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

Choosing the tile textures


Until now we've been loading a prebuilt level from a text file. This level file already knew which textures needed to be used and where they should be used, but since we're now generating them procedurally, that's not the case. We need to decide which tiles should have which sprites.

The if/else approach

A common way of approaching this is simply to create a monstrous if/else statement. In principle, it's a simple task; define each tile through a series of if statements and set the right tile. However, in reality, you end up with a complex mess of code that is very difficult to read.

Imagine a situation where you have a tile set of fifty possible variants. The amount of code required to choose which tile goes where would be crazy. Thankfully, there's a much simpler solution to the problem, and it is one of my favorite examples of an elegant solution to a problem.

Bitwise tile maps

In our game, we concern ourselves with four directions, namely up, down, left, and right...