Book Image

Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. It's a powerful tool that perfectly fits the needs of game developers. This book will help you learn the basics of Qt and will equip you with the necessary toolsets to build apps and games. The book begins by how to create an application and prepare a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. You will learn how to use built-in Qt widgets and Form Editor to create a GUI application and then learn the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt's core concepts. Further, you'll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. You will learn about Qt's capabilities for handling strings and files, data storage, and serialization. Moving on, you will learn about the new Qt Gamepad module and how to add it in your game and then delve into OpenGL and Vulcan, and how it can be used in Qt applications to implement hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics. You will then explore various facets of Qt Quick: how it can be used in games to add game logic, add game physics, and build astonishing UIs for your games. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skillset to develop interesting games with Qt.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Pop quiz answers

Modern OpenGL with Qt

The OpenGL code shown in the previous section uses a very old technique of streaming vertices one by one into a fixed OpenGL pipeline. Nowadays, modern hardware is much more feature-rich and not only does it allow faster processing of vertex data but also offers the ability to adjust different processing stages, with the use of reprogrammable units called shaders. In this section, we will take a look at what Qt has to offer in the domain of a "modern" approach to using OpenGL.

Shaders

Qt can make use of shaders through a set of classes based around QOpenGLShaderProgram. This class allows compiling, linking, and executing of shader programs written in GLSL. You can check whether your OpenGL implementation...