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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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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

Understanding shaders


In the modern world of computer graphics, many different calculations are offloaded to the GPU. Anything from simple pixel colour calculations, to complex lighting effects can and should be handled by hardware that is specifically designed for this purpose. This is where shaders come in.

A shader is a little program that runs on your graphics card instead of the CPU, and controls how each pixel of a shape is rendered. The main purpose of a shader, as the name suggests, is performing lighting and shading calculations, but they can be used for much more than that. Because of the power modern GPUs have, libraries exist that are designed to perform calculations on the GPU that would usually be executed on the CPU, in order to cut down the computation time significantly. Anything from physics computations to cracking password hashes can be done on the GPU, and the entry point to that horsepower is a shader.

Tip

GPUs are good at performing tons of very specific calculations...

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