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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

Face culling and depth buffer


One way of solving the draw order issues is by using a depth buffer. In the simplest terms, a depth buffer, also commonly known as the Z-buffer, is basically a texture managed by OpenGL in the background that contains depth information of each pixel. When a pixel is being rendered, its depth (Z value) is checked against that on the depth buffer. If a pixel being rendered has a lower Z value, the pixel is overwritten, as it is clearly on top.

Enabling the depth buffer only comes down to a single glEnable() method call:

Game::Game() ... { 
  ... 
  glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); 
  ... 
} 

Keep in mind that the depth buffer is a texture. It is imperative to make sure it gets allocated when the window is created, and it has enough data to work with. We can make sure of that by creating an sf::ContextSettings structure and filling out its depthBits data member before passing it to the SFML's window Create() method:

void GL_Window::Create() { 
  ... 
  sf::ContextSettings...
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