C++ Programming for Computer Games

Overview
The purpose of this course is to extend the students C++ programming skills and to cover more advanced C++ programming techniques needed for the demanding task of developing that side computer games dealing with other than audio and graphics. In addition to bringing programmers up to a high level of C++ programming competence the course also covers

• the standard template library and its use to represent and organise complex collections of data
• serialisation and persistence
• realisation of state machines and statecharts using C++
• performance and efficiency aspects of C++
• efficient memory management

Course Contents
Overview of C++ and common C++ programming idioms

• Classes, inheritance, polymorphism
• multiple inheritance - pros and cons
• constness in C++
• references, pointers, and casting
• C++ exception handling
• composition and aggregation
• reference counting and copy on modify idiom

Templates and the Standard Template Library

• Class templates
• Function templates
• Costs and benefits of using templates
• Template specialisation
• STL - the Standard Template Library
• Sequence Containers
• Vector
• Deque
• Queue
• Associative Containers
• Set and Multiset
• Map and Multimap
• Hash
• Container Adaptors
• Stack
• Queue
• Priority Queue
• Iterators
• Function Objects
• Algorithms
• mutating vs. nonmutating algorithms
• Sorting algorithms
• Generalised numerical algorithms
• Allocators

Graphs

• Graph representation
• Graph search and traversal strategies
• Trees and Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs)
• A* and mini-max
• Overview of the Boost Graph Library

Further Topics

• State machines and statecharts
• Strings and pattern matching
• Run Time Type Information (RTTI)
• Using scripting languages inside C++ applications
• Plugin architectures
• Object creation and management
• object factories
• shared objects - reference counting and smart pointers
• Serialisation and persistence