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

Implementing A* in the game


Now that we have the function that can calculate the shortest path, we need to incorporate this behavior into the game.

Enabling the enemy to follow a path

We now need to make the enemies follow the vector of target locations that the pathfinding algorithm generates. We need the enemy to constantly follow this path, so we'll override its base classes' Update function, as it's called during every game's tick. The code that will do this is fairly simple; if there is a location in the vector, move towards it at a fixed pace. When the position is reached, we simply remove it from the vector. When the vector is empty, we know that the enemy has reached its goal.

We'll start by adding the function declaration to Enemy.h:

public:
/**
 * Overrides the default Update function in Enemy
 */
void Update(float timeDelta) override;

Now we can add the code to follow the path. Like we just said, if there is a value in the vector of the target positions, move towards it at a fixed...