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 overview of dungeon generation overview


Dungeon generation is a vast topic with a wide range of possible implementations, with each implementation having its own characteristics. However, underneath the nuances of different algorithms, dungeon generation generally involves the generation of rooms and a maze and the integration of the two, as shown in the following diagram:

Procedurally generating dungeons is not that different from the work that we did on path finding. It's all about viewing a level as nodes and manipulating them. Before we implement it we'll break it down into the three main stages that were identified previously, namely the generation of rooms, the generation of a maze, and the integration of all together.

Generating rooms

Dungeons are a series of interconnected rooms, and their generation is the first step in many systems. There is no complex algorithm behind this; we simply choose a room size and place a number of them in the level. The characteristics of this level...