Book Image

SDL Game Development

By : Shaun Mitchell
5 (1)
Book Image

SDL Game Development

5 (1)
By: Shaun Mitchell

Overview of this book

SDL 2.0 is the latest release of the popular Simple DirectMedia Layer API, which is designed to make life easier for C++ developers, allowing you simple low-level access to various multiplatform audio, graphics, and input devices.SDL Game Development guides you through creating your first 2D game using SDL and C++. It takes a clear and practical approach to SDL game development, ensuring that the focus remains on creating awesome games.Starting with the installation and setup of SDL, you will quickly become familiar with useful SDL features, covering sprites, state management, and OOP, leading to a reusable framework that is extendable for your own games. SDL Game Development culminates in the development of two exciting action games that utilize the created framework along with tips to improve the framework.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
SDL Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using inheritance


The first powerful feature of OOP we will look at is inheritance. This feature can help us enormously when developing our reusable framework. Through the use of inheritance, we can share common functionality between similar classes and also create subtypes from existing types. We will not go into too much detail about inheritance itself but instead we will start to think about how we will apply it to our framework.

As mentioned earlier, all games have objects of various types. In most cases, these objects will have a lot of the same data and require a lot of the same basic functions. Let's look at some examples of this common functionality:

  • Almost all of our objects will be drawn to the screen, thus requiring a draw function

  • If our objects are to be drawn, they will need a location to draw to, that is, x and y position variables

  • We don't want static objects all the time, so we will need an update function

  • Objects will be responsible for cleaning up after themselves; a function...