Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6. Rendering Special Effects with
Shaders
Welcome to the
advanced
section of the topic. These last two chapters introduce concepts,
such as shaders and networking, which are difficult to understand for an inexperienced de-
veloper and might even trip up an experienced one. We will explain what they are and how
they are represented in SFML, but we will not cover them in detail. They are large topics
on their own with many topics and tutorials covering the subject.
The main focus of this chapter is
shaders
. Shaders are typically the tools which we use to
create interesting graphical effects, do anti-aliasing, optimize the graphics pipeline, and so
on. They are essentially programs that run on the GPU and work with vertex and fragment
(pixel) data. We will also talk about rendering directly onto a texture and using that texture
to generate our final image on the screen.
In this chapter we will cover the following:
sf::RenderTarget
and
sf::RenderWindow
• Rendering directly to a texture
• Shader programming
• Combining everything
