SFML Essentials is a practical set of tutorials about the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) that teaches you how to use the library quickly and easily. The book establishes the core concepts of game development by providing the best practices in this field.
Game development can be a difficult topic to understand. SFML Essentials will provide enough knowledge about SFML for you to start implementing your ideas as soon as possible. This book also includes a number of fully working examples, which you can use and modify to suit your needs.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with SFML, is an introductory chapter about the SFML library. It goes through the process of creating a window and rendering basic shapes on the screen. This chapter concludes with a functional mini-game, the code of which is explained in detail.
Chapter 2, Loading and Using Textures, introduces the concept of sprites and textures and their interaction with the window. At the end of this chapter, the problems of resource management are tackled by building a robust asset manager.
Chapter 3, Animating Sprites, builds on the sprite class by animating it with spritesheets. A fully functional Animator class is constructed by the end of this chapter. This class can also be used outside the context of this book.
Chapter 4, Manipulating a 2D Camera, introduces the concept of cameras in a scene and the ways they can be interacted with. This chapter also discusses direct rendering with OpenGL on an SFML window.
Chapter 5, Exploring a World of Sounds and Text, discusses the audio and text components of a game. The concept of spatialization (3D audio) is covered as well.
Chapter 6, Rendering Special Effects with Shaders, dives into the topic of shaders and their uses in special effects. Postprocessing is briefly covered by giving an example of a pixelation shader.
Chapter 7, Building Multiplayer Games, discusses the topic of networking. After a brief introduction, the transport layer (TCP and UDP sockets) is explored. A working networking example between two PCs is presented at the end of this chapter.
For this book you will require Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop, which can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=34673. You also need to install SFML v2.1 Visual C++ 11 (2012) 32-bit from http://sfml-dev.org/download/sfml/2.1/.
You also require a graphics card capable for running at 1024 x 768 pixels or a higher display resolution, and is compatible with OpenGL 2.0.
SFML Essentials is for people who have experience in the field of game programming but want to use SFML for their next project. Perhaps you have an idea for a game, but your current environment is too slow to accommodate the needs of your game, or you want a cross-platform solution in your favorite language. In either case, this book will quickly guide you towards your goal. We assume that you possess a very basic understanding of game development, but solid understanding in at least one of the supported languages is required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and explanations of their meanings.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This is the reference that initializes the member's Sprite& field."
A block of code is set as follows:
sf::Uint32 style = sf::Style::Titlebar | sf::Style::Close;
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
The images used inside this book have been taken from the following locations:
Chapter 2, Loading and Using Textures,
Chapter 3, Animating Sprites,
Chapter 6, Rendering Special Effects with Shaders,
The Tower (level 1 concept, pixelation): http://www.dreamharvest.co.uk/?page_id=171
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