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 – making the clock functional


The final step in creating a clock is to make it actually show the current time. In JavaScript, we can query the current time using the Date object:

var currentDate = new Date()
var hours   = currentDate.getHours()
var minutes = currentDate.getMinutes()
var seconds = currentDate.getSeconds()

Therefore, the first thing that comes to mind is to use the preceding code to show the current time on the clock:

Item {
  id: clock
  property int hours:   currentDate.getHours()
  property int minutes: currentDate.getMinutes()
  property int seconds: currentDate.getSeconds()
  property var currentDate: new Date()
  // ...
}

This will indeed show the current time once you start the application, but the clock will not be updating itself as the time passes. This is because new Date() returns an object representing one particular moment in time (the date and time at the moment when the object was instantiated). What we need instead is to have the currentDate property...