Fifth week – Arkanoid and SDL
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During last weeks lectures our lecturer started live coding for Arkanoid (or Breakout). We went through some of the basic stuff you need for almost any game, the engine and a couple of managers. This week we finished it by adding stuff specific to Arkanoid (blocks, paddle, ball and movement; in short, the logic of the game). We also implemented SDL_Image and SDL_TTF as an addition. In SDL you can only handle .bmp images, and to be able to utilize for example transparency in images we must use a different kind of image (.PNG for example). This could be done with the SDL_Image library. It could take almost any kind of image, but there is one problem. When loading in a image to a surface we don’t know what kind of image it is. Thus we have to convert it to a format that we desire by using SDL_ConvertSurfaceFormat(parameters) and then making it into a texture which we could use in our game. In a similar way we could insert text into the game, though as images, with the SDL_TTF library. With TTF_OpenFont(parameters) we load in a desired font and then create a new instance of an inherited class SpriteText from our Sprite class. This SpriteText class takes the font and the text and creates a surface with TTF_RenderText_Solid(parameters), much like we did with images. We also convert this surface into a desired format with SDL_ConvertSurfaceFormat(parameters) and then create a texture which can be used in our game. From now on we are going to mainly focus on our own projects and I have started looking up different kinds of Bomberman games for inspiration. Best Regards, Sven Music of the week: Hungarian Dance no. 5 – Brahms  |
