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

Use of third-party software


Before diving into such a difficult subject to debug, it's always nice to have proper tools that will ease the headaches and reduce the number of questions one might ask oneself during development. While normal code executed on the CPU can just be stepped through and analyzed during runtime, shader code and OpenGL resources, such as textures are a bit more difficult to handle. Most, if not all, C++ compilers don't have native support for dealing with GPU-bound problems. Luckily, there is software out there that makes it easier to deal with that very predicament.

Among the few tools that exist out there to alleviate such headaches, CodeXL by AMD Developer Tools Team stands out. It's a free piece of software that can be used as a standalone application for Windows and Linux or even as a plugin for Visual Studio. Its most prominent features include being able to view OpenGL resources (including textures) while the program is running, profile the code and find bottlenecks...