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

Generalizing the approach


We have implemented everything we need for textures, but we would like to handle other resources such as fonts and sound buffers too. As the implementation looks extremely similar for them, it would be a bad idea to write new classes FontHolder and SoundBufferHolder with exactly the same functionality. Instead, we write a class template, which we instantiate for different resource classes.

We call our template ResourceHolder and equip it with two template parameters:

  • Resource: The type of resource, for example, sf::Texture. We design the class template to work the SFML classes, but if you have your own resource class which conforms to the required interface (providing loadFromFile() methods), nothing keeps you from using it together with ResourceHolder.

  • Identifier: The ID type for resource access, for example, Textures::ID. This will usually be an enum, but the type is not restricted to enumerations. Any type that supports an operator< can be used as identifier...