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.

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SFML Game Development
Artur Moreira | Henrik Vogelius Hansson | Jan Haller | Henrik Valter Vogelius | SFML
Jun, 2013 | 296 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
SFML Game Development
SFML Game Development
Credits
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Making a Game Tick
Making a Game Tick
Introducing SFML
A few notes on C++
Developing the first game
Game loops and frames
Displaying sprites on the screen
Summary
2
Keeping Track of Your Textures – Resource Management
Keeping Track of Your Textures – Resource Management
Defining resources
Resources in SFML
A typical use case
An automated approach
Error handling
Generalizing the approach
Summary
3
Forge of the Gods – Shaping Our World
Forge of the Gods – Shaping Our World
Entities
Rendering the scene
Updating the scene
The view
Landscape rendering
Composing our world
Integrating the Game class
Summary
4
Command and Control – Input Handling
Command and Control – Input Handling
Polling events
Getting the input state in real time
Playing nice with your application neighborhood
A command-based communication system
Customizing key bindings
Summary
5
Diverting the Game Flow – State Stack
Diverting the Game Flow – State Stack
Defining a state
The state stack
The state context
Integrating the stack in the Application class
Navigating between states
The loading screen – sample
Summary
6
Waiting and Maintenance Area – Menus
Waiting and Maintenance Area – Menus
The GUI hierarchy, the Java way
Updating the menu
The promised key bindings
Summary
7
Warfare Unleashed – Implementing Gameplay
Warfare Unleashed – Implementing Gameplay
Equipping the entities
Creating enemies
Adding projectiles
Picking up some goodies
Collision detection and response
An interacting world
Victory and defeat
Summary
8
Every Pixel Counts – Adding Visual Effects
Every Pixel Counts – Adding Visual Effects
Defining texture atlases
Low-level rendering
Particle systems
Animated sprites
Post effects and shaders
Summary
9
Cranking Up the Bass – Music and Sound Effects
Cranking Up the Bass – Music and Sound Effects
Music themes
Sound effects
Sounds in 3D space
Summary
10
Company Atop the Clouds – Co-op Multiplayer
Company Atop the Clouds – Co-op Multiplayer
Playing multiplayer games
Interacting with sockets
Data transport
Network architectures
Creating the structure for multiplayer
Working with the Server
Taking a peek in the other end – the client
Latency
Cheating prevention
Summary
Index
Index

Playing nice with your application neighborhood

Now what we learned in the last part is indeed handy, but it has got its problem. What if the user tabs out and tries to interact with the other applications that are running in the background? We would be constantly forcing the mouse back to the center of our window, making it impossible to do anything else than playing our game.

Believe it or not, this is actually very annoying for a lot of people, including ourselves. When we are debugging our application, this behavior will make it impossible to work with the IDE in the background. We have to detect when the user doesn't want to interact with us anymore and behave properly.

This is where events come in again. If you remember, we had the event types sf::Event::GainedFocus and sf::Event::LostFocus that notify the application as soon as the window gains or loses focus:

void Game::processEvents()
{
    sf::Event event;
    while(mWindow.pollEvent(event))
    {
        if (event.type == sf::Event...
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