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 – creating an item for Benjamin


First we need a custom item class for Benjamin. We call the class Player and choose QGraphicsPixmapItem as the base class because Benjamin is a PNG image. In the item's Player class, we further create a property of integer type and call it m_direction. Its value signifies in which direction Benjamin walks—left or right—or if he stands still. Of course, we use a getter and setter function for this property. Since the header file is simple, let's have a look at the implementation right away (you will find the whole source code at the end of this book):

Player::Player(QGraphicsItem *parent)
  : QGraphicsPixmapItem(parent), m_direction(0) {
    setPixmap(QPixmap(":/elephant"));
    setTransformOriginPoint(boundingRect().center());
}

In the constructor, we set m_direction to 0, which means that Benjamin isn't moving at all. If m_direction is 1, Benjamin moves right, and if the value is -1, he moves left. In the body of the constructor, we set the...