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

Saving modified sprites


In our game we're going to be generating new sprites each time the game is run. We want each run to be unique, so once we've generated a sprite and used it we can let it go. However sometimes, you might want to keep hold of a sprite. For example, you might want to create a randomized NPC and keep the same character throughout the entire game.

The two data types that we've used to create images so far are sf::Sprite and sf::Texture. These classes let us interact with images through a set of predefined member functions. It's great for standard drawing and simple image manipulation, but we don't get access to the raw image information. This is where sf::Image comes into play!

Passing a texture into an image

Sf::Image is a class that is used to load, manipulate, and save images. Unlike the other data types, sf::Image provides us with the raw image data, allowing us to interact with every pixel in the image. We'll use more of this functionality later, but for now, we're...