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Game Programming Using Qt Beginner's Guide
Game Programming Using Qt Beginner's Guide

Game Programming Using Qt Beginner's Guide: A complete guide to designing and building fun games with Qt and Qt Quick 2 using associated toolsets

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Profile Icon Witold Wysota Profile Icon Lorenz Haas
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$42.99 $47.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3 (4 Ratings)
eBook Jan 2016 512 pages 1st Edition
eBook
$42.99 $47.99
Paperback
$60.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m
Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Witold Wysota Profile Icon Lorenz Haas
Arrow right icon
$42.99 $47.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3 (4 Ratings)
eBook Jan 2016 512 pages 1st Edition
eBook
$42.99 $47.99
Paperback
$60.99
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Free Trial
Renews at $19.99p/m
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$42.99 $47.99
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$60.99
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Renews at $19.99p/m

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Game Programming Using Qt Beginner's Guide

Chapter 2. Installation

In this chapter, you will learn how to install Qt on your development machine, including Qt Creator, an IDE tailored to use with Qt. You will see how to configure the IDE for your needs and learn the basic skills to use that environment. In addition to this, the chapter will describe the process of building Qt from the source code, which can be useful for customizing your Qt installation as well as getting a working Qt installation for embedded platforms. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to prepare your working environment for both desktop and embedded platforms using tools included in the Qt release.

Installing the Qt SDK

Before you can start using Qt on your machine, it needs to be downloaded and installed. Qt can be installed using dedicated installers that come in two flavors—the online installer, which downloads all the needed components on the fly, and a much larger offline installer, which already contains all the required components. Using an online installer is easier for regular desktop installs, so we will prefer this approach.

Time for action – installing Qt using an online installer

First, go to http://qt.io and click on Download. This should bring you to a page containing a list of options for different licensing schemes. To use the open source version, choose the Open Source edition licensed under GPL and LGPL. Then, you can click on the Download Now button to retrieve the online installer for the platform that you are currently running on or you can click on any of the header sections to reach a more comprehensive list of options. The links to online installers are at the beginning of the list, as shown in the following screenshot. Click and download the one suited to your host machine:

Time for action – installing Qt using an online installer

When the download completes, run the installer, as shown:

Time for action – installing Qt using an online installer

Click on Next and after a while of waiting as the downloader checks remote repositories, you'll be asked for the installation path. Be sure to choose a path where you have write access (it's best to put Qt into your personal directory unless you ran...

Setting up Qt Creator

After Qt Creator starts, you should be presented with the following screen:

Setting up Qt Creator

The program should already be configured properly for you to use the version of Qt and compiler that were just installed, but let's verify that anyway. From the Tools menu, choose Options. Once a dialog box pops up, choose Build & Run from the side list. This is the place where we can configure the way Qt Creator builds our project. A complete build configuration is called a kit. It consists of a Qt installation and a compiler that will be executed to perform the build. You can see tabs for all the three entities in the Build & Run section of the Options dialog box.

Let's start with the Compilers tab. If your compiler was not autodetected properly and is not in the list, click on the Add button, choose your compiler type from the list, and fill the name and path to the compiler. If the settings were entered correctly, Creator will autofill all the other details. Then, you can...

Time for action – loading an example project

Qt comes with a lot of examples. Let's try building one to check whether the installation and configuration were done correctly. In Qt Creator, click on the Welcome button on the top-left corner of the window to go the initial screen of the IDE. On the right-hand side of the page that appears (refer to the previous screenshot) there are a couple of tabs among which one of them happens to be called Examples. Clicking on that tab will open a list of examples with a search box. Make sure that the version of Qt you just installed is chosen in the list next to the search box. In the box, enter aff to filter the list of examples and click on Affine Transformations to open the project. If you are asked whether you want to copy the project to a new folder, agree. Qt Creator will then present you with the following window:

Time for action – loading an example project

What just happened?

Qt Creator loaded the project and set a view that will help us to learn from example projects. The...

Time for action – running the Affine Transformations project

Let's try building and running the project to check whether the building environment is configured properly. First, click on the icon in the action bar directly over the green triangle icon to open the build configuration popup, as shown in the following screenshot:

Time for action – running the Affine Transformations project

The exact content that you get may vary depending on your installation, but in general, on the left-hand side you will see the list of kits configured for the project and on the right-hand side you will see the list of build configurations defined for that kit. Choose a kit for your desktop installation and any of the configurations defined for that kit. You can adjust configurations by switching Qt Creator to the project management mode by clicking on the Projects button in the working mode selector bar. There, you can add and remove kits from the project and manage build configurations for each of the kits, as shown in the following screenshot:

Time for action – running the Affine Transformations project

You can...

Building Qt from sources

In most cases for desktop and mobile platforms, the binary release of Qt you download from the webpage is sufficient for all your needs. However, for embedded systems, especially for those ARM-based systems, there is no binary release available or it is too heavy resource-wise for such a lightweight system. In such cases, a custom Qt build needs to be performed. There are two ways to do such a build. One is to download the sources as a compressed archive just like the binary package. The other is to download the code directly from a Git repository. Since the first way is pretty much self-explanatory, we'll focus on the second approach.

Time for action – setting up Qt sources using Git

First, you need to install Git on your system if you don't already have it. How to do that depends on your operating system. For Windows, simply download an installer from https://git-for-windows.github.io. For Mac, the installer is available at http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer. For Linux, the simplest way is to use your system's package manager. For instance, on Debian-based distributions, just issue the sudo apt-get install git command on a terminal and wait until the installation gets completed.

Afterwards, you need to clone Qt's Git repository. Since Git is a command-line tool, we'll be using the command line from now on. To clone Qt's repository to a directory where you want to keep the sources, issue the following command:

git clone git://code.qt.io/qt/qt5.git

If all goes well, Git will download a lot of source code from the network and create a qt5 directory, containing all the files that were...

Installing the Qt SDK


Before you can start using Qt on your machine, it needs to be downloaded and installed. Qt can be installed using dedicated installers that come in two flavors—the online installer, which downloads all the needed components on the fly, and a much larger offline installer, which already contains all the required components. Using an online installer is easier for regular desktop installs, so we will prefer this approach.

Time for action – installing Qt using an online installer


First, go to http://qt.io and click on Download. This should bring you to a page containing a list of options for different licensing schemes. To use the open source version, choose the Open Source edition licensed under GPL and LGPL. Then, you can click on the Download Now button to retrieve the online installer for the platform that you are currently running on or you can click on any of the header sections to reach a more comprehensive list of options. The links to online installers are at the beginning of the list, as shown in the following screenshot. Click and download the one suited to your host machine:

When the download completes, run the installer, as shown:

Click on Next and after a while of waiting as the downloader checks remote repositories, you'll be asked for the installation path. Be sure to choose a path where you have write access (it's best to put Qt into your personal directory unless you ran the installer as the...

Left arrow icon Right arrow icon

Key benefits

  • Learn to create simple 2D to complex 3D graphics and games using all possible tools and widgets available for game development in Qt
  • Understand technologies such as QML, Qt Quick, OpenGL, and Qt Creator, and learn the best practices to use them to design games
  • Learn Qt with the help of many sample games introduced step-by-step in each chapter

Description

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming more popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. Despite its simplicity, it's a powerful tool that perfectly fits game developers’ needs. Using Qt and Qt Quick, it is easy to build fun games or shiny user interfaces. You only need to create your game once and deploy it on all major platforms like iOS, Android, and WinRT without changing a single source file. The book begins with a brief introduction to creating an application and preparing a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. It then dives deeper into the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt core concepts of data processing and display before you try creating a game. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. We then delve into Qt Quick, OpenGL, and various other tools to add game logic, design animation, add game physics, and build astonishing UI for the games. Towards the final chapters, you’ll learn to exploit mobile device features such as accelerators and sensors to build engaging user experiences. If you are planning to learn about Qt and its associated toolsets to build apps and games, this book is a must have.

Who is this book for?

If you want to create great graphical user interfaces and astonishing games with Qt, this book is ideal for you. Any previous knowledge of Qt is not required, however knowledge of C++ is mandatory.

What you will learn

  • Install Qt on your system
  • Understand the basic concepts of every Qt game and application
  • Develop 2D object-oriented graphics using Qt Graphics View
  • Build multiplayer games or add a chat function to your games with Qt s Network module
  • Script your game with Qt Script
  • Program resolution-independent and fluid UI using QML and Qt Quick
  • Control your game flow as per the sensors of a mobile device
  • See how to test and debug your game easily with Qt Creator and Qt Test

Product Details

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Publication date : Jan 29, 2016
Length: 512 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782168881
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Publication date : Jan 29, 2016
Length: 512 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782168881
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Game Programming Using Qt Beginner's Guide
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. Introduction to Qt Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Installation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Qt GUI Programming Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Qt Core Essentials Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Graphics with Qt Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Graphics View Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Networking Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Scripting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Qt Quick Basics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Qt Quick Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Pop Quiz Answers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3
(4 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 25%
3 star 25%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
AP May 17, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very good book, filled with practical examples. The book covers wide range of topics e.g. scripting, networking and has even Qt Creator shortcuts between the lines ;) I enjoyed reading the book but advance users will probably skim through some chapters and for complete beginners I'd recommend "Foundations of Qt Development" book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
L Feetham Aug 02, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very clear and informative
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Jan 18, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I found the part about the use of QGraphicsScene and QGraphicsView very informative. I have not read past that part of the book so I cannot tell more.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer May 19, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
The content of the book sounds decent but the execution of the topic seemed rushed and incomplete, the chapters about chess were interesting.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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