Summary
We had to cover a lot of ground in this chapter. We have explained the most basic concepts that are required to create a game; concepts that you should always have present in order to save yourself from losing time in such issues, and instead, focus on making a great game.
In this chapter we:
Learned what SFML is, and what functionality it provides
Listened to input, and moved the player over several frames
Rendered an image to the screen
Learned about game loops and delta times, and saw the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to handle time steps.
And if you are interested in how you would measure your FPS and render that to the screen, then have a look at the code base. We have implemented that functionality there, and it is based on the subjects we have already covered. We would recommend you try yourself; the only things you need are sf::Text and sf::Font in order to render text on the screen. You can learn more about these classes in SFML's API documentation at www.sfml-dev.org.
This concludes our introduction chapter. From now on we are going to investigate different aspects of SFML and game development in a more detailed manner. In the next chapter, we start with resource handling, which explains the backgrounds behind textures, fonts, and other resources.
