Book Image

SFML Game Development

By : Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller, Henrik Valter Vogelius, SFML
Book Image

SFML Game Development

By: Artur Moreira, Henrik Vogelius Hansson, Jan Haller, Henrik Valter Vogelius, SFML

Overview of this book

Game development comprises the combination of many different aspects such as game logics, graphics, audio, user input, physics and much more. SFML is an Open Source C++ library designed to make game development more accessible, exposing multimedia components to the user through a simple, yet powerful interface. If you are a C++ programmer with a stack of ideas in your head and seeking a platform for implementation, your search ends here.Starting with nothing more than a blank screen, SFML Game Development will provide you with all the guidance you need to create your first fully featured 2D game using SFML 2.0. By the end, you'll have learned the basic principles of game development, including advanced topics such as how to network your game, how to utilize particle systems and much more.SFML Game Development starts with an overview of windows, graphics, and user inputs. After this brief introduction, you will start to get to grips with SFML by building up a world of different game objects, and implementing more and more gameplay features. Eventually, you'll be handling advanced visual effects, audio effects and network programming like an old pro. New concepts are discussed, while the code steadily develops.SFML Game Development will get you started with animations, particle effects and shaders. As well as these fundamental game aspects, we're also covering network programming to the extent where you'll be able to support the game running from two different machines. The most important part, the gameplay implementation with enemies and missiles, will make up the core of our top-scrolling airplane shoot' em-up game!You will learn everything you need in SFML Game Development in order to start with game development and come closer to creating your own game.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
SFML Game Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A typical use case


Now we have seen what kinds of different resources there are, but we do not know yet how to apply this knowledge to our game. While the approach you have seen in Chapter 1, Making a Game Tick, may work for simple examples, it does not scale well to a bigger project. As our game grows, we have to reflect about how the resources are going to be used. This is explained in the next sections.

Graphics

In our game, a crucial part will be the visual representation of the world and different objects in it. We need to think about how we get from an image on the hard disk to its visualization on the screen.

  • Game entities such as the player's airplane, enemies, or the landscape are represented with sprites and possibly texts. They do not own the heavy textures and fonts; instead they use the front-end classes to refer to them.

  • As a consequence, the resources (textures and fonts) need to be accessible by the entities. We must make sure that the resource objects stay alive as long as any...