Messages

1

General discussions / Re: Deprecated functions

« on: January 14, 2016, 04:20:37 pm »

As an industry practice, marking a method or variable as depricated is basically just saying "this is no longer the prefered way of doing this and could go away at any point!"


Your issues with the warning are easily countered, either via the library as Exploiter( sorry... too lazy to do it right..   ) said, or can be handled on your end with ease.  Having LESS information available to the developer is almost always the wrong choice.  Now, if fields are marked as depricated that aren't, that's a different issue.


Now, to actually be useful, since you are using Visual Studio, you should be aware of the ability to disable warnings via the #pragma warning command ( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/441722ys.aspx ).  This should work on other compilers as well, but #pragma cross platform implementation is spotty at best, so I'm not saying that with confidence.  You can also suppress warnings via the project settings.

2

SFML website / Re: Request: Getting started tutorial SFML and CLion

« on: November 10, 2015, 10:42:02 pm »

If you are interested I did a tutorial on using SFML with CLion on Mac OS

3

General discussions / Re: SFML Tutorial Series

« on: November 03, 2015, 02:57:00 pm »

Ah, I first learned about SFML with said tutorial, and I ported it myself to SFML 2 & C++11. It was a good tutorial as it helped my get into the topic at that time. So when I have some time I will watch the new one.
Keep up the good work!

Awesome, glad to hear it.  Truth is, this series is quite different, at least to this point.  Right now it's more about the introductory nuts and bolts of starting with SFML and then putting those bolts together.  If you've got a fair bit of experience at this point, there is probably very little for you in this tutorial, you've already surpassed it.  That earlier tutorial was actually more about C++ than it was SFML in the end.  Probably why it's had the longevity it did, even with C++11/14 being released.  Glad to hear it got you started here, that's cool.

4

General discussions / Re: SFML Tutorial Series

« on: November 03, 2015, 02:54:56 pm »

Nice to see you posting it here as well.

Btw. your first video link is broken while it should point to:

Oops, I tried doing recursive <url>tags apparently... fixed now, thanks.

5

General discussions / Re: Why do so many game take so much space?

« on: October 30, 2015, 03:46:59 pm »

Sounds (especially lots of dialogue and many musics) can really increase size.

Sound is increasingly the culprit these days.  Many AAA engines such as Unreal allow for some pretty complex realtime audio processing, but the catch is the source waveforms are often uncompressed.  This results in a massive amount of disk space being burned.

Mesh data, even with extremely high levels of detail, doesn't really contribute all that much to the size of a game, but the textures for those meshes certainly do.  Especially in this day and age where you dont just have a diffuse (color) texture, but often several...  for lighting, normals, shadows, etc.

And yeah, movies are still a big pig for space, although I see less and less FMV in games, although it does seem to be making a bit of a revival.

6

General discussions / SFML Tutorial Series

« on: October 30, 2015, 03:39:44 pm »

Hello All,

I run the site GameFromScratch which is a collection of news, tutorials and articles for game developers.  In fact one of my very first tutorials was about SFML and it's still fairly popular to this date.  It's also seriously out dated at this point, being tied to SFML 1.6.  So I've decided to launch a new updated SFML series.


The series is in both audio and video formats and is going to be in two parts.  The first part covers the basics or fundamentals of working with SFML, it's very similar in scope to SFML's own tutorials.  This covers the nuts and bolts of working with SFML.  The second part, assuming enough interest, will be on putting all of these pieces together, along with third party libraries such as Thor or Box2D, to create a complete but simple game.

Right now, the fundamentals part of the series is almost complete.  It currently consists of:

A Closer Look at SFML   ( Text ) ( )
Configuring Visual Studio   ( Text ) ()
Window, Game loop and Timers   ( Text ) ()
Handling Input and Random Numbers   ( Text ) ()
Basic Graphics   ( Text ) ()
Sprites and Textures   ( Text ) ()
Spritesheets and Animations   ( Text ) ()
Music and Time ()



Or of course you could just go to the tutorial series table of contents I suppose...

The series focused on setup and install with Visual Studio as that is probably the area that most people will fumble.  If you are working on a different platform, this guide on using SFML with CLion on MacOS should help.  You could of course always use XCode... I certainly wouldn't but you can.


Hopefully these prove helpful to new developers.  Any and all feedback appreciated of course.

7

General / Re: C++ Visual Studio 2013 SFML 2.2: Cannot find procedureentrypoint

« on: May 28, 2015, 12:30:13 am »

Did you notice in your error message its looking for a method named CircleShaoe instead of CircleShape?  Youve a typo somewhere.

8

General / Re: VC2010 and SFML 1.6

« on: June 08, 2012, 04:58:00 pm »

Try running the pre-configured project from the bottom of this page.

Just download it, extract to a folder, open the solution and hit F5.  If all works well, you should have a fully configured project file to work from ( it will simply show a red screen ).

If it doesn't work, you may want to check out this post in the comments, which appears to work around the problem:

OK.. I've finally fixed my graphics driver problem (The atigktxx.Dll fix caused crashes for me). Firstly, I rolled back the drivers to v10.6 - the game was now working. Then I looked at the ATI files the debugger was using (in the SysWOW64 folder) and copied them. Then I reloaded my newer drivers and copied the dll files into the games debugger folder and the game booted.

 After a little testing, I found that the aticfx32.dll file was the only file I needed to fix the problem. If anyone else has this problem, hopefully this fix will work for you as well.  You can download the DLL file here:

Additionally, some people have had success with this work around.

Then again, some people had blue screens as a result.

I can't confirm the first work around um... works, as I no longer have an ATI based card to test on.  ( And boy do I not miss them! )

9

General / Re: Hello!

« on: June 06, 2012, 07:36:08 pm »

Yeah, start with tutorials here, SFML is quite well documented.  Once you've done that, you can consider my tutorial series, that shows you how to put it all together into an actual game.

There are no books, at least, not to my knowledge.  Then again, you don't really need one.

10

General discussions / Re: Can someone make a tile system tutorial ?

« on: June 04, 2012, 02:36:40 pm »

This is why you were invaluable vetting my tutorial, you are like a human C++ Lint.

That said, isn't it possible for RenderWindow to throw an exception?

Here is a good tutorial: C++ Tile Engine from Scratch

Good? At least concerning the code, there are some really bad mistakes.

#include <SFML\Graphics.hpp>

Engine::Engine()
{

}

Engine::~Engine()
{

}

bool Engine::Init()
{
        window = new sf::RenderWindow(sf::VideoMode(800, 600, 32), "RPG");

        if(!window)
                return false;

        return true;
}

Already this short code contains plenty of mistakes:

• It should be #include <SFML/Graphics.hpp> with a slash for portable code.
• Empty constructors and destructors needn't be defined, but the Init() method's functionality should be in the constructor.
  
• new without std::nothrow never returns a nullpointer, thus Init() always returns true and the check is useless.
  
• There is a memory leak, because the dynamically allocated memory is never freed. This mistake is repeated when the engine object is created. I don't know why he even uses pointers, there's no need to.

11

General / Re: SFML Complete Game Tutorial

« on: May 18, 2012, 05:54:52 pm »

In response to a reader request, I just finished putting together one more part, this one covering compiling in release mode.

It's part of the main tutorial series.  Essentially it covers building in release configuration, provides the required Visual Studio 2010 dlls and then covers what files need to be shipped with your game for someone else to play it.

If you are looking at distributing a 1.6 SFML game, even if you didn't run through my tutorial, this post should probably be of use to you.  Building the DLLs themselves is a bit problematic, thanks to the statically linked freetype library, which caused me one gigantic headache.  That is why I provided them in a zip.

12

General / Re: SFML Complete Game Tutorial

« on: May 04, 2012, 10:27:35 pm »

Part 7, 8 and 9 have now been ported to 2.0 as well. 

Detail link

13

General / Re: Linking, relative paths and sharing projects.

« on: May 04, 2012, 09:58:26 pm »

In my SFML tutorial, I set it up so SFML is included and set up to link using relative paths, so you can just download the zip, open the solution and be off to the races.

If you check out part 1, you can see an example ( with screenshots ) of setting up a project to be relative pathed.  The settings are for C++ and the Linker.  The example is in Visual Studio 2010, but 2008 is close enough you should be fine.

14

General / Re: SFML Complete Game Tutorial

« on: May 03, 2012, 02:41:53 pm »

Thanks for the catch cotterall.

I've fixed the link... that was odd, I swore I tested it after posting.  Ill blame gremlins for that one.

15

General / Re: SFML Complete Game Tutorial

« on: May 03, 2012, 12:21:32 am »

That would be pretty awesome if you did!


On the topic of other people doing my work for me... 

Nathan is porting the source code from SFML 1.6 to 2.0, starting with chapter 6 ( before that it's pretty cut and paste ), so if you are interested in this tutorial in 2.0 form, check this out.

I will edit the originals to include 1.6 and 2.0 source downloads once he is completed.  For now, there is a starting point for 2.0 (RC).  Like the examples I provide, its download and go.