SFML Blueprints: Sharpen your game development skills and improve your C++ and SFML knowledge with five exciting projects

Barbier

€17.99 ~~€26.99~~

3.8 (4 Ratings)

eBook May 2015 298 pages 1st Edition

Barbier

€17.99 ~~€26.99~~

3.8 (4 Ratings)

eBook May 2015 298 pages 1st Edition

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SFML Blueprints

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

Now that the boring part is over, let's start working with SFML. In this chapter, we are not yet going to build a complete game, but instead we'll learn some basic skills that are required to build a game. These are as follows:

Understanding a basic game architecture
Managing user inputs
Keeping a track of external resources

All of these points are really important for any kind of game. But what do these points exactly mean? This is what I will explain to you in this chapter.

Keeping track of resources

In general game development, the term resource defines an external component that will be loaded at runtime within the application. Most of the time, a resource is a multimedia file such as music and image, but it can also be a script or a configuration file. Throughout this book, the term resource will mostly refer to a multimedia resource.

The resources require more memory, and one of the consequences of this is that all the operations on it run slowly, such as the copy. Another thing is that we don't want to have the same resource loaded multiple times in the memory. To avoid all this, we will use them in a particular way, with the help of a resource manager. Most of the time, a resource is loaded from a file to the hard disk, but there are other ways to load them, for example, from the memory or the network.

Resources in SFML

The SFML library deals with a great numbers of different resources:

Graphics module	Audio module
Texture	SoundBuffer
Image	Music...

Description

This book is for developers who have knowledge of the basics of the SFML library and its capabilities in 2D game development. Minimal experience with C++ is required.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers who have knowledge of the basics of the SFML library and its capabilities in 2D game development. Minimal experience with C++ is required.

What you will learn

Build a complete game and integrate advanced features by adding a multiplayer layer
Get to grips with SFML resources and build a generic and reusable resource manager
Gather knowledge about different entity models and build your own 2D games
Explore the Box2D engine and add physics properties to your game
Add a nice user interface to your game to make it more user friendly
Discover the SFGUI library and learn how to customize your game
Delve into the importance of multithreading and boost your code
Add networking and learn about serialization and database management using Sqlite3

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CS Oct 10, 2015

This book has good knowledge on basics of SMFL Library. You can learn to make small 2D games, with C++ and SMFL. Good book overall, and useful for understanding SMFL.

Amazon Verified review

Amazon Customer Nov 12, 2015

Someone fairly new to C++ will find making the code samples into a working project quite tough. Although I would say it was not too tough.For example the Asteroids, Tetris and real-time multi-player tower defence game were straight-forward enough to get playing.The strength of this book is really in it's sheer variety of projects(blueprints). If you want a really convincing SFML patterns guide maybe research SFML Game Development . If you want to build multiple working games packed full of the different SFML module's functionality then I have to say this book was seriously fun.Tetris with box2d is a hilarious but really useful project.

Zach Wilder Jan 11, 2016

The examples in this book are clear, well thought out, and (relatively) easy to follow. I would STRONGLY recommend a firm grasp on C++, as most of the examples could be hard to put together for a complete beginner.The example games were a blast to put together, and they do a pretty good job of illustrating the various features of the SFML library.Now, why this book should really be considered 3.5 stars and not a solid 4 - The authors should have hired an editor who can speak/write English competently. There are many typos and grammatical errors throughout the book, which detracts from the excellent job the authors did with the code. For example: "The is no member here, and the class can't be instantiate. [...] So here, only one collision test is describe that take two sf::Sprite as parameters. Take a look to the implementation." (pg 72) In addition, the code examples are spread out in a strange manner that makes it a bit difficult to read, and the typos do carry over to the code - so I would recommend you keep an eye on what you are actually typing.If you want to have fun while learning some cool tricks with SFML, I'd highly recommend this book. I wouldn't hesitate to buy another book from the same author, even with the issues above, and will probably pick up the other SFML books soon.

Barron Fritz Aug 01, 2015

At the end of chapter 2, so my review does not reflect the work in it's entirety.. I will leave a full review once I have completed it.Chapter 1 is all about Setting up your environment on whatever OS you choose(Windows, OSX or *nix) and it goes into presice detail on exactly how to set things up. At the end of chapter 1 you create "A minimal example" program to make sure that the library and your programming environment is set up properly. It shows a picture of the final result, shows the code in order to get this result, and then explains exactly what each part of code does. 5 Stars on Chapter 1.Chapter 2 starts out explaining what the different parts of a game are, and what they are intended to do. You extract your minimal example into it's own "Game" class and break apart each functional piece of code into it's own function. The next part goes into explaining different game loops time-steps or update cycles. I think the Author does a good job explaining Why you would need each kind of type-step and how to implement them, in a very general/basic way. Now we are in to user inputs and how the game will react to such things. At first, a 'minimal' example is given for handling Polled input and Real-Time input. Almost immediately, and with no clear reason or purpose You are instructed to create 2 new classes for handling real-time user input. The book fell apart for me here, and the code shown in the book does not match the code given in the code samples (eg. assignment operators are defined but never declared, namespace "book::" shows up out of nowhere (never mentioned) and causes errors, and the code does not compile at the end of the chapter.)I'm going to give This "hickup" the bennefit of the doubt, and wait till I finish the book to write a full review. Please take this review with a grain of salt, and Note this is for the first Edition, PDF/Kindle copy from PacktPub, and these flaws may be corrected in future editions.

SFML Blueprints: Sharpen your game development skills and improve your C++ and SFML knowledge with five exciting projects

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SFML Blueprints

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

General structure of a game

The game class

Managing user inputs

Keeping track of resources

Resources in SFML

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SFML Blueprints: Sharpen your game development skills and improve your C++ and SFML knowledge with five exciting projects

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The game class

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