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

Using GLEW


The first thing we are going to need if we are working with OpenGL is a window. Luckily, window creation isn't OpenGL specific, so one can be made using almost any library out there that supports it, including SFML. For our purposes, we'll be reusing the Window class with some minor adjustments to it, including the actual SFML window type:

class GL_Window { 
  ... 
private: 
  ... 
  sf::Window m_window; 
  ... 
}; 

Note the data type of the m_window data member. If actual SFML is not used to draw anything, we do not need an instance of sf::RenderWindow and can instead work with sf::Window. This means that any task that does not have anything to do with the actual window has to be handled separately. This even includes clearing the window:

void GL_Window::BeginDraw() { 
  glClearColor(0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 1.f); // BLACK 
  glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); 
} 

Here we get a glimpse at the first two GL functions we are going to be using. Because GLEW is a C API, code that looks like this will...