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

A breakdown of A*


Before we start coding our own A* implementation, it will do us good to break down the algorithm into its key areas and take an isolated look at each.

Representing a level as nodes

Perhaps the most important area of understanding when we look at A* is how the algorithm will view our level. While we see tiles, the pathfinding algorithm sees only nodes. In this context, a node just represents a valid location that an entity can move to within the level.

How nodes are defined differs from game to game. For example, in our game, the level is already described as a 2D array of tiles. Therefore, each tile in that grid will act as a node. In 3D games however, we don't have this grid so navigation meshes are used to create a surface that can be represented as nodes.

Tip

Valve has a great article on their developer wiki page regarding navigation meshes. So head to https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Navigation_Meshes if you want to learn more about this subject.

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