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...

Handling the player's input

A few different things depend on the movement of the player, as follows:

  • When to show the axe
  • When to begin animating the log
  • When to move all of the branches down

Therefore, it makes sense to set up keyboard handling for the player who's chopping. Once this is done, we can put all of the features we just mentioned into the same part of the code.

Let's think for a moment about how we detect keyboard presses. Each frame, we test whether a particular keyboard key is currently being held down. If it is, we take action. If the Esc key is being held down, we quit the game, and if the Enter key is being held down, we restart the game. So far, this has been sufficient for our needs.

There is, however, a problem with this approach when we try and handle the chopping of the tree. The problem has always been there; it just didn't matter until now. Depending on how powerful your PC is, the game loop could be executing...