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

The state stack


One way to visualize the flow of the game screens would be to picture a finite state machine of all the screens and how they trigger each other's appearance. However, while that works and is logically accurate, we broaden the concept of the active state into a stack.

Note

Finite State Machine (FSM): While this is a well known concept across the world of computation, we will shortly describe the state machine as a collection of states that ensures that only one state is active at any given time. The transition of the current state into a new one is always triggered by a condition or a timer. So, for any state of the FSM, there will be a determined set of triggers that will activate new states when appropriate.

Now, turning the active state into a stack essentially means that the current state is not an individual piece anymore, but rather a stacked group of pieces, when necessary. Usually, the state mechanism will only have one state active at a time, and while this is true...