Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By : Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen
Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By: Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen

Overview of this book

OpenGL is one of the most popular rendering SDKs used to develop games. OpenGL has been used to create everything from 3D masterpieces running on desktop computers to 2D puzzles running on mobile devices. You will learn to apply both 2D and 3D technologies to bring your game idea to life. There is a lot more to making a game than just drawing pictures and that is where this book is unique! It provides a complete tutorial on designing and coding games from the setup of the development environment to final credits screen, through the creation of a 2D and 3D game. The book starts off by showing you how to set up a development environment using Visual Studio, and create a code framework for your game. It then walks you through creation of two games–a 2D platform game called Roboracer 2D and a 3D first-person space shooter game–using OpenGL to render both 2D and 3D graphics using a 2D coordinate system. You'll create sprite classes, render sprites and animation, and navigate and control the characters. You will also learn how to implement input, use audio, and code basic collision and physics systems. From setting up the development environment to creating the final credits screen, the book will take you through the complete journey of creating a game engine that you can extend to create your own games.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
OpenGL Game Development By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with fonts


Until now, we embedded any text that we needed inside of an existing texture. However, there are times when we may want to have the code decide what text to display. For example, on our credits screen, we don't want to make a graphic for each person's name who took part in creating the game.

Creating the font

We need a way to render text directly to the screen, and this means that we also need a way to define the font that we want to use when rendering the text. First, we need to add a global variable that services as a handle to our fonts. Add the following line to the variable declarations in the code:

GLuint fontBase;

Now, we need to add the following code to create the font:

GLvoid BuildFont(GLvoid)
{
  HFONT newFont;
  HFONT tempFont;
  
  fontBase = glGenLists(96);
  
  tempFont = CreateFont(-26, // Height
  0,                        // Width
  0,                        // Escapement
  0,                        // Orientation
  FW_BOLD,                  // Weight
  FALSE...