Book Image

Mastering SFML Game Development

By : Raimondas Pupius
Book Image

Mastering SFML Game Development

By: Raimondas Pupius

Overview of this book

SFML is a cross-platform software development library written in C++ with bindings available for many programming languages. It provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. This book will help you become an expert of SFML by using all of its features to its full potential. It begins by going over some of the foundational code necessary in order to make our RPG project run. By the end of chapter 3, we will have successfully picked up and deployed a fast and efficient particle system that makes the game look much more ‘alive’. Throughout the next couple of chapters, you will be successfully editing the game maps with ease, all thanks to the custom tools we’re going to be building. From this point on, it’s all about making the game look good. After being introduced to the use of shaders and raw OpenGL, you will be guided through implementing dynamic scene lighting, the use of normal and specular maps, and dynamic soft shadows. However, no project is complete without being optimized first. The very last chapter will wrap up our project by making it lightning fast and efficient.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering SFML Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 4. Have Thy Gear Ready - Building Game Tools

Making games is a fine art. It is entirely possible, of course, to make art with the most basic of tools, but most commonly, developers need a strong toolkit supporting them in order to efficiently and professionally create quick, painless edits to their game. Building the said toolkit is arguably on a par with the difficulty of building the actual game, but the work spent on proper tools offsets the difficulty and frustrations that come with direct file edits.

In this chapter, we're going to be covering these topics:

  • Building a graphical means of file management

  • File loading in a separate thread

  • Establishing a state and means of controls for map editing

There's lots of ground to cover, so let's get started!