Game Design and Artificial Intelligence - Bournemouth University

Game Design and Artificial Intelligence
David Hopkins
Fig 2.5 – an experiment with Qt working with OpenGL.
Learning QT
The game required quite a complex HUD, originally the method for this was going to be through
creating textures for each ASCII character. However, further research into the QT software
revealed another potential solution. QT offers a host of functions for creating some simple looking
but effective HUD tools, including push buttons, radio buttons and tick boxes. It works quite
simply through a slot and signal algorithm [macey01]. Whenever a message needs to be sent from
an item, like a push button, it calls its signal function which is sent to one or more slots of other
objects. The most useful element is that it can display opengl scenes in a window, with a frame of
buttons on the outside. The only setback is that it does slow down the opengl program, but it would
be a useful for small programs so would have worked quite nicely with the demo.
In the end I decided to use the glText to display the information, though it is still my intention to
use qt for a HUD which the player can interact with.
Problems Encountered
I originally setup the game to be able to switch between levels easily based on a selected global
levelNumber using the following code:
Switch(levelNumber)
{
case (1):
{
draw all objects level_1;
}
break;
}
The program had a strange bug when I attempted to start on a different level number and attempted
to switch to the current level. The enemy ship speed seem to rocket for some unknown reason. I
originally thought it could be to do with the timer, but as I disabled this at the beginning of the level
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