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...

Arrays

If a variable is a box in which we can store a value of a specific type, such as int, float, or char, then we can think of an array as a row of boxes. The rows of boxes can be of almost any size and type, including objects made from classes. However, all the boxes must be of the same type.

Tip

The limitation of having to use the same type in each box can be circumvented to an extent once we learn some more advanced C++ in the penultimate project.

This array sounds like it could have been useful for our clouds in Chapter 2, Variables, Operators, and Decisions – Animating Sprites. So, how do we go about creating and using an array?

Declaring an array

We can declare an array of int type variables like this:

int someInts[10];

Now, we have an array called someInts that can store ten int values. Currently, however, it is empty.

Initializing the elements of an array

To add values to the elements of an array, we can use the type of syntax we are already...