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

Designing the component system


A component-based system can be implemented in many ways. So, before we write any code, let's look at some possibilities. The goal is to break reusable behavior into succinct components and be able to add and remove them from the existing objects with ease. All objects share a common base class named object so we'll add the facility to add components to and remove them from this class. We can then ensure that it will be propagated to all the subsequent classes in the project.

There are a number of ways to implement a component-based approach, and there is no single right answer. For example, we could create a function to add or remove each component individually. Here's an example:

bool	AttachSpriteComponent(SpriteComponent spriteCompontent);
bool	AttachInputComponent(InputComponent inputComponent);

While this will make things straightforward, we will have a lot of duplicate code in the class. Also, every time we add a component, we will have to create two matching...