Book Image

Mastering SFML Game Development

By : Raimondas Pupius
Book Image

Mastering SFML Game Development

By: Raimondas Pupius

Overview of this book

SFML is a cross-platform software development library written in C++ with bindings available for many programming languages. It provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. This book will help you become an expert of SFML by using all of its features to its full potential. It begins by going over some of the foundational code necessary in order to make our RPG project run. By the end of chapter 3, we will have successfully picked up and deployed a fast and efficient particle system that makes the game look much more ‘alive’. Throughout the next couple of chapters, you will be successfully editing the game maps with ease, all thanks to the custom tools we’re going to be building. From this point on, it’s all about making the game look good. After being introduced to the use of shaders and raw OpenGL, you will be guided through implementing dynamic scene lighting, the use of normal and specular maps, and dynamic soft shadows. However, no project is complete without being optimized first. The very last chapter will wrap up our project by making it lightning fast and efficient.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering SFML Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Integrating the Renderer class


There is obviously no point in even having the Renderer class, if it is not going to be in its proper place or used at all. Since its only job is to draw things on screen with the correct effect being applied, a fitting place for it would be inside the Window class:

class Window{ 
public: 
  ... 
  Renderer* GetRenderer(); 
  ... 
private: 
  ... 
  Renderer m_renderer; 
}; 

Because outside classes rely on it as well, it is a good idea to provide a getter method for easy retrieval of this object.

Actually integrating it into the rest of the code is surprisingly easy. A good place to start is giving the Renderer access to the Window class like so:

Window::Window(...) : m_renderer(this, l_useShaders) { ... } 

The renderer also has hooks for knowing when we begin and end the drawing process. Luckily, the Window class already supports this idea, so it's really easy to tap into it:

void Window::BeginDraw() { 
 ...