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

Chapter 7.  One Step Forward, One Level Down - OpenGL Basics

Often times it's easy to take a library like SFML for granted. After all, the ideas and concepts offered by it seem quite intuitive. Building something rather simple can take as little as a couple of minutes, and there are no major headaches to deal with. In a perfect world, we could just offload those troubles to someone else and simply rely on increasingly higher levels of abstraction to get the job done. However, what happens when certain limitations make us slam face-first into a brick wall? In order to know the way around them, it's necessary to know the fundamentals that SFML was built on. In other words, at that point, downward is the only way forward.

In this chapter, we are going to be covering:

  • Setting up and using OpenGL with a window from SFML

  • Shaping and submitting data to the GPU

  • Creating, building, and using shaders for rendering

  • Applying textures to geometry

  • Looking at various coordinate spaces and model transformations...