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

Defining texture atlases


A texture atlas describes the concept of a single texture that contains multiple objects. You may also encounter other terms, such as sprite sheet, or tile set in the case of squared tiles put together. Texture atlases allow having fewer image files, which decreases the amount of switches between different textures at runtime. Since texture switching is a rather slow operation on the graphics card, using texture atlases may result in notable speedups. Till now, we used separate textures for each object: one for each aircraft, pick-up, projectile, button, and background. Every texture was stored in its own PNG file. The code design looked as follows:

  • Textures were stored inside TextureHolder, our container storing sf::Texture objects.

  • We had an enum Textures::ID to identify the different textures in a TextureHolder. By that, we could easily refer to different textures without knowing the actual sf::Texture object or the filename.

  • The textures used in the scene were...