Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By : Dale Green
Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By: Dale Green

Overview of this book

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease. Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

How we'll implement procedural generation


At the very start of the book I gave a brief overview of each chapter and what we will be covering in it. Now that we've covered what procedural generation is, let's take a look specifically at some of the ways in which we'll be implementing it as we work towards creating our own roguelike game. This list is not exhaustive.

Populating environments

When we load the game for the first time our objects will be in fixed locations. We're going to start our efforts by fixing this, implementing what we've learned in this chapter about random number generation to spawn our objects at random locations.

At the end of this chapter there are a few optional exercises that include generating numbers within a collection of different ranges. I suggest completing them if you're not comfortable with it already, as we'll be relying on it to achieve this.

Creating unique game objects

One of my personal favorite aspects of procedural generation is the creation of unique objects and items. Knowing that there is a wide variety of items in a game is awesome. Knowing that the items don't even exist yet, and that the possibilities are limitless, is even better!

We'll start simply by initializing our object's member variables randomly, and move up to giving our objects unique sprites and properties. We'll also look at creating dynamic classes that can create highly unique objects from a single base class.