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

The benefits of procedurally generated art


The procedural generation of game art brings with it a range of benefits to us as developers and the people who play our games. From its versatility, to being cost-effective and a time-saver, let's take a look at a few of these benefits.

Versatility

The main benefit of procedurally generating game art is versatility. Game art is expensive to produce, and as a result imposes limits on what can feasibly be created for a given project. It would be nice to have an artist create thousands of textures for our games, but it's not feasible. Instead, we can create a handful resources, employ procedural techniques to turn these resources into thousands of individual possible textures, and bring variety and diversity to games.

Cheap to produce

Expanding on the previous point, since we do not have to pay artists to manually create all of these textures, procedural generation saves us both time and money. In the example that we're going to work on in this chapter...