SFML Blueprints

Maxime Barbier

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784398477
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

SFML Blueprints

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Table of Contents

SFML Blueprints

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Preparing the Environment

C++11

SFML

Installation of a C++11 compiler

For Linux users

For Mac users

For Windows users

For all users

Installing CMake

For Linux users

For other operating systems

Installing SFML 2.2

Building SFML yourself

Installing dependencies

Linux

Other operating systems

Compilation of SFML

Linux

Windows

Code::Blocks and SFML

A minimal example

Summary

2. General Game Architecture, User Inputs, and Resource Management

General structure of a game

The game class

Game loops

The frame rate

Fixed time steps

Variable time steps

Minimum time steps

Move our player

The player class

Managing user inputs

Polling events

Real-time events

Handling user inputs

Using the Action class

Action target

Event map

Back to action target

Keeping track of resources

Resources in SFML

The texture class

The image class

The font class

The shader class

The sound buffer class

The music class

Use case

RAII idiom

Building a resources manager

Changing the player's skin

Summary

3. Making an Entire 2D Game

Turning our application to an Asteroid clone

The Player class

The levels

The enemies

The meteors

The flying saucers

Modifying our application

The World class

The hierarchical entity system

The entity component system

Designing our game

Prepare the collisions

The Entity class

The Player class

The Enemy class

The Saucer class

The Meteor class

The Shoot class

Building a Tetris clone

The Stats class

The Piece class

The Board class

The Game class

Summary

4. Playing with Physics

A physics engine – késako?

3D physics engines

2D physics engines

Physics engine comparing game engine

Using Box2D

Preparing Box2D

Build

Install

Pairing Box2D and SFML

Box2D, how does it work?

Adding physics to a game

The Piece class

The World class

The Game class

The Stats class

Summary

5. Playing with User Interfaces

What is a GUI?

Creating a GUI from scratch

Class hierarchy

The Widget class

The Label class

The Button class

The TextButton class

The Container class

The Frame class

The Layout class

The VLayout class

Adding a menu to the game

Building the main menu

Building the pause menu

Building the configuration menu

Using SFGUI

Installing SFGUI

Using the features of SFGUI

Building the starting level

Summary

6. Boost Your Code Using Multithreading

What is multithreading?

The fork() function

The exec() family functions

Thread functionality

Why do we need to use the thread functionality?

Using threads

Adding multithreading to our games

Summary

7. Building a Real-time Tower Defense Game from Scratch – Part 1

The goal of the game

Building animations

The Animation class

The AnimatedSprite class

A usage example

Building a generic Tile Map

The Geometry class as an isometric hexagon

VLayer and Layer classes

VMap and Map classes

Dynamic board loading

The MapViewer class

A usage example

Building an entity system

Use of the entity system

Advantages of the entity system approach

Building the game logic

Building our components

Creating the different systems

The level class

The game class

The Team GUI class

Summary

8. Build a Real-time Tower Defense Game from Scratch – Part 2, Networking

Network architectures

Peer-to-peer architecture

Client-server architecture

Client

Server

Network communication using sockets

UDP

TCP

Selector

The Connection class

The goal of the Connection class

Creating a communication protocol

Using the sf::Packet class

RPC-like protocol

The NetworkEvent class

Modifying our game

Server

Building the Server entry point

Reacting to players' actions during a match

Synchronization between clients and the server

The Client class

Connection with the server

The Level class

Adding data persistence to the game

What is ORM?

Using cpp-ORM

Turning our object persistent

Saving an object in a database

Loading an object from the database

Summary

Index

SFML Blueprints

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: May 2015

Production reference: 1220515

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-847-7

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Maxime Barbier

Reviewers

Nolwenn Bauvais

Jason Bunn

Tom Ivanyo

Vittorio Romeo

Richa Sachdeva

Michael Shaw

Commissioning Editor

Edward Bowkett

Acquisition Editor

Shaon Basu

Content Development Editor

Akashdeep Kundu

Technical Editors

Tanmayee Patil

Shiny Poojary

Mohita Vyas

Copy Editors

Trishya Hajare

Aditya Nair

Shambhavi Pai

Merilyn Pereira

Aarti Saldanha

Project Coordinator

Milton Dsouza

Proofreaders

Safis Editing

Jonathan Todd

Indexer

Tejal Soni

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Maxime Barbier has recently finished his studies and is now a software engineer in Strasbourg, France. He loves programming crazy things and has been experimenting and sharing them with the open source community on GitHub since 2010. Also, he really likes game programming.

As his favorite technology is C++, he has become an expert in it because of his work. He has also developed several libraries with this language, and some of them are used in this book. Game programming is his hobby, and he really likes the challenges involved in such a project. He also loves sharing his knowledge with other people, which was the main reason he wrote this book and also the reason for his activity in the open source community.

Since 9 years, he has been working on different projects such as Anka Dreles, which is a pen and paper role-playing game, and is putting in effort to convert it into a computer game.

He also loves sailing and was a sailing teacher for several years while studying. His dream is to be able to combine sailing and computer sciences by traveling around the world.

Before sta...