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

Setting the game seed


Before we do anything we're going to need to set the game seed. Without it we'll get the same results each time our game is run. As we've learned, this simply requires us to make a call to the std::srand() function passing a random parameter to be used as the seed. We'll use the current system time as our seed, it's random enough for our purposes.

Where we make the call to the std::srand() function is arbitrary so long as it's called before any call to the std::rand() function. The file main.cpp contains the function main(), the entry point of the application. It's here that our game object is created and the main game loop entered, so we'll make our call to the std::srand() function here.

Our updated main() function should now look like this:

// Entry point of the application.
int main()
{
    // Set a random seed.
    std:: srand(static_cast<unsigned int>(time(nullptr)));

    // Create the main game object.
    Game game;
 
    // Create a Boolean that we can...