Book Image

SFML Game Development

By : Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller, Henrik Valter Vogelius, SFML
Book Image

SFML Game Development

By: Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller, Henrik Valter Vogelius, SFML

Overview of this book

Game development comprises the combination of many different aspects such as game logics, graphics, audio, user input, physics and much more. SFML is an Open Source C++ library designed to make game development more accessible, exposing multimedia components to the user through a simple, yet powerful interface. If you are a C++ programmer with a stack of ideas in your head and seeking a platform for implementation, your search ends here.Starting with nothing more than a blank screen, SFML Game Development will provide you with all the guidance you need to create your first fully featured 2D game using SFML 2.0. By the end, you'll have learned the basic principles of game development, including advanced topics such as how to network your game, how to utilize particle systems and much more.SFML Game Development starts with an overview of windows, graphics, and user inputs. After this brief introduction, you will start to get to grips with SFML by building up a world of different game objects, and implementing more and more gameplay features. Eventually, you'll be handling advanced visual effects, audio effects and network programming like an old pro. New concepts are discussed, while the code steadily develops.SFML Game Development will get you started with animations, particle effects and shaders. As well as these fundamental game aspects, we're also covering network programming to the extent where you'll be able to support the game running from two different machines. The most important part, the gameplay implementation with enemies and missiles, will make up the core of our top-scrolling airplane shoot' em-up game!You will learn everything you need in SFML Game Development in order to start with game development and come closer to creating your own game.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
SFML Game Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Rendering the scene


At one point, we have to reflect about how the game is rendered on the screen. How do we draw all the entities, the scenery, and interface elements (such as a health bar)? A simple option is to have different sequential containers through which we iterate. For each element, we call a possible Entity::draw() function to draw the corresponding entity on the screen. We only have to make sure that objects that appear behind others (such as the scenery background) are drawn first.

Relative coordinates

The sequential rendering approach works well for many cases, but makes it difficult to handle an entity relative to another one. Imagine we have a formation of airplanes, where one is the leader and the rest follows it. It would be nice if we could set the position of the following airplanes dependent on the leader, in the sense of "plane A is located 300 units behind (below on the screen) and 100 units right of the leader" instead of "plane A is located at position (x, y) in...