Book Image

Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. It's a powerful tool that perfectly fits the needs of game developers. This book will help you learn the basics of Qt and will equip you with the necessary toolsets to build apps and games. The book begins by how to create an application and prepare a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. You will learn how to use built-in Qt widgets and Form Editor to create a GUI application and then learn the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt's core concepts. Further, you'll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. You will learn about Qt's capabilities for handling strings and files, data storage, and serialization. Moving on, you will learn about the new Qt Gamepad module and how to add it in your game and then delve into OpenGL and Vulcan, and how it can be used in Qt applications to implement hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics. You will then explore various facets of Qt Quick: how it can be used in games to add game logic, add game physics, and build astonishing UIs for your games. By the end of this book, you will have developed the skillset to develop interesting games with Qt.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Pop quiz answers

Data storage

When implementing games, you will often have to work with persistent data; you will need to store the saved game data, load maps, and so on. For that, you have to learn about the mechanisms that let you use the data stored on digital media.

Files and devices

The most basic and low-level mechanism that is used to access data is to save and load it from the files. While you can use the classic file access approaches provided by C and C++, such as stdio or iostream, Qt provides its own file abstraction that hides platform-dependent details and provides a clean API that works across all platforms in a uniform manner.

The two basic classes that you will work with when using files are QDir and QFile. The former represents...