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



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.

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General / Networking (tutorial) using SFML and NodeJS

« on: February 29, 2012, 03:42:51 am »

I am not sure how many people are interested, but I am putting together a series of posts on using SFML networking using SFML on the client and NodeJS on the server.


In part 1 it covers making a basic socket connection between SFML and NodeJS.

In part 2, it covers sending highscore data to a server.  In this case encoded using JSON and sent via UDP.


The next part will cover actually returning the high scores back to the SFML client ( and possibly to a web page).  

I also intend to cover creating a match making server for peer to peer matches between SFML clients.


Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, or of course if you spot any errors.  It uses SFML 1.6 and provides downloadable projects.  Node for those unexposed to it, is a server side platform utilizing Javascript.  By design, it is extremely scalable, something often quite difficult to accomplish with C++ based servers.  Of course, node extensions are written in C++, so you can extend it as needed.  If you haven't locked at Node yet and are doing some server side programming, you really should check it out.

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Audio / sf::Sound by value

« on: November 10, 2011, 07:52:43 pm »

Hello all,

I just want to verify, SoundBuffer is heavy and should be cached, but sf::Sound itself is light weight and passing it by value should not be a big deal, right?

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General / SFML Complete Game Tutorial

« on: September 09, 2011, 12:09:46 am »

I have been working on a tutorial series on using SFML 1.6 with Visual Studio 2010 to create a complete game from scratch.

One of the things I often see is when new developers share their code, the structure is absolutely horrible.  Part of this is as a result of learning from code samples that are meant to concisely demonstrate the usage of the library involved, not how to make an actual game.  Many other beginner samples are from books, where being concise is one of the most important aspects. There seem to be very few examples out there that actually explain how to bridge the gap between various library features and an creating an actual game.

That is what I am trying to provide with this example.  It is long, 5 chapters already and frankly nowhere near complete and the end result is going to be a glorified pong clone.  That said, along the process I try to teach the basics of object oriented programming.  Additionally, initial setup and configuration seems to be one of the major stumbling blocks for new developers in C++, so I spend a good deal of time focusing on that in detail.


Anyways, if you are new to SFML and are just learning C++, you are my target audience.

If you are a C++ expert and see a glaring flaw in what I have written, let me know!

Hopefully this series is useful to new developers.  Please let me know what you think.

A Game From Scratch: C++ Edition