The loading screen – sample
While our example game does not use a loading screen up to this point, we have decided to provide a possible implementation of such a state. You can find its source code together with the sources of this chapter, as well as guide yourself through the following paragraphs into understanding it.
A loading screen is a state like any other, except for one thing; it performs a task in the background, using a parallel thread of execution. Using threads and understanding them in full is out of the scope of this book; however, SFML does provide sf::Thread
, a cross-platform implementation for launching and managing multiple branches of execution in a program. Because of this, we will briefly introduce the use of sf::Thread
and apply it directly into our loading screen.
But why do we need to use threads? Simply because a loading screen will most often be passing a number of resources from the hard drive into memory and this will be a lengthy process, and even worse, a blocking...