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...

Class enumerations

An enumeration is a list of all the possible values in a logical collection. C++ enumerations are a great way of, well, enumerating things. For example, if our game uses variables that can only be in a specific range of values and if those values could logically form a collection or a set, then enumerations are probably appropriate to use. They will make your code clearer and less error-prone.

To declare a class enumeration in C++, we can use these two keywords, enum class, together, followed by the name of the enumeration, followed by the values the enumeration can contain, enclosed in a pair of curly braces {...}.

As an example, examine the following enumeration declaration. Note that it is convention to declare the possible values from the enumeration in uppercase:

enum class zombieTypes {
   REGULAR, RUNNER, 
   CRAWLER, SPITTER, BLOATER 
};

Note that, at this point, we have not declared any instances of zombieType, just...