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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
Languages
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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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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

Back face culling


In order to save on performance, it is a good idea to let OpenGL know that we would like to cull faces that are not visible from the current perspective. This feature can be enabled like so:

Game::Game() ... { 
  ... 
  glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); 
  glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); 
  glCullFace(GL_BACK); 
  ... 
} 

After we glEnable face culling, the glCullFace function is invoked to let OpenGL know which faces to cull. This will work right out of the box, but we may notice weird artifacts like this if our model data is not set up correctly:

This is because the order our vertices are rendered in actually defines whether a face of a piece of geometry is facing inwards or outwards. For example, if the vertices of a face are rendered in a clockwise sequence, the face, by default, is considered to be facing inwards of the model and vice versa. Consider the following diagram:

Setting up the model draw order correctly allows us to save on performance by not drawing invisible faces, and having...

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