Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By : Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas
Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By: Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas

Overview of this book

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming more popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. Despite its simplicity, it's a powerful tool that perfectly fits game developers’ needs. Using Qt and Qt Quick, it is easy to build fun games or shiny user interfaces. You only need to create your game once and deploy it on all major platforms like iOS, Android, and WinRT without changing a single source file. The book begins with a brief introduction to creating an application and preparing a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. It then dives deeper into the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt core concepts of data processing and display before you try creating a game. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. We then delve into Qt Quick, OpenGL, and various other tools to add game logic, design animation, add game physics, and build astonishing UI for the games. Towards the final chapters, you’ll learn to exploit mobile device features such as accelerators and sensors to build engaging user experiences. If you are planning to learn about Qt and its associated toolsets to build apps and games, this book is a must have.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Game Programming Using Qt
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – custom-painted widgets


Let's immediately use our new skills in practice!

Start by creating a new Qt Widgets Application in Qt Creator, choosing QWidget as the base class, and making sure the Generate Form box is unchecked.

Switch to the header file for the newly created class, add a protected section to the class and type void paintEvent for the section. Then press Ctrl + spacebar on your keyboard and Creator will suggest the parameters for the method. You should end up with the following code:

protected:
    void paintEvent(QPaintEvent *);

Creator will leave the cursor positioned right before the semicolon. Pressing Alt + Enter will open the refactoring menu, letting you add the definition in the implementation file. The standard code for a paint event is one that instantiates a painter on the widget, as shown:

void Widget::paintEvent(QPaintEvent *)
{
  QPainter painter(this);
}

If you run this code, the widget will remain blank. Now we can start adding the actual painting code...