Book Image

SFML Game Development By Example

By : Raimondas Pupius
Book Image

SFML Game Development By Example

By: Raimondas Pupius

Overview of this book

Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) is a simple interface comprising five modules, namely, the audio, graphics, network, system, and window modules, which help to develop cross-platform media applications. By utilizing the SFML library, you are provided with the ability to craft games quickly and easily, without going through an extensive learning curve. This effectively serves as a confidence booster, as well as a way to delve into the game development process itself, before having to worry about more advanced topics such as “rendering pipelines” or “shaders.” With just an investment of moderate C++ knowledge, this book will guide you all the way through the journey of game development. The book starts by building a clone of the classical snake game where you will learn how to open a window and render a basic sprite, write well-structured code to implement the design of the game, and use the AABB bounding box collision concept. The next game is a simple platformer with enemies, obstacles and a few different stages. Here, we will be creating states that will provide custom application flow and explore the most common yet often overlooked design patterns used in game development. Last but not the least, we will create a small RPG game where we will be using common game design patterns, multiple GUI. elements, advanced graphical features, and sounds and music features. We will also be implementing networking features that will allow other players to join and play together. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the SFML library to its full potential.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
SFML Game Development By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Common mistakes


A fairly common thing people often forget is the following line:

srand(time(nullptr));

If you notice, the numbers being generated are exactly the same each time you launch the game-chances are that you haven't seeded the random number generator or you haven't provided a proper seed. It's recommended to always use a unix timestamp, as shown.

Tip

The use of this particular random function should be restricted to something that isn't related to security and cryptography. Using it in combination with the modulus operator can produce incredibly non-uniform results due to the introduced bias.

Another fairly common problem is the programmers' choice of the data container to hold their structures. Let's take the following for example:

using SnakeContainer = std::vector<SnakeSegment>;

This defines the type of our SnakeContainer. If you've compiled the code we've written, you will notice that it runs fairly smoothly. Now consider this next line of code:

Using SnakeContainer = std::deque...