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 – drawing an oscillogram


Let's further extend our widget to become a simple oscillogram renderer. For that we have to make the widget remember a set of values and draw them as a series of lines.

Let's start by adding a QList<quint16> member variable that holds a list of unsigned 16-bit integer values. We will also add slots for adding values to the list and for clearing the list, as shown:

class Widget : public QWidget
{
  // ...
public slots:
  void addPoint(unsigned yVal) { m_points << qMax(0u, yVal); update(); }
  void clear() { m_points.clear(); update(); }
protected:
  // ...
  QList<quint16> m_points;
};

Note that each modification of the list invokes a method called update(). This schedules a paint event so that our widget can be redrawn with the new values.

Drawing code is also easy; we just iterate over the list and draw symmetric blue lines based on the values from the list. Since the lines are vertical, they don't suffer from aliasing and so we can...