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

An introduction to SFML audio


SFML has its own module dedicated to audio, which provides a number of useful functions that we can use to modify sounds. There are two main sound types in SFML: sf::Sound and sf::Music. We'll cover the difference between these two types in detail shortly. It also provides a number of functions to edit the properties of sounds, such as pitch and volume. We'll use these to give our sound effects some variance.

sf::Sound versus sf::Music

Before we start working with audio, we need to look at the difference between sf::Sound and sf::Music:

  • Sf::Sound is intended for shorter sound clips such as picking up an object or footsteps. The sound is loaded in its entirety into the memory, and it is ready to be played with no latency.

  • Sf::Music is intended for longer, bigger sound files and is not loaded into the memory; it is streamed as it is used.

This might seem like a slight difference, but it's very important to use the correct type. For example, if we were to load a game...