–using OpenGL to render both 2D and 3D graphics using a 2D coordinate system. You'll create sprite classes, render sprites and animation, and navigate and control the characters. You will also learn how to implement input, use audio, and code basic collision and physics systems. From setting up the development environment to creating the final credits screen, the book will take you through the complete journey of creating a game engine that you can extend to create your own games.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
OpenGL Game Development By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating sprites


Professional 2D artists use programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, to create 2D assets for a game. Unfortunately, we can't take the time to teach you how to use a program as sophisticated as Photoshop.

If you want to play around with creating your own assets, then you might try the Paint program that comes installed on any Windows based computer. If you really want to dig deep into 2D art creation without digging deeply into your bank account, then you can download GIMP (http://www.gimp.org), a free, full-features 2D image manipulation program.

Working with PNGs

In the previous chapter, we loaded and rendered a bitmap file. It turns out that bitmaps aren't the best format to work with sprites because they take more file space (and therefore, more memory) than PNGs, and bitmaps do not support transparency.

Tip

Before we had image formats that allowed transparency to be directly encoded as part of the image, we used a specific background color, and then expected our image library to...