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...

Manipulating variables

At this point, we know exactly what variables are, the main types they can be, and how to declare and initialize them. We still can't do that much with them, however. We need to manipulate our variables; add them; take them away; and multiply, divide, and test them.

First, we will deal with how we can manipulate them and then we will look at how and why we test them.

C++ arithmetic and assignment operators

In order to manipulate variables, C++ has a range of arithmetic operators and assignment operators. Fortunately, most arithmetic and assignment operators are quite intuitive to use and those that aren't are quite easy to explain. To get us started, let's look at a table of arithmetic operators, followed by a table of assignment operators, all of which we will regularly use throughout this book:

And now for the assignment operators:

Important note

Technically, all of these operators...