Making a Game Tick

Summary

We had to cover a lot of ground in this chapter. We have explained the most basic concepts that are required to create a game; concepts that you should always have present in order to save yourself from losing time in such issues, and instead, focus on making a great game.

In this chapter we:

•Learned what SFML is, and what functionality it provides

•Listened to input, and moved the player over several frames

•Rendered an image to the screen

•Learned about game loops and delta times, and saw the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to handle time steps.

And if you are interested in how you would measure your FPS and render that to the screen, then have a look at the code base. We have implemented that functionality there, and it is based on the subjects we have already covered. We would recommend you try yourself; the only things you need are sf::Text and sf::Font in order to render text on the screen. You can learn more about these classes in SFML's API documentation at www.sfml-dev.org.

This concludes our introduction chapter. From now on we are going to investigate different aspects of SFML and game development in a more detailed manner. In the next chapter, we start with resource handling, which explains the backgrounds behind textures, fonts, and other resources.

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Keeping Track of

Your Textures – Resource

Management

In the previous chapter, you have learned how to load a texture, and display a sprite that uses the texture. During the process of game development, you encounter such situations again and again: you need to load data from the hard disk, be it images, fonts, or sounds. This chapter intends to give you a broader understanding of the following points:

•What is the motivation behind external resources

•Which classes for resource handling and manipulation does the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) provide

•What might a typical use case in a game look like

•How do we cope with the constantly recurring need to manage resources in a simple way

Defining resources

In game development, the term resource denotes an external component, which the application loads during runtime. Another often-used term for a resource is asset.

Mostly, resources are heavyweight multimedia items, such as images, music themes, or fonts. "Heavyweight" refers to the fact that those objects occupy a lot of memory, and that operations on them, especially copying, perform slowly. This affects the way we use them in our application, as we try to restrict slow operations on them to a minimum.

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