[ SDL2 - Part 4 ] Making things happen

Make things happen!

Games without any input would be really boring. Actually it wouldn't be a game at all, just a movie. So let's look at how we can get input so that the player can actually play the game. But before we do that, we need to take a look at how we do the things updates every frame. ( A frame is a single image of the game, basically each SDL_RenderPresent(..) is the end of a frame. )

The game loop

---

In a game ( and many other applications ) things need to happen over and over again. So you need a big loop that does all of these things. A minimal game loop covers :

• Objects needs to be moved
• Input handling
• Collision detections
• ....

Today we'll focus on the two first points, we'll cover collision detection later.

The game loop itself is usually a form of infinite loop :


bool loop = true;
while ( loop )
     ....


So in order to exit the loop, we need a way of setting the loop bool to yountrue inside the loop.This will make the loop condition ( if ( loop ) ) false and the loop will stop. We could just use a break; to quit the loop. But this won't work when we start handling input. We'll see why in a few moments. But first, we need to move on to the next SDL object :

Events in SDL2

---

All events in SDL2 is in the form of a SDL_Event struct. A SDL_Event is a huge structure with tons of member variable with names that generally don't say a lot about what they're for. It is used for just about everything ;

• Quit event
• Mouse events
• Keyboard events
• Window events( resize, minimize, move, focus, ...  )
• Phone events ( touch, scale, flipping, ... )
• ...And the list goes on...

The type of the event is contained int the .event. This is an enum of the type SDL_EventType If you take a look at the documentation, you'll see that it has a lot of fields. But to start out, we'll only look at SDL_Quit and SDL_KeyDown.

Event polling

---

Now that we know about the SDL_Event, let's see how we get the event from SDL. The method for doing this is :

int SDL_PollEvent
(
    SDL_Event* event
)


As you can see, it's pretty straight forward. Just pass it a pointer to a SDL_Event and it will populate the structure. If it returns 0, there are no more events. There will most likely be more than one SDL_Event in each iteration, so we'll need to put this function in a loop.


bool loop = true;
while ( loop ) ....
{
    SDL_Event event;
    while ( SDL_PollEvent( &event )
    {
        // Handle events here....
    }
}


SDL_Quit

---

The first SDL_EventType we'll be handling is SDL_QUIT. Which occurs when the user quits our game. Either using the x on the top of the window or Alt + F4


bool loop = true;
while ( loop ) ....
{
    SDL_Event event;
    while ( SDL_PollEvent( &event )
    {
        if ( event.type == SDL_QUIT )
            loop = false;
    }
}


And there we go! Now the user can exit the program. Which is rather important...

SDL_KeyDown

---

Let's handle a more interesting event. Namely keyboard presses. These have the event type
SDL_KeyDown. All possible key presses is stored within the enum called SLD_KeyCode. If you want to see all possible values, you can look at the documentation. We won't dive into the details of the where the SDL_KeyCode is stored right now because, as I said, it's stored deep inside the SLD_Event. Instead we'll just tell you were to find the SDL_KeyCode.

event.key.keysym.sym

Where the last sym is the actual SDL_KeyCode

Moving things

---

And now we've come to the highpoint of this part, namely moving something based on user input. Doing this is fairly easy, we already have most code for it. All we need to do is to store the location ( SDL_Rect ) of what we are trying to move somewhere ( for now we'll let it be a global variable along with SDL_Renderer and SDL_Window. )

We can render a rectangle normally like in the last part and move it around based on user input. We'll use the following SLD_KeyCode values for movement

• SDLK_LEFT    - left arrow key
• SDLK_RIGHT - right arrow key
• SDLK_UP       - up arrow key
• SDLK_DOWN - down arrow key

As you can see, the names are very self-explanatory. And moving the item is as simple as incrementing the x and y of the SDL_Rect. So we get



This will handle arrow key presss and move the object accordingly.

---

Feel free to comment if you have anything to say or have any issues/questions. I always appreciate getting comments.

For a full list of my tutorials / posts, click here.