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

Chapter 6. Waiting and Maintenance Area – Menus

Most games have menus and it's something the player expects when opening up a new game. Even in its simplest form, there is a user interface that responds to the user, and gives him the information he needs to enjoy the game. You might have noticed that we implemented a simple menu in the previous chapter, but it's a prime example where you should refactor and extract into its own class. This is what we will do in this chapter:

  • Design a user interface components hierarchy

  • Implement the base component class

  • Implement containers, labels, and buttons

  • Create a proper title screen

  • Create a settings screen

What we aim in this chapter is to give you a fundamental understanding of creating a graphical user interface (GUI). GUI design is a huge topic that deserves its own book, but we will do a crash course together.

Normally, in a GUI you use the mouse as an input source; you click on a button and something happens. But for our examples we keep it simple...