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 7. Procedurally Modifying Audio

Now that our game art has received procedural treatment, let's turn our attention to its neighbor, sound. Great sound is imperative for a good game. Think about how iconic the sound of Super Mario's jump is, or the sound of chomping ghosts in Packman! A great soundtrack and accompanying game sounds help players immerse themselves in the worlds that we create as game developers. It's an area that needs to be done correctly, and there needs to be enough diversity here so that your players don't get sick of hearing the same sound effects over and over again.

We could manually create lots of variants of sound effects, but that's not the procedural way! Instead, we'll alter sounds randomly at runtime to create a slightly different sound each time it's played. Then, we'll utilize SFML's audio functions to create spatialized 3D sounds, thus adding more depth and immersion to the game.

Procedurally generating audio from scratch is a very complex task. Our work...