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

Procedurally generating a dungeon


It's time to put this theory into practice and implement procedural dungeon generation in our game for real. We'll move the Level class from loading its data from a text file to generating it at runtime, and we'll also cover the application of the correct sprites to the tiles in the random level.

As we identified, one way of approaching this is to generate a maze over the entire play area and then generate rooms to carve out some larger open areas. This method not only generates tighter, more intertwined levels, but also saves us the step of having to connect mazes to rooms, leaving us with just two steps to generate great levels:

Changing how we view the maze

Before we write any code, we're going to make a change to the project so that we can easily see the entire level. Currently, the view is zoomed, and we have the light blocking the level. We want to be able to see the entire maze as we work on the algorithm. So let's make some changes.

The first thing that...