Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Book Image

Learning Libgdx Game Development

Overview of this book

Game development is a field of interdisciplinary skills, which also makes it a very complex topic in many respects. One decision that usually needs to be made at the beginning of a game development processis to define the kind of computer system or platform the game will be developed for. This does not pose any problems in general but as soon as the game should also be able to run on multiple platforms it will become a developer's nightmare to maintain several distinct copies of the same game. This is where the libGDX multi-platform game development framework comes to the rescue! "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to know about the libGDX framework as well as game development in general so you can start developing your own games for multiple platforms. You will gradually acquire deeper knowledge of both, libGDX and game development while you work through twelve easy-to-follow chapters. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" will walk you through a complete game development cycle by creating an example game that is extended with new features over several chapters. These chapters handle specific topics such as organizing resources, managing game scenes and transitions, actors, a menu system, using an advanced physics engine and many more. The chapters are filled with screenshots and/or diagrams to facilitate comprehension. "Learning Libgdx Game Development" is the book for you if you want to learn how to write your game code once and run it on a multitude of platforms using libGDX.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Libgdx Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with shaders in Libgdx


Let us now turn our attention to the topic of shaders. This is a feature that is available in OpenGL (ES) 2.0 only, as it makes use of the so-called Programmable Pipeline. Shaders are usually small programs, which allow us to take over control of certain stages in the rendering process to define the way how a scene should be rendered by the graphics processor. In consequence, shaders are an important building block in today's computer graphics and are also an extremely powerful tool to create all sorts of (special) effects that would be very hard to realize otherwise. For the sake of simplicity, we will only discuss vertex and fragment shaders here.

Note

Fragment shaders are also called pixel shaders. Unfortunately, this is a bit misleading as this type of shader actually operates on fragments instead of pixels.

Consider the following list of reasons as to why shaders are generally useful and highly recommended to be in the toolkit of every (graphics) programmer...