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

Height maps


The main point of illuminating the world is to make all the visual details pop up in a realistic manner. We have already added artificial dynamic lighting, fake 3D geometry, and shininess, so what's left? Well, there's nothing that shows the proper height of the scene yet. Until this very moment, we've been dealing with the scene as if it's completely flat when calculating the lighting distances. Instead of this, we need to work on something referred to as the height map that will store the heights of the pixels.

Adapting the existing code

Drawing heights properly can be quite tricky, especially in the case of tile maps. We need to know which way a tile is facing when drawing realistic heights. Consider the following illustration:

The tiles right next to point A have no normals associated with them, while the tiles next to point B are all facing the camera. We can store normal data inside our map files by making these few simple alterations:

struct Tile { 
  ... 
  sf::Vector3f m_normal...