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

Creating a day/night cycle


Unifying the shading across many different world objects in our game gave us a very nice way of manipulating how the overall scene is actually represented. Many interesting effects are now possible, but we are going to focus on a rather simple yet effective one-lighting. The actual subtleties of the lighting subject will be covered in later chapters, but what we can do now is build a system that allows us to shade the world differently, based on the current time of the day, like so:

As you can tell, this effect can add a lot to a game and make it feel very dynamic. Let us take a look at how it can be implemented.

Updating the Map class

In order to accurately represent a day/night cycle, the game must keep a clock. Because it is relative to the world, the best place to keep track of this information is the Map class:

class Map : ... { 
  ... 
protected: 
  ... 
  float m_gameTime; 
  float m_dayLength; 
}; 

For the sake of having dynamic...