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

Planning the selection options


Versatile selection options are important when creating a responsive and useful application. Without them, any sort of software can feel unintuitive, clunky, or unresponsive at best. In this particular case, we are going to be dealing with selecting, copying, and placing tiles, entities, and particle emitters.

Let us see what such an interface might look like:

In order to get there, we need to create a flexible class, designed to be able to handle any possible combination of options and controls. Let us start by going over the most basic data types that are going to come in handy when developing this system:

enum class SelectMode{ Tiles, Entities, Emitters }; 
using NameList = std::vector<std::pair<std::string, bool>>; 

First, the selection mode needs to be enumerated. As shown in the preceding snippet, there are three modes we are going to be working with at the moment, although this list can easily be expanded in the future. The NameList...