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 – self-updating car dashboard


In the next exercise, we will implement a car dashboard that can be used in a racing game and will show a number of parameters such as current speed and motor revolutions per minute. The final result will look similar to the following image:

We will start with the C++ part. Set up a new Qt Quick Application. Choose the most recent Qt Quick version for the Qt Quick component set. This will generate a main function for you that instantiates QGuiApplication and QQmlApplicationEngine and sets them up to load a QML document.

Use the File menu to create New file or Project and create a new C++ class. Call it CarInfo and choose QWidget as its base class. Why not QObject, you may ask? This is because our class will also be a widget, which will be used for modifying values of different parameters so that we may observe how they influence what the Qt Quick scene displays. In the class header, declare the following properties:

  Q_PROPERTY(int rpm READ rpm...