Book Image

Beginning C++ Game Programming - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Beginning C++ Game Programming - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

The second edition of Beginning C++ Game Programming is updated and improved to include the latest features of Visual Studio 2019, SFML, and modern C++ programming techniques. With this book, you’ll get a fun introduction to game programming by building five fully playable games of increasing complexity. You’ll learn to build clones of popular games such as Timberman, Pong, a Zombie survival shooter, a coop puzzle platformer and Space Invaders. The book starts by covering the basics of programming. You’ll study key C++ topics, such as object-oriented programming (OOP) and C++ pointers, and get acquainted with the Standard Template Library (STL). The book helps you learn about collision detection techniques and game physics by building a Pong game. As you build games, you’ll also learn exciting game programming concepts such as particle effects, directional sound (spatialization), OpenGL programmable shaders, spawning objects, and much more. Finally, you’ll explore game design patterns to enhance your C++ game programming skills. By the end of the book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to build your own games with exciting features from scratch
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
23
Chapter 23: Before You Go...

Inheritance

We have already seen how we can use other people's hard work by instantiating objects from the classes of the SFML library. But this whole OOP thing goes even further than that.

What if there is a class that has loads of useful functionality in it, but is not quite what we want? In this situation, we can inherit from the other class. Just like it sounds, inheritance means we can harness all the features and benefits of other people's classes, including the encapsulation, while further refining or extending the code specifically to our situation. In this project, we will inherit from and extend some SFML classes; we will also do so with our own classes.

Let's look at some code that uses inheritance.

Extending a class

With all this in mind, let's look at an example class and see how we can extend it, just to see the syntax and as a first step.

First, we define a class to inherit from. This is no different from how we created any of our other...