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

Polling events


Generally speaking, events are objects that are triggered when something happens; mostly related to the user input. Events are a construct in the underlying operating system. On top of them, SFML provides a nice abstraction layer that is easier to use and cross-platform. SFML goes with a polling design to have you work with events. When an input occurs, the operating system reports it to the application. SFML processes this input, converts it into the corresponding SFML event type, and puts it into a queue of waiting events. In your actual application code, you extract events from this queue using the sf::Window::pollEvent() function (note that sf::Window is the base class of sf::RenderWindow, without the rendering functionality). The pollEvent() function signature is a bit interesting:

bool sf::Window::pollEvent(sf::Event& event);

Now this is a bit special and might not be self-explanatory. The problem with pollEvent() is that we want to receive two different values. We...