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

Setting up OpenGL


  • In order to have access to the latest version of OpenGL, we need to download two libraries. One is named the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library. It loads and makes available all OpenGL extensions that are supported on the target platform. The library can be downloaded here http://glew.sourceforge.net/.

  • The other library we need is called OpenGL Mathematics, or GLM for short. It is a header-only library that adds a lot of extra data types and functions, which come in handy more often than not. Anything from simple vector data types to functions used to calculate cross products are added in by this library. It can be found here http://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.8/index.html .

Setting up a Visual Studio project

Alongside the usual SFML includes, which we are still going to need for creating a window, we also need to add the GLEW and GLM include folders in the Include Directories field under VC++ Directories.

The GLEW Additional Library Directory must be added in as well in the General...