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...

Making decisions with if and else

The C++ if and else keywords are what allow us to make decisions. We have already seen if in action in the previous chapter when we detected whether the player had pressed the Esc key each frame:

if (Keyboard::isKeyPressed(Keyboard::Escape))
{
    window.close();
}

So far, we have seen how we can use arithmetic and assignment operators to create expressions. Now, we will look at some new operators.

Logical operators

Logical operators are going to help us to make decisions by building expressions that can be tested for a value of either true or false. At first, this might seem like quite a narrow choice and insufficient for the kind of choices that might be needed in an advanced PC game. Once we dig a little deeper, we will see that we can make all of the required decisions we will need with just a few of the logical operators.

Here is a table of the most useful logical operators. Look at them and the associated examples...