The following user tutorial was created by Mod J., for the purpose of expanding upon the SDLTutorials.com series, and expounding upon the use of SDL. This tutorial, though not purposely a part of the SDLTutorials.com or created for the series, may be a branch or addition to the series. Please read notes by the author for any additional code and/or framework used by the author. If you wish to submit your own tutorial to this site, please visit the “User Tutorials” page.

Today we’re going to learn something about extending the capabilities of SDL_Surfaces. If we take a look at OpenGL, what happens when we load a Surface and we render it specifying a width and height bigger than the Surface’s original width and height? It gets automatically scaled (unless you specify you want to be repeated). In SDL there is no automatic way of scaling surfaces, so we’re going to make a (relatively simple) routine that does the trick.

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The following user tutorial was created by Arseniy B., for the purpose of expanding upon the SDLTutorials.com series, and expounding upon the use of SDL. This tutorial, though not purposely a part of the SDLTutorials.com or created for the series, may be a branch or addition to the series. Please read notes by the author for any additional code and/or framework used by the author. If you wish to submit your own tutorial to this site, please visit the “User Tutorials” page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I DON’T NAME SURFACES LIKE TIM DOES. WHEN HE CALLS IT Surf_Display, MINE IS SIMPLY SurfDisplay, WITHOUT THE UNDERSCORE. MAKE SURE YOU KNOW THIS, AND ADAPT TO THE TUTORIAL ACCORDINGLY. ALSO, WHEN I MAKE PROTOTYPES IN CLASS DEFINITIONS, THE ONLY STUFF I WRITE IN THE PARAMETERS AREA (I.E. THE PARENTHESES) IS THE TYPE OF DATA TAKEN, NOT THE NAME OF THE DATA TAKEN. THAT NAME IS ONLY IN THE ACTUAL FUNCTION DEFINITION, AT LEAST FOR ME.

This tutorial is based on everything you’ve learned by now, if you’ve been following the tutorials in order and have just finished the Maps tutorial. Get ready to get a glimpse of creating your first real game! (Not counting that fabulous tic-tac-toe.) Similarly, the code this comes from is from all the code you’ve written up to the Maps tutorial, and including it. It would be wise to make a new Code::Blocks project (or a new DevC++ project, or whatever), because this tutorial will delve a different way for a bit, and you don’t want to mess up your existing code for the upcoming Collision Detection tutorial. Speaking of that, this tutorial will introduce you to very simple collision detection, on a tile-based board.

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In this side tutorial we are going to be adding a soundbank that will load all of our sounds, and then we call play them via an ID whenever we want. This tutorial will only deal with sounds, not music, and mind you it’s a very basic tutorial that gets the job done. There is much that can be added to this class, for channels, groups and such, but we’re dealing with basics here. We’ll base this tutorial off of my SDL Events tutorial. So use those project files if you need something to work off of.

The first thing you need to do is download SDL mixer from the SDL website. It’s also included in the SDL library I provide on my website. Be sure to put the include files in the same directory as your SDL include files, and your lib files in the same directory as your SDL lib files to make things easier.

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As I stated in the last lesson, we’re going to be looking at making a Map class that will be tile based. In addition to the maps, we’ll be creating Areas that enhouse many Maps. While we could create one giant map, it’s far easier to manage many smaller maps, and also opens the possibility of tiling maps as well. By the way, head on over to the SDL Image tutorial if you haven’t already done so, we will be making the switch over to SDL Image and stop using SDL_LoadBMP. No more chatter, lets get started.

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This side tutorial is rather simple, short, and sweet. I am going to show you how to stop using those pesky bitmap (BMP) files that are too big and don’t support alpha transparency, and to start using other file formats for you surfaces (I personally like PNG). If you have not read my SDL Coordinates and Bliting tutorial, I encourage you to do so now. We will be building off of that tutorial, modifying the OnLoad function of the CSurface class.

The first thing you need to do is download SDL_image, the latest version, from the main SDL website. You can also download this library from the “Libraries” section of this website, under SDL. If you don’t want to worry about finding all these libraries, the SDL package I provide is good for most SDL beginners, as it provides SDL_image, and some other useful libraries. Be sure to put the include files in the same directory as your SDL include files, and your lib files in the same directory as your SDL lib files to make things easier.

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In this new tutorial, as I had promised before, we are going to take our hand at creating entities. Entities, for all gaming purposes, are anything that can be interacted with in any way, shape, or form. Some examples might be a monster or a treasure chest that you can open. In this sense, practically everything within the game that moves is an Entity. A rock that is part of a map, which never moves, is not an entity. But if you wanted that rock to move for whatever reason, then we’d make it an Entity. This tutorial will be split into 3 different tutorials. The first, this one you are reading, will deal with a basic Entity class structure. The next tutorial will veer off slightly to build a Map class via a tileset. Then, the last tutorial, which is what a lot of people have trouble with, will deal with Entity to Map collision, and Entity to Entity Collision.

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The last tutorial we took our chance at making a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Hopefully most of you were successful in getting it to work. If not, don’t fret, you’ll get the hang of all of this eventually.

In this tutorial we are going to take our hand at SDL Animation. As before, we’ll be building on top of the previous SDL lessons (but not including the Tic Tac Toe one). So lets get started.

We’ll be creating a new class to handle Animation, and in the next tutorial we will create a class to handle Entities. Please keep in mind that these two things are seperate, and while I know they could be one class, I don’t wish to take that approach. So please hold back your criticism.

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Up to this point we have been laying the foundation for developing a game. So far we’ve setup a basic structure to handle common routines, we’ve setup a special class to handle events, and we’ve also setup a class to handle a few surface functions. In this tutorial we’ll take all those things, combine them, and create a tic-tac-toe game. Don’t worry, things should be pretty simple. Use the last tutorial to build off of.

The first thing we are going to need to do is plan our game. From experience, we know that tic-tac-toe has a 3×3 grid, where you place X’s and O’s. So, we know that we will need 3 graphics, one for the grid, one for the X, and one for the O. We don’t need multiples of the X or O, because we can draw them in the program as many times as we like. Lets eliminate this first step. Our grid is going to be 600×600, and our X’s and O’s will be 200×200 (1/3 of the area).

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Alongside the basics of game development is something called Events. Events are basically interactions the program has with the user. These events can be keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, and so on, or events from our operating system. It’s important to understand how events work if we are to approriately interact a user with a game. We’ve already been using events, but only for closing our window, now we’ll look at how to receive events from the user. Read the rest of this entry »

Using the first tutorial as our base, we’ll delve more into the world of SDL surfaces. As I attempted to explain in the last lesson, SDL Surfaces are basically images stored in memory. Imagine we have a blank 320×240 pixel surface. Illustrating the SDL coordinate system, we have something like this:

This coordinate system is quite different than the normal one you are familiar with. Notice how the Y coordinate increases going down, and the X coordinate increases going right. Understanding the SDL coordinate system is important in order to properly draw images on the screen. Read the rest of this entry »