Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By : Dale Green
Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By: Dale Green

Overview of this book

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease. Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Procedurally Generating Art

A game's art is one of its defining features. It's usually what first attracts us, and it is one of the driving forces behind keeping us hooked; great aesthetics go a long way. Given that, we want to ensure that this is an area that is as rich, diverse, and immersive as possible.

However, art is financially expensive and time-consuming to produce. Not only that, it's also expensive at the hardware level! Game textures can hit 4K in size, and creating a thousand 4K textures and storing them on traditional game media is no easy task. Thankfully, a wide range of procedural generation techniques can be employed when creating art to help combat some of these issues.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

  • How procedural generation is used with art

  • The benefits and drawbacks of procedurally generated art

  • Using SFML sprite modifiers

  • Saving modified sprites

  • Programmatically creating sprites