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Mastering SFML Game Development

You're reading from   Mastering SFML Game Development Inject new life and light into your old SFML projects by advancing to the next level.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786469885
Length 442 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Raimondas Pupius Raimondas Pupius
Author Profile Icon Raimondas Pupius
Raimondas Pupius
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Toc

Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Under the Hood - Setting up the Backend FREE CHAPTER 2. Its Game Time! - Designing the Project 3. Make It Rain! - Building a Particle System 4. Have Thy Gear Ready - Building Game Tools 5. Filling the Tool Belt - a few More Gadgets 6. Adding Some Finishing Touches - Using Shaders 7. One Step Forward, One Level Down - OpenGL Basics 8. Let There Be Light - An Introduction to Advanced Lighting 9. The Speed of Dark - Lighting and Shadows 10. A Chapter You Shouldnt Skip - Final Optimizations

Height maps

The main point of illuminating the world is to make all the visual details pop up in a realistic manner. We have already added artificial dynamic lighting, fake 3D geometry, and shininess, so what's left? Well, there's nothing that shows the proper height of the scene yet. Until this very moment, we've been dealing with the scene as if it's completely flat when calculating the lighting distances. Instead of this, we need to work on something referred to as the height map that will store the heights of the pixels.

Adapting the existing code

Drawing heights properly can be quite tricky, especially in the case of tile maps. We need to know which way a tile is facing when drawing realistic heights. Consider the following illustration:

Adapting the existing code

The tiles right next to point A have no normals associated with them, while the tiles next to point B are all facing the camera. We can store normal data inside our map files by making these few simple alterations:

struct Tile { 
 ...
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