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

Selecting a suitable game tile


Now, to find suitable tiles, we will generate random spawn coordinates. We know that all tiles with the TILE::FLOOR or TILE::FLOOR_ALT type are floor tiles. Therefore, we can select a tile at random and deduce if it's suitable for the spawning of an item.

To avoid having to do these checks ourselves, the project provides the Level::IsFloor function. It is quite self-explanatory; you can pass it a tile, or the indices of one, and it will return true if it's a floor tile. We'll use that from now on to check whether the tiles are valid for spawning an item.

Randomly selecting a tile

The first function that we'll look at is choosing a value from an underlying grid. In our case, the level data is described in a 2D array. Therefore, we simply need to generate a random column and a row index.

Tip

Remember that this range is the number of rows and columns - 1 as all indices start from 0. If we have a grid with 10 rows and columns, then they are numbered 0 to 9, and the...