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 – implementing the game board class


Now we will focus on our data structure. Add a new private member to ChessBoard, a vector of characters that will contain information about pieces on the board:

QVector<char> m_boardData;

Consider the following table that shows the piece type and the letters used for it:

Piece type

White

Black

King

K

k

Queen

Q

q

Rook

R

r

Bishop

B

b

Knight

N

n

Pawn

P

P

You can see that white pieces use upper-case letters and black pieces use lower-case variants of the same letters. In addition to that, we will use a space character (0x20 ASCII value) to denote that a field is empty. We will add a protected method for setting up an empty board based on the number of ranks and columns on the board and a boardReset() signal to inform that the position on the board has changed:

void ChessBoard::initBoard()
{
  m_boardData.fill(' ', ranks()*columns());
  emit boardReset();
}

We can update our methods for setting...